When I was growing up, I distinctly
remember the day my family got a dog. We went to a local humane society where
my sisters and I picked him out. His name was Charlie. He was a great dog. I
think he was a mix of cocker spaniel and something else.
For all intents and purposes, he was a
mutt. That fact didn’t matter to us. He was always happy to see us and we loved
him.
When I was in college, he had to be put to
sleep and we all felt the loss. Later in my college years, I became a cat
lover, as well.
I had never had cats before, but had been
around them at the home of my best friends, Heather.
I had an apparent genetic predisposition to
cats. I wasn’t particularly font of them, perhaps because my mother had not
been particularly fond of them, nor her mother due to some destruction of
drapery or some such thing. However, falling in love with a long-time cat
lover, I began to see the error of my ways and slowly converted to his way of
thinking.
In 1991, while visiting a friend at
Virginia Tech with my husband Leslie. I picked a cat out of a box of kittens on
a street corner. My life has never been same.
Her name was Delilah. She was amazing and
taught me that cats were incredibly intelligent and compassionate.
She was clearly intentional in her actions
and earned the title of “The Queen,” not just because of her poise and beauty,
but also because she ruled the house.
She would not be denied attention, food or
love. If I was working on the computer, she walked across the keys. If my
husband was reading the newspaper, she curled up n in middle of its pages.
If she needed to go out, she started
knocking my jewelry off the dresser to get out attention.
Delilah was a mood-changer as well, quick
to nurse us in a time of sadness, illness, or simply when in a funk.
She traveled with us from Blacksburg and
back to Davidson until we moved to Mandeville, La., across Lake Pontchartrain
from New Orleans.
When we moved to Seattle, where I went to
nursing school, she was put on a plane and joined us there.
When we headed back to North Carolina, we
crammed into our Toyota Corolla with our 3-month-old son and Delilah to make
the long journey back. It was a journey that we knew we would never repeat, in
this life or the next.
She stayed a short time with my sister,
Jill, in Concord and then settled in with us in Salisbury for the next four
years. We brought her to the mountains with us in 2002.
We called her the “well-traveled kitty.”
She won me over, as she did my mother.
In 2009, at age 18, she died. Our hearts
were broken. She had ushered us through our early relationship, through many
trials, into parenthood of three children (she was our firstborn), and helped
me through my entire educational process.
Losing an animal is losing a part of your family.
We cried and still do at times, but she was only the first of several animals
we’ve lost.
The loss of our cat, Sid, was the most
recent. Like Delilah, he was an integral part of our family. While initially
surviving being hit by a car, he required an amputation and died later that
day.
We had no regrets that we had agreed to the
surgery. We all grieved, except for my 4-year-old, Ben, who didn’t quite “get
it” He just wanted to know what was for dinner.
Sid was a Russian Blue cat. He was vocal
and opinionated. He loved my children and waited for them every day to get off
the bus and come home. We all miss him.
I have reflected a lot recently about the
effect that animals have on us. I think their connection to us runs deeply,
since they usually accept us exactly how we are.
They do not talk back. They seem always
ready to forgive and to give and receive love, no matter what.
I think that we, as humans, can learn a lot
from our animals.
