She was quite young when we found her cowering on a mountainside road in Wyoming where we had pulled over to get a view of Devil’s Tower in the distance. She and her sister had been abandoned there by someone who couldn’t see their sweetness, how much they had to give, how they could change things. At first, even we tried to give them away, we had so many at home already, but in the end, we felt we had to take them with us. She had a grey spot on her back between her shoulders. We weren’t sure if it was dirt-darkened or a pattern in the fur, but we decided to call her Dot. How different the ending to her story could have been. The end of things, the end of some things, or the end of all things.
I was drawn to her white softness and her wide blue eyes – her classic beauty. We found a home for Dot’s fluffy, black sister, called Lucifer, of course, or Lucy for short, but Dot became Dottie, and she came to live with us. She knew she was my cat, perhaps because I had held her in my lap all the way to Rapid City, petting and talking to her, reassuring her that now all would be well.
Once she was back home with us in Georgia and the indignity of the bath was out of the way, she began to establish her dominance. No matter how many other pets were in our household over her long life, she was always Queen. As other cats grew old and died or disappeared suddenly, as some are wont to do, she remained and grew in her authority. The seat closest to me was always hers, as were all cat-food dishes on the floor, but woe to the cat who presumed to approach her while she was eating! Her gray fluffy tail was her scepter, held straight up as she walked and wrapped around people or cats to let them know she went first.
Dottie-cat, Dotta-kitten, Dotta-fluff-and-fur-and-nose-and-tail-and-whiskers. She knew all her names. In the last years, she would follow me around the house to be sure she would be there beside me or in my lap when I sat down. In the mornings, she came to our bedroom door with a guttural, strangely human wail, demanding my appearance, to reassure her once more that all would be well. Wow-wow-ow-ooooo. She doted on our morning routine. I picked her up at the stairs and put her on my lap in the chairlift so we could ride down together. It made my daughter laugh to see it.
She endured so much in her life: three household moves, a broken leg that mended good as new, a botched tooth-extraction surgery that put her close to death. Then kidney failure and a few strange illnesses that laid her low, finally blindness and confusion. She always pulled back from the darkened doorway. She knew I would be there waiting for her. But after 19 years, it was time to let her go. The loss of things, the loss of some things, then the loss of all things.
We liked to say she would never die because her heaven couldn’t be any better than what she had here with us. But then the death of things, the death of some things, finally the death of all things. Now we must get used to the presence of it, the weight of it, the lack of what is gone that was there before. But the endings, the losses, the deaths – who could possibly prepare?
I struggle to think of her existence now after the life she had with us. Where is she? Where would it comfort me to think she is and what is she doing? I don’t know; it’s beyond my ability even to imagine. But I hope she endures somewhere, in some way, and I hope she remembers me. I won’t forget her. Her sweetness, what she gave us, how she changed us.