Beltane 2017 - Felicia

(This is an essay related to the poem Felicia posted on the fiction side of this blog).

 

Spring is a hard season for us and cats. Thomas, Sandy, Smoke, Sara and Felicia all died between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. Three we knew were coming for a long time, two we didn’t.

A number of people might not understand this poem or why I’m posting it. They may feel it’s frivolous, or trivializes what they see as more important deaths. People’s deaths. Human deaths. With death as with life, it’s all in how loss affects the living. Just as with who we love, we rarely get a choice in who we miss.

1996 was a hard year. One of the hardest of my life. It came after the year Karen had sworn me to silence about what her brother had done to her. It started with that silence being lifted, with her telling her parents, with her confronting him. None of that went particularly well. Worse now.

That year of silence had taken its toll. It’s not in my nature to sit quietly rather than to confront injustice. That enforced silence ate at me. It ate at our relationship. It ate at my attitude at work. It ate at my friendships, at people who I’m not sure really understood or could deal with me dealing with it. That issue was ravenous, insatiable. A beast that consumed way too much of our time, energy and attention.

In February, we noticed that Felicia was getting sick. A lot. Almost every day. Because of everything else going on, it took us longer to notice than it should have. We took her in to the vet, got recommended to a specialist, got her examined, got her tests. The results came back. Cancer. All through her abdomen. She was nine and a half years old. Not old for a cat but not young either.

My focus immediately shifted to her. We briefly tried a treatment of oral chemotherapy with her but quickly abandoned it when it was clear she wouldn’t tolerate it. After that, all we could do was give her medication to make her comfortable, try to get her to keep eating and wait.

Felicia is the only cat we’ve had who literally knocked at our front door. Ok, she didn’t knock. She cried.

I was living with Karen at the time. I’d graduated college six months earlier. Five months after that, I’d moved in with her once it became clear I could no longer live at home. Not that I every really could.

Karen had a cat named Duncan who she had gotten from a nearby pet store. He was a product of that environment, what we’d call today under-socialized when he was a kitten. He was probably taken away from his mother too young. He was friendly enough until he wasn’t. He’d turn aggressive on a dime. Karen had become a dead-eye shot with a water sprayer just to keep him from running completely wild.

I’d never lived with a cat before. My mother was allergic. She’s more of a dog person anyway. But Duncan had me thinking that living with a cat might be ok. He started me thinking about the personality traits I would want in a cat. Over that first month, I constructed the ideal cat in my mind. The only thing I hadn’t thought about was a color.

Karen and I were sitting at home one evening in December when we heard a crying out front. High, tiny, plaintive mews as if someone asking to come in. When we opened the door, a kitten was sitting on the doorstep looking up at us.

We petted her and looked her over. She was amenable to being handled so she’d been around people. We quickly spotted that all four of her paw pads were burned, blackened, cracked and bleeding. She had a cut and a kink at the tip of her tail like it had been broken. She had a nasty bite wound on her belly.

We brought her inside, not knowing what else to do. She curled up with us on the couch and started purring. And she didn’t stop purring for thirty-six hours straight. Thus her name, Felicia. Happiness.

I remember asking Karen like a kid if we could keep her. Like an indulgent, yet responsible adult, she said we should post a notice. I said no way, if someone had owned this kitten before, they’d lost their rights by the condition she was in. So we compromised. Karen would ask the apartment manager if anyone had reported a lost kitten. No one had.

We had the vet examine her. She was maybe three months old. He thought a tomcat had given her the wounds on her belly and tail. The only hopeful explanation any of us had for her paws was a road repaving project over a mile away. We didn’t want to think about the alternative. He gave us antibiotics and a sulfa lotion for her infections. He started her with her first round of shots. We picked up a flea collar.

Initially, Duncan wasn’t sure what to make of her. But then he decided she was a perfect playmate. She wasn’t as sure about this. But she proved to be quite the tactical kitten, figuring out all the tiny spaces in the apartment where she fit and he couldn’t. Especially places she could dart into, turn around and swat his nose when he stuck it in. For a little kitten, she more than held her own.

As it turned out, every trait I’d thought of in my ideal cat Felicia had. Patient, curious, affectionate, accepting. As I said, the only thing I hadn’t considered was a color. She was a tortoiseshell calico, so in that I had my pick. I came to think of her as my familiar.

