My Sweet Girl

Wednesday was supposed to be like any other day. Get up, go to work, come home and take care of some things. Instead, it became a day of  heartbreak, a day of tears.

If you aren’t a pet person then you might want to skip this post.

Doing what she did best - Following Blue

The first days. That is a Wendy's bag.

Every morning when I get out of bed I do it to the meows of my cats. They might be quiet as long as you’re in bed or not moving around, but once they hear you?  All bets are off.  They want you up, they want your love.

That morning though, I don’t remember hearing anything.  In a rush to make up some time at work I’m leaving early. I grab my stuff and head to the door.  About a step from the door I almost step on a cat and quickly step over her.

I turn on the light to find Shadow, my girl, on the floor, dead. 

The night before I left two small bags in the sink. She must have smelled the chicken on them and somehow got one of them onto her head and couldn’t get it off. So yes, I woke up to find my girl suffocated by the front door.

I pulled the bag off hoping she would just pop up like she does, but she didn’t move.  I couldn’t do anything but cry. I cried so loud that my husband came down stairs to find out if I was okay, and I couldn’t do anything but point in her direction.

He went to check on her then came back to check on me because I was just frozen against the wall in tears.  This cannot be happening, it just can’t.  I got myself the two steps it took to get to a chair and sit down and just cried.  It felt like forever.

What do you do at this point?  I think we were both sitting there trying to figure out what is the right thing.  After about 15 minutes he picked her up and put her in the garage. She had to have died very early in the night because she was already in full rigor.

We both just sat. Eventually I got up to go to work because I figured they wouldn’t understand, and I really didn’t want to be home all day. But I also wanted to be home because though they got on each other’s last nerve, Blue and Shadow had never been apart for more than a couple of hours, the amount of time it took for a trip to the vet.  I wanted to see with my own eyes how he was reacting, to see if he was okay.

Is that weird?  If it is, I don’t care. I don’t have kids so these are my babies.  And after almost nine years I failed her in the worst way.  A small careless act turned out with the worst ending imaginable. 

 I did go to work, but it was evident something was very wrong.  It was so evident an old boss sent me an email that he was there if I needed anything. Thankfully I have great friends and an understanding VP, and at 9:30 I was on my way home. 

Watching Blue throughout the day hurt. He’s never had to be on his own, ever, and so I’m watching him react to every sound he hears, even ones I know he’s heard before. He’s jumpy. He spends every available second in my lap. And two days later, I haven’t seen him sleep in a single place that she would rest – not in the window which he loves, not on her side of the sofa. 

They would sleep like one big unit.  Sometimes one literally lying on the other, sometimes head to head.  But most of the time if you didn't see them they were somewhere together, asleep.

That evening we decided she would rest at the back of our yard.  While my husband dug the hole I went through I don’t know how many tissues.  I had a blanket that I was going to make a cat bed with.  Shadow would sit on that blanket and knead it forever if I let her.  And so I thought it was only fitting for her to be buried in it.

He wrapped her up and carried her out back placing her gently into the ground.  There was nothing to say.  We just stood there for a few minutes him very solemn, me crying from sadness, from guilt, from disbelief.  I turn around to look at the house and Blue is watching us from the back door.  More tears.   Hard ones.

After she was covered up I came back in the house still expecting to have her run down the stairs and bump against my leg like she’s trying to knock me over.  To have her screaming at me while I’m in the kitchen saying, hey, I’m fat, feed me more!! (At last weigh in she was almost 18 pounds.) To have her jump on the sofa, lay her front half on my legs and pretty much pick my hands up and force me to pet her, purring and trying not to drool on me while she purred.

That's the look!!

She also had this way of looking at us – ROFL – it wouldn’t be funny, but it would be hysterical if that makes any sense. Anytime I said anything about her, especially her weight, she would get this look on her face like she understood and she DID NOT approve of what I was saying. I called it her old man look because everything was just so tight and so serious. Like you could put a pair of glasses on her and she would become the uptight professor.  And it would make me laugh.  While I was laughing I swear to you she’d roll her eyes which would make it even funnier.


 She was a pain in the butt, but she was my pain in the butt.  She would try to chew the stone out of my engagement ring.  She would never let me pet Blue without having to get involved.  She has ruined more pairs of shoes than I can count from kneading on them.  Last week, she tried it while they were on my feet!  She had a thing for shoes we could never figure out.

Shadow would bring us presents - pens, pencils, batteries, business cards. If it was out and she could carry it, she would bring it to you. Never on command, always in her own time.  One time she carried my mother’s prescription eyedrops away and hid them, LOL. It wasn’t funny at the time though and thank goodness we found them.

Today, there are still two pens on the floor, one upstairs, one downstairs, where she left them.  I know I need to pick them up, but I don’t want to.

She will always be my sweet girl, my fat girl, my clingy affectionate girl. She would run to the door when I left in the morning so I could pet her and tell her to behave, and she’d immediately come see me when I got home like she was telling me I was gone too long.

I’m going to miss her.  I already do. But I’m glad we got to have her for as long as we did. It just doesn’t feel like enough time. I hope she loved the life she had with us because we loved having her.

My sweet girl