A little over a year ago I said goodbye to a very dear and long-lived feline companion. It was a difficult loss for me to process. In the intervening time, I’ve read diaries on PWB Peeps about others’ losses of their fur-friends, most recently and memorably from Major Kong and Missys Brother, and each time one of these diaries comes up my own feelings of sadness would well up and be re-lived anew. Not that I’m telling others to please stop with their stories of loss, having dealt with it I know it is an important step in the process of grief to write/tell of your pain. It had become obvious to me that I hadn’t dealt with my grief, I’d simply repressed it.
So I write this diary to tell you a happy story; one of a new beginning.
After eclipsing the one-year anniversary of letting go, my spouse gently (sometimes pointedly) nudged me down the path of processing my buried grief and coming to terms with it and deciding on whether to accept new cats into our lives. It’s easy to adapt to a pet-free existence, to become complacent and enjoy being able to leave the house for any length of time and not worry about a damn thing, as well as enjoy a slightly fatter pocketbook. Inertia settles in, and you don’t feel like moving.
After the last nudge, and a lengthy, open, and honest discussion about what we were looking for and would accept in new feline friends, along with some internet investigation, we visited a local shelter and met with a pair of beautiful 3-year-old brothers: Scooter — a sleek black panther with tuxedo markings, and Dusty — his slightly smaller and stouter ash-grey & white brother.
The shelter told us they had come from a trailer park where their owner, an OTR trucker, would leave them outside to fend for themselves while he was away. A conscientious neighbor brought one to the shelter, and a few months later the other. The owner had called the shelter about the cats, but after discussion, decided to give them up for adoption. That was 3 months ago; so I’m not sure which, but one of them was in the shelter for the last 6 months.
We took them home.
While there was a lot of worry and nervousness about getting new cats, these boys have been moving down the checklist with little problem at all
- Adapting to the home — back of basement, then full basement, then main floor, then upstairs.
- Using the litterbox (some initial diarrhea, but passed)
- No ‘marking’ — we had some other cats do that; they can obviously smell those spots (still), but no problems.
- Scratching where appropriate — never had clawed cats before, the prior others were adopted w/o claws — these guys like raw wood and rope covered stuff I’ve built. So far, so good.
- Food — they have some ‘food anxiety’ , but they haven’t gone after our food.
The food anxiety is something we’re working on and will take some time to be successful. They consume food so rapidly that their meals must be metered out, lest they gorge to the point of vomiting. I tried a ‘puzzle mat’ which forces slower eating by requiring the cat to work around soft rubber spikes to get at kibble, but the mat just got upended after about the third vicious snarf from Scooter. I’d have to glue it to the floor or a board to keep it down.
We’re trying out a timed feeder now, too. We’ll need some dependable way to feed them to be able to go away for a weekend …
We have a good home for pets; we can make a difference in the lives of these animals.
I can let go of the old pain now, and love once again.