Another Empty Place, Another Goodbye

Eight years ago...I guess...it's hard to remember, sometimes, exactly when our "walk-ons" walked into our lives...a tiny, frightened, starving black mite showed up in our back yard in Scappoose.  She mostly hid/lived under the deck we had put in front of our greenhouse.  We somehow managed to coax her out from her dark, damp safe space with bowls of food and water.  But there was no petting her...no touching her.  Just...trying against stacked odds to nourish and house her.

We fed her, we sheltered her, to the best of our abilities (she was petrified of going inside any place and having the doors shut behind her, so we couldn't even keep her safe in the greenhouse at night.) She would huddle in our eight-foot-diameter open gazebo, through heat and cold and rain and snow.  We wrapped it in plastic as best we could, trying to give her some shelter from the wind and cold.  And we put soft beds and food dishes in that inadequate living space. 

 

And she stayed. But never warmed to us past the relationship of a very frightened feral cat dependent upon the food and best shelter we could give her.  

 

Then in 2019, we made the move.  Back to Eugene.  Away from the yard she called her own.  

I wrote a letter to the people who bought the house, begging them to care for the little black cat who was attached to the property.

 

They declined.

 

And so, days before we packed up and left the house for good, I managed to grab her and drop her into a cat carrier.

 

She was coming to Eugene with us, by god.

 

And she was going to be an indoor cat.

 

No more of this bare subsistence crap that had served as a life for her up til then.

 

And she who had had no name beyond "little black kitty" would be henceforth known as "Princess."   

  

Princess' last "Fort Princess." A cozy chair in the corner of the family room.

Her metamorphosis to "indoor cat" was a challenge, and it was slow, and it was not without its bumps and boogers.  But she did it.  

 

She never became a lap cat.  Never tolerated being picked up and held.  Her sharp claws would stick to any surface upon which she stood, and picking her up invariably brought along a pillow or a quilt or some part of her perch.

 

But she did eventually learn to enjoy pets.  In fact, she demanded them.  From the back of the chair when I came out to the family room to feed the livestock in the morning.  From behind my head as I sat and watched tv.

She had a tendency to choose a place and make it her "favorite" for a few weeks or months.  We got to calling each of these places her "Fort Princess-es"--the nooks and crannies she chose as her safe places as time went on.  

 

Eventually, all of her safe places ended up being in the family room.  She hardly ever left that room.  She became the quiet, soft, warm black presence.  Always there.  Always content to be there and nowhere else.

 

For the past five years, she has been our Family Room Princess.

 

 

Unfortunately, we have at times chosen to introduce other cats into her space...some of whom she didn't particularly like.  One miscreant--Apollo, the light orange cat from across the street--she really didn't like.  As Apollo spent more time in the house, Princess got smaller and smaller.  The stress made her start pulling her hair out. By the time I figured out what was going on, and what was stressing her, she was almost bald from the neck down.

 

I quickly decided to keep Apollo out of the house...and in a couple of weeks, Princess' fur grew back.

 

But we also realized there was something more sinister going on with her.

 

She lost a ton of weight.  She had trouble eating, couldn't swallow dry food, then choked on wet food, and just kept getting worse.  

 

We took her to the vet.  Spent $500 on the requisite diagnostic blood tests.  And they found nothing.  

 

The vet said she had been over-grooming because she had fleas.

 

The day after our useless vet visit, I picked up the Princess and discovered a tumor on one of her nipples.  Mammary cancer.  And she was dying of it.  In fact, was very close to death.

 

And so, we called the mobile vet to help her to her final rest.  Quietly.  Peacefully.  In her favorite chair.

 

The next morning, a hummingbird landed on a wire just outside the sliding door to the patio.  He looked inside, cocking his head.  Looking for...something.  I had never seen one of these little guys do that before.

 

And I just felt in my heart that this little messenger had come to call Princess' spirit.  To show her the way back to the stars. 

     

The Pretty Pretty Princess has left the house.  We will miss her.  So much.

 

Play among the starts, pretty girl!