Most of my childhood was on a farm. I experienced death all the time. When I was about 8, I was closing up the hen house for the night and found her, a small hen, sitting on the floor, rather than on the roosts like the rest, her head twisting in a gentle, spastic way. Though I was young, I could see she was in a bad way. I took her into the barn where my father was shoveling out the manure. I sat down on a bale of hay and held her. She could not move in any sensible way, she could not stand, and her head would slowly twist to the left, and then spring back to normal, and repeat. That got slower and slower until finally she slumped over, her wide-open eye staring vacantly towards the rafters. She didn’t even have a name, she was just one of the brown hens. I found a shoe box and my father helped me dig a hole by an old apple tree where we buried her. I don’t think there were any tears or grief, just a bit of sadness; just another day on the farm.
In mid 2003 I had just moved in with my fiance, and both of her cats had died recently, so when the downstairs neighbor said she had a friend with an unintentional litter of kittens, we went to visit. Many of them were skittish, but one came right up to us, friendly and fearless. She was the one. She was a beatiful black and white, mostly snow white and black on top, with a large sawtooth border. We took her home and briefly discussed names, but quickly settled on “Freya”. A fitting name. Little did we know that she would rule our lives for the next 21 years. She was wild, energetic, and there was no doubt as to who was in charge in the house.
It would take me far too long to write about our entire life together, but I’ll give a few snippets. Write them down before the mists of time blur the memories beyond recall.
My step son would always take her to bed with him; he would scoop her up and attempt to hold her, but she would wriggle and claw at him until he got into his room and closed the door, after which she should sleep next to him. After he grew up, this kind of stopped, but she would still sleep next to him while he watched football; in fact, that’s how she spent her final afternoon.
She was wildly energetic, often tearing through the house at top speed ending with a climb up a doorway. She was often able to get to the very top, and she would look around as if trying to figure out a way to get higher. One day she even mistook my step-son for a doorway and climbed him. Everyplace we have lived has had several doorways scratched up. As she was aging I would always report this to the vet as an indication of her continued vigor. One morning right before a trip to the vet, she climbed a doorway right near my desk. I had no idea at the time, but that was one of the last times she would ever do that. After that she would run up to a doorway, and just get her front paws up and then stare upward longingly. Eventually, it was just a stare, and that was months ago.
She was not a cuddly lap cat. I don’t think I heard her purr until she got much older. But she loved to curl up next to her humans more so as she got older. As long as it was on her terms. She would sleep pushed right up against my wife, but if I ever slept on my back, she loved to lay on top of my legs. After I took a shower in the morning, I would sit on the bed for a bit in my robe, and she would rush over, barely waiting for me to get in position before she trying to climb on top of me.
As she got older she really started to appreciate laptops, or, as I think she thought of them as “lumpy butt warmers”. My wife would often come back from a break to find her sitting on her laptop and an enormous string of nonsense letters in a freshly composed email. My wife got the habit of putting a notebook and stapler over her keyboard to prevent this. A habit which is now just a constant reminder of what has been lost.
One funny habit she had was that she would drop her cat toys (usually little plastic fur covered mice) into her drinking water, and we would find her water a bright purple or pink from the cheap dye leaking out. Before we moved to our current house we stayed at my in-laws for a few days, who had a mouse problem. One morning my wife got a shock when found an actual mouse, dead, in Freya’s water bowl. We are not sure if this instinct was to ensure they were dead, or to clean them. It is fortunate, for all the small animals near our house, that she was an indoor cat, I am sure she would have left a trail of death and destruction in her wake.
But the last few years were hard. She collected a number of maladies, one of which was a spinal issue which hindered her ability to walk, so she had a limp and one leg would thump when she walked. But even so, she would still chase her sister around (which was more fun for her than her sister), and she would still try to jump around in ways that was risky to impossible given her age. Her lack of flexibility eventually left her unable to groom herself. A few days ago her eating diminished to almost nothing and no amount of coaxing or bribing her with churu on her food would work. I knew this was a bad sign.
Whenever we would find her sleeping she would jump up to greet us, but on Monday when she tried to do this, her back legs would no longer cooperate, she spun in circles trying to get moving. We had a difficult night, and she did something she would never do: she wet the bed, undoubtedly because she could no longer move. We knew it was time. She spent her last day sleeping next to her sister, which is something they had never done for all the years they spent together. I think they both knew. At the end of the day on Tuesday, she passed peacefully in the arms of those who loved her. She was finally free of pain, but ours was just starting.
As I said at the outset, growing up on a farm inures you to a lot of death. But none of that helped me deal with the hole in my heart right now. I spent more that a third of my life with Freya. Everyplace I look I expect to see her, and physical reminders are everywhere. At mealtime I still put out two plates, and get all her special food and medications out in preparation, only to put most of it back, never to be used again. Every day I find another physical reminder of her, and collect them together. This morning I found the piece of tulle she loved to play with. Maybe someday I’ll be able to look at all that without sobbing.
