As I drifted off to sleep last night my mind returned to Autumn of 2006. I was playing with my little ginger cow kitten in the foyer of my old house. I saw everything in clarity like I had never left. I could see the house just the way it was, down to the cobwebs dangling off the chimney pipe coming off the wood stove after a summer of disuse. The little kitty boy was wound up and when my then girlfriend opened up the front door he darted out. My dream of the past quickly turned into a nightmare that I also recall just as vividly. The kitten darted across the road into a dark woods. I could hear him crying from across the road. I crossed into the forest and searched for him for hours but all I could hear was his fading mews as he ran away, scared as the sun was setting. I couldn't sleep all that night. I put bowls of food on the front porch in case he came home. I checked every hour until 4 in the morning when I saw that half the bowl of food had been eaten. I grabbed a flashlight and looked all over the yard. I was about to give up when I peeked underneath my back deck and, sure enough, there was little Mango staring at me -- wild eyed. I hollered at him and he ran right up to me. I held him for hours, cuddling him as I went back to bed for the remainder of the night.
Then my dream turned to years later, in the Spring of 2010 after we had moved downstate to my home town. Mango would sit in my laundry room window every day, watching this little wild cat who would come sit on a bench beneath the window and talk to him. It was the same routine every day. Eventually, a few days before Christmas, the wild cat now name Clarysse decided that she wanted to come inside and meet her Mango.
They were inseparable. Just this summer we took in a stray kitten, then adopted another. Mango and Clare (after ten years together) were finally parents and loved their babies. Day and night they would snuggle and play. They were a perfectly adorable family.
Until yesterday.
After two days of appearing to be under the weather and off his food, I took Mango to the vet for some tests. I believed he had a hairball based on his coughing and cramping. It wasn't a hairball, but liver cancer. His intestines had shut down. At 14.5 years old any procedure was dangerous and the doctor felt the prognosis was poor, even with surgery.
I lost that sweet little kitten yesterday. It hits particularly hard right now. We lost our other fluffy boy, Coal, just a month and a half ago after a battle with leukemia. All the while that we were tending to Coal our Mango boy was dealing with his own silent fight -- and we never knew.
I wanted to write this down, preserve his story in some form. He was much more than a cat. He was my buddy, and truly felt like my child. He is gone. The last chapter in his innocent little story has come to an end, and the dream has slipped into the ethereal. Goodbye, my big bear.
Back on writing hiatus for a bit until I feel better.
Cheers,
