Telling Ivy Goodbye

 

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

Emily Dickinson

"Hey, Ivy," I coaxed one May afternoon.  "Want to come and watch a movie with me?  Come on- Nazis blowing each other up- great stuff!  What do you say?"

Ivy had been in the doorway, preparing to go into the livingroom and climb up to her favorite sunny window.  She looked over her shoulder at it, looked back to me, then wobbled over.  It took her a little while to climb up beside me, but she settled in and together we watched Tom Cruise try- and fail- to save the world.

When Ranger got home that evening we had our first serious conversation about Ivy's health.  After more than three years and many dire predictions, she had finally begun to seem frail.

One afternoon a little over three years ago, I pulled up in front of our house after work and noticed something in my rose bushes.

"Somebody has thrown a greasy old rag into our yard!" I thought.  "That's not very nice!"  I marched up the steps to grab it and get rid of it.

But it wasn't a rag.  It was a cat.  A tiny, ragged, dirty cat scarcely bigger than my hand.  She was crouched under one of my miniature rose bushes and didn't even turn her head to look when I touched her.

"Somebody is not taking good care of their cat," I thought.  She was so emaciated that petting her felt like fondling a pack of needles.  What fur she had stuck up in greasy spikes.  She scarcely reacted to this stranger inspecting her, not moving from her dispirited huddle.

We had been keeping extra food and bowls around for the local strays, so I went in and fixed up some food and water for the cat.  I left it on our porch and then went inside.

I peeked out several times while doing my afternoon chores and saw the cat jump up on the porch, eat a little, then jump away again.

When Ranger got home I told him about the cat.  By that time she had taken cover in the overgrown ivy at the far side of the yard, and he moved the food and water over there. 

He said he didn't expect her to make it through the night. She was hyperventilating and seemed very weak.  We agreed that if she was still there in the morning, Ranger would take her to our vet on his way to work.

Unbelievably, she was still alive the next morning.  Ranger put on some long work gloves and took a box out to the yard.  One paw flashed out as he closed the lid,  but she was captured.

Our vet was rather hard on Ranger for bringing her in.  "See that?  That's a collar," she snapped, pointing at an outsized blue flea collar around the cat's neck.

Ranger asked why anyone who owned a cat would let it get into such horrible condition.

"Because people are no damn good," said the vet.

(We sometimes call our Vet the House of veterinary medicine. With affection.)

The cat was in terrible shape: severely underweight, malnourished, so covered with fleas she had not just flea anemia, but a skin infection from the bites.  She was also very, very old.  At least 12, said the vet.  Probably older.

The vet gave her three days to live- tops.

She needed multiple tests and procedures. We paid what we could, and as the bills mounted the vet agreed to dip into her practice's Stray Cat Fund to help out. 

While she underwent treatment, I canvassed the neighborhood with posters, trying to find her owners.  Ranger had taken a picture of her hiding in the ivy:

 

We printed the picture with a description of the cat and some contact info, and I walked all over the neighborhood, knocking on doors or leaving the picture in mailboxes.

At one small house the door was opened by a skinny, shirtless guy with long hair, vacant eyes and a weirdly pleasant smile.

"A caaaat?" he said, staring at the picture, then at me.  "Noooo."

(This was when I realized that Cheech and Chong could have been based on real people-  who lived in my neighborhood.   Disconcerting.)

I never found anyone who recognized the cat.  About ten days later, she came home with us.

Ranger named her Ivy, because he had found her in the ivy.

We found her at the end of April, and by that Christmas she was an inseparable part of our family.

And I mean our whole family.  We took her on our annual Christmas visit to my parents, and she charmed them as well.  My parents have a much larger house, with wall-to-wall carpeting instead of our plain hardwood floors.  Ivy would flop in the middle of the floor as if to say: This whole house is one giant cat bed! Cool!

My parents let her sit or sleep anywhere she wanted, floor or furniture.  After three Christmas trips, she had tried out every chair and bed.  And she always gravitated to the kitchen when there were people talking and eating.  We all took turns feeding her milk from a spoon.

I began to wonder if she had been the pet of a large family. Some big house with lots of food and people always laughing and talking in the kitchen.

Ranger took a picture of her that first holiday, peeping shyly from beneath our Christmas tree:

 

She had already lived many months more than expected.  We had watched all through that spring, summer and fall as she quietly, determinedly, put herself back together again.

"I never saw a wild thing feel sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself." -D.H. Lawrence

The vet had given us carte blanche to feed Ivy whatever she would eat in those first months, and soon she was working her way through big plates of tuna packed in oil with saucers of vanilla ice cream for dessert.  She was so weak that sometimes her head shook from the effort to hold it over the food, but she ate it.  And ate it.

And slowly put the pounds back on.

"Old, lost, gaunt, frightened

you were no barn cat.

Dignified as a dowager

 your craving for chicken scraps and fat

declared you once belonged,

were somebody's pampered pet.

With your unkempt black beauty and trustful affection...

...you cheated death..."

Cat from the Animal Shelter

Kathleen McKinley Harris

We watched Ivy's taste in food for clues to her  past identity.  As fall came and the weather cooled, I often had a cup of hot tea with lemon in the evening.  As soon as Ivy smelled the tea, she would come trotting over and sit next to me, sniffing the cup and giving me an expectant look.  Then she would peer around the cup at my other hand.

