One month ago today would have been our cat Mandy’s 19th
birthday. Unfortunately she didn’t live
that long. Mandy died on November 6 of
last year. I still miss her.
Mandy lived with us for over 18 ½ years, longer than our two
daughters. Our girls were young when we
picked her up at the Humane Society.
Mandy (named by the girls) was only 6 weeks old and was so tiny that she
could fit through the spaces in our cyclone fence. I wouldn’t let her out alone at first, afraid
a fox would get her. Once she could no
longer fit through the fence, she had the run of the fenced area—and after a
while, our entire large yard.
Mandy loved to spend many hours exploring our acre, watching and hunting. She brought us her prizes, dead or alive—our girls became adept at catching live birds in our house. Sometimes there were small snakes. She was never particularly interested in eating her prey—apparently it was all about the hunt. There was a trail blazed through the lawn where she ran to the irrigation pump in our stream and took her drinks. When I put the hose in the ditches of my vegetable garden, Mandy would be there to lap up the water. I don’t think there was one inch of our yard that she didn’t explore. I can still see her walking along the cattails in our stream, checking everything out. Mandy spent countless hours soaking up the sun on our deck and patio –or sometimes from the inside of the house, through the windows.
The inside of our house was also Mandy’s domain—she was
queen of the house and everybody knew it.
(Our dog, Kozmo, once crawled under a table to keep out of her
reach.) If we brought something new into
the house, Mandy was instantly on it or in it—she didn’t miss anything. When Mandy was small, we taught her to drink
out of the sink. Well, actually, I’m not
sure who taught who because we all soon learned to turn on the water when she
wanted it. She didn’t just drink the
water—often she simply wanted to wash her paws or her face. Mandy had a very loud voice