Our sweet Lilly died suddenly yesterday, likely from heart worms, and I’ve just been searching for ways to honor her and try to feel slightly less useless. It’s been comforting to read some of the stories on this site, so I wanted to share my tribute to her.
<3, O
“For Lilly Cat”
"Are you nervous?"
"Yes," she says, staring up at their bedroom ceiling and anxiously clutching the comforter. "She's going to get her hair everywhere."
"You mean, fur?" he chuckles, cradling her face with both his hands. "Your hair is already everywhere."
"Exactly! Where will all the extra hair go?! Do you promise you'll clean the carpet? And the litter? And brush her?"
"Yes. Just wait, you're going to love having her here."
Fast forward three months, and here we are, under the same blankets, but this time trying to make sense of our sweet cat daughter's sudden death. Every time I close my eyes, the morning's events replay in my head. Instead of awaking to her insistent, hungry meows and scratches at the door, I'm jolted awake by my fiancé's voice.
"Something's wrong with Lilly," he says, as he snatches his glasses from the ledge of the bed and races back toward the living room.
I throw the comforter aside and jump from the bed. Just like in the movies, everything moves in slow motion.
I see Lilly on the couch and I close the gap between us in three or four, eternal steps. I kneel on her left and Frank kneels on her right. We both call her name over and over again, still in denial, still hoping that she's simply in a very deep sleep, or cold, or playing a joke on us. I hear her meow in my head. I call it forth with my mind, but it remains trapped in my memory.
She's gone.
Frank pets her gently, as I, unsurprisingly, start sobbing wildly.
I'm still processing. I hypothesize I'll be processing for some time. There are the "whys" and the "this isn't fairs" and the "this was too soons". There's so much I don't, can't understand. Like, why the hell there's no treatment for feline heart worm disease. But here's what I do understand, what I know.
I am so blessed to have met this little cat, with her insistent little face, always asking for love, and her cute little patitas, often tucked underneath her, when she cozied up to us on the couch.
Life is incredibly precious and things can so rapidly change. We must cherish, be grateful, celebrate each second we're alive.
We, as humans, are designed to love and I'm on this earth to love as hard and tight as I can, for as long as I can, even if it means, that in moments like this one, I smack my face on the pavement of emotions with particular panache.
I'm grateful times infinity to the man I'm going to marry for saving Lilly eight years ago and bringing her into our little family.
I'm grateful for every purr, scratch, lick, nuzzle.
I suspect we'll be covered in her fur for months to come, reminded of her olympic races across our carpet and her belly rub begging, with every strand, and with that usual dash of annoying life irony, I take comfort in that fact.
I love you, our plump, funny, little cat. May you eat all of the treats in kitty heaven.