Felicia was definitely more my cat than Karen’s. I was the one she clung to. Probably because right after we took her in, Karen went home to East Longmeadow for ten days for Christmas. So I was the one Felicia imprinted on. The giver of food, the cleaner of the box. The warmth she curled up with at night when I shut Duncan out of the bedroom to keep her safe.

A month later, she and Duncan moved with us to a new apartment in Melbourne. Not six months after that, we all moved again to DC. She and Duncan rode with me as I drove Karen’s little car while she drove the truck, which was quite an adventure in late May with no AC. Felicia spent most of the trip curled up behind my neck, or at my feet, trying not to get tangled in the pedals of the manual transmission.

When Duncan died quite suddenly that first summer, we adopted Sandy, who had been abandoned with our vet. Felicia saw her long as a lost sibling. She never had a problem with any other cat we adopted. Thomas, Smoke, Jasmine, she got along with each and every one, even if they didn’t always get along with each other.

She moved with us from Silver Spring to Gaithersburg, from Gaithersburg to Largo, from Largo to Pinellas Park, from Pinellas Park to Seminole. She became our most well-traveled cat, though she never really liked it.

As I said, she was my familiar. My comfort. My confidante. My little girl. I was fiercely protective of her because of how she came to us. She became the inspiration for a main character in my novel as well as a character in a game.

She saw me through stressful times. The months I spent desperately searching for my first professional job. The year Karen and I lived apart. The two years I spent working overtime while being denigrated by my coworkers. The second near split between Karen and me after we’d bought the house. Our getting married. The first and second periods where I traveled for weeks at a time for work and went to sea. I could never wait to see her when I got home.

And she me. She greeted me at the door whether I was coming home from work or returning from the field. She was always happy to see me. She jumped up on the bed each night to say goodnight. If she wasn’t sleeping by my feet, she’d come back when I got up to say good morning. She’d curl up beside me on the couch. The only time she’d sit on me was if I put a blanket over my legs in the recliner. She followed me around the house for weeks after I came home from a month in the shipyard and at sea, never letting me out of her sight, as if she wanted to be sure I wouldn’t disappear again.

I cared for her so much and so deeply, it made Karen more than a little jealous. What I’m not sure she understood at the time was that because of my background and the way I grew up, this little calico was teaching me how to love. Teaching me that it was ok to be vulnerable. Ok to show affection.

If Karen and I started fighting, Felicia would jump up on the table between us and look at each of us, as if telling us to cut it out. The adult in the room.

She was with me when Karen told me what her brother had done to her. She stuck with me during my vow of silence. As I was sorting all that out, I needed her so much.

I just didn’t see that she needed me, too. I still feel a crushing guilt that I didn’t see what was going on with her sooner. It was my responsibility to take care of her, just as she had taken care of me.

I would have sacrificed anything to save her. I understood that this was always part of the bargain between man and domesticated feline. We live longer. They almost always die first. But I wasn’t ready. I’d never be ready. I don’t think I am today. 

When we knew the end was near, we took some vacation so we could spend her last days with her. Karen spent the day before she died drawing her on the porch, which is where the above picture comes from. Felicia was restless. She couldn’t get comfortable. She hurt inside.

We fed her catnip and tuna juice, her favorite food, what little she would eat. We took her into the backyard on a leash which she used to love. A heron landed in the yard nearby. Even that close to the end, she wanted to take down that bird even though it was three times as big as she was.

We’d talked to our vet who agreed to come out to the house to put her to sleep so we wouldn’t have to take her in. After several visits to the vet and the emergency clinic, she hated car rides. We didn’t want to do that to her on her last day.

As we counted down the hours, we petted her, and purred with her, and lay with her on the floor. I held her on the porch when the vet arrived.

Felicia’s was the first grave I dug in our backyard. Five feet deep, through layer after layer of colored sand. We buried her with her favorite toys and blanket. We planted a yesterday, today and tomorrow over her. I caught my wedding ring on the posthole diggers which then tried to rip my finger off. That put a notch in my ring that remains there to this day. Something I will always remember her by.

I watched my father die and never shed a tear. With my little girl, I cried for days. I’m crying still. 

© 2017 Edward P. Morgan III