It turned out Ivy had a taste for vanilla cookies.  We would crumble up a cookie and let her lick the crumbs- just as someone else had once done.  Someone who also liked hot tea with lemon.  She liked opera, too, and would purr loudly whenever Ranger played his favorite aria, Delibes' Flower Duet.

I began to wonder if she had been the treasured pet of an elderly retiree who sipped tea in the afternoons.

Other things pointed to an indoor past.  She was never afraid of the sound of my sewing machine, or the blender, or the dishwasher or even the vacuum cleaner. She never tried to claw the furniture. 

When we brought home a new rug for the dining room, she knew what it was before we even unrolled it- and began purring immediately.  Thereafter she made a point of walking on it whenever she passed through the dining room, as if to say: This is how civilized cats behave.

But she never forgot the outdoors.  That first year, she would climb onto the desk and peer out the window for long intervals, as though waiting for her 'real' people to come and claim her.  When we did take her outside, she made a beeline for the front of the house and the ivy patch where she'd hidden.  She would sniff there and then try to charge across the neighbor's yard and up the street.  There was sense of purpose in her stride.

The last time we put her on a leash was this June. She led us right down to the sidewalk and halfway up the street before her legs gave out and she had to sit in the grass and rest.  She sat there scanning the horizon as if to say: It's here someplace.  I know I'll remember in just a minute...

We did our best to be good substitutes for her real family, but with Ivy it could be hard to tell.  I have lived with several cats and Ivy was by far the most modest and retiring.  She seldom spoke and never pestered us for anything.  Her only gambit was to sit in front of you and simply stare you into submission while you tried to figure out what she wanted.  Attention?  A bite from your plate? Fresh water? New litter?  Confronted with that patient, unblinking gaze we would try one thing after another until we hit on what she wanted.  Then we might be rewarded with a curious, soft purr that sounded like the cooing of doves, not a cat. 

Just when we wondered what she thought of us, she would suddenly show us great empathy.  Two summers ago I got a nasty cold which plunged into my chest.  I had been to the doctor and gotten a prescription, but continued to cough and wheeze.  Late one afternoon I finally had to lay down.  I'd had a case of pnuemonia years before and the gurgling sensation in my lungs was starting to frighten me.  As I was lay on the bed, struggling to breathe and not panic, Ivy suddenly walked in the bedroom, which up to then had been Maddie's fiercely patrolled territory- no Ivy allowed!

Completely ignoring an outraged Maddie, Ivy hopped up on the bed and sat pressed against my leg- another first.  She trained that calm, unwavering golden gaze on my face and kept it there for what seemed an eternity, until the medicine kicked in and my breathing began to ease.  Then she hopped down and left the room.

That would remain her way with me.  She would hurry over and inspect me for signs of serious injury, lingering until she was satisfied that I would recover.  Then she would quietly slip away, with no further fuss.

We called her Little Miss Head Pats because that was the only kind of petting she really liked.  She would put up with having her back stroked or her tummy rubbed, but she would actually walk up to you and ask for head pats, pushing her head under your hand.

She hated being chucked under the chin.  She would make a face and jerk her head away.

She wasn't a lap cat.  She preferred to slip in between us when Ranger and I sat on the couch to watch DVDs and was exposed to a lot of bad sci-fi and movies this way.  That didn't bother Ivy; she was happy to snooze between us while we watched.

Each time we took her in for a checkup we were warned she probably couldn't last much longer. 

"Her teeth are in terrible shape."

"That's probably arthritis in those legs."

"She has high blood pressure and kidney disease."

And checkup after checkup, she slowly wore the vet down with that alert, patient, golden gaze, until the hardened professional was reduced to cupping Ivy's face in her hand and cooing,

"You're such a pretty cat, Ivy."

She became a kind of mascot for the whole practice. "Is that the same cat?  You mean she's still alive?"

The three days had become three years.  I used to joke that Ivy was the Cat of the Thousand Days.

She wound up with many nicknames: The Ivester, Tuxie Girl, Old Miss, Little Miss Head Pats, Granny Biscuit, Granny Cat, Lil' Bit.

We never learned her real name, but maybe that didn't matter.  Ivy always knew exactly who she was.  The age and identity issues were everyone else's problem.

In the end she was braver as a cat than I have ever been as a human:

• She survived God-alone-knows how many weeks or months lost and alone at the end of winter, with no dependable food or shelter;

• She fearlessly adopted a whole new family, calmly adjusting to their strange new ways;

• She won the respect of a cat half her age and twice her size, and lived alongside her in peace and dignity;

• She remained sweet and loving even as her vision dimmed and creeping paralysis took her back legs, quietly adapting to her new limitations without complaint.

From the first day to the last you astonished all of us, Ivy.  Thank you.  And sleep in peace.

 

 

Comments

[Scooby, Shaggy & Scout]

I hardly know what to write because of the tears. I have become so attached her it is hard to realize she is gone. This was a lovely tribute. What a joy and inspiration she was to you & your family and you must be missing her terribly, even as much as you prepared for the inevitable.
Ivy, may you rest peacefully. You were a grand lady.

[fiona]

Oh no!!!

Thank you Ivy, for sharing your life with us.

And thank you, Ranger and Lady Ranger, for sharing her with us.

I'm not ashamed to say his made me cry *sniff* I love the posts, Ivy and her wee feets.

I am so sorry for your loss.

[iamfelix]

A remarkable tribute to a remarkable little girl -- touching and beautifully said. I will miss the weekly tales of brave Ivy.