David's Thoughts About Ellie...

(David wrote this and posted it on his blog...)

At seven o'clock yesterday morning the tops of the tallest trees and steeples in my neighborhood disappeared into a fog that, hiding the highrises, obscured the last one hundred years or so of construction in Buffalo and charmed me with a little century-old illusion of a city as Stanford White and Frederick Law Olmsted and E.B. Green and Frank Lloyd Wright and god intended it.

Brenda and I had to pick up Ellie from the weekend and overnight emergency vet clinic at Main and Kensington and take her to her usual vet on Sheridan. Eddie had been a frequent visitor there in his last years to get his blood sugar checked. It's a good thing that Ellie, whose visits to the vet were highly unpleasant for vet and cat alike, had never been sick as far as we could see. But cats are mysterious creatures. Every time Brenda brought Eddie home from the vet Ellie attacked him. "But what about all the times he attacked me?"

My last trip to the vet was three years ago to visit Eddie. He was very sick but he was still the same old Eddie. He couldn't wait to get out of that cage into Brenda's arms. He couldn't eat but he tried, he kind of licked at his food. He was hooked up to an IV but then so was I at the time -- I'd just come home from the hospital with a PIC line in my arm (a percutaneous intravenous catheter) -- to me it meant recuperation. Underweight and, under the influence of prednisone, hungry all the time, I waited a little bit guiltily for Brenda so we could go to Anderson's across the street. She didn't want to leave him. I bought her a sandwich but she couldn't eat it. I made her take it home. The next day she came back with her mother to be with Eddie in his final moments.

Ellie got very serene and lovie in her old age. Unthinkable a few years ago, she let me pick her up and hold her a couple times recently. She wasn't always like that. She used to hiss at me from time to time and hated it when Brenda went away and left her in my care. She moped for weeks when Eddie died. She sat in one spot in the middle of the apartment for hours. "I am not moving from this spot until you bring back Eddie."

She suddenly got sick on Sunday. I got to the emergency clinic in time to join them on the floor and wait for the vet. It was all she could do to pull herself up on her gimpy hindlegs and wander a few steps in search of a place to hide before collapsing on her side, her big eyes wide open unblinking and glassy. One whimpery little growl was all she could muster as the vet poked and prodded her and scooped her up off the floor like a ragdoll and took her away for bloodwork. "If I wasn't so sick I'd have this vets eye out in a second."

Yesterday morning when we picked her up to take her to Sheridan we got a little glimpse of the old Ellie when she didn't want to let Brenda put her in her carrier. So instead, though she hates the car almost as much as she hates the vet, she watched the foggy world whiz by as I drove and Brenda held her on her lap and cried the whole way. Maybe Ellie was thinking that wherever Eddie had gone, that's where she was finally going too.

We visited her in the afternoon. She looked a little better, a little more alert. I wanted to get her some furniture to rip up but she wouldn't have been up to that, she wouldn't even come out of her cage, though she did get up and move around a little and claw at Brenda's finger. We brushed her and stroked her and kissed her until she got tired of us. Then Brenda sang to her as she'd sang to Eddie and then we went home.

I don't believe in god or heaven or hell but I do believe that if there's some place where good cats go when they die it's the same place where bad mice go when they die and bad furniture goes when it dies and Eddie is there waiting to settle a score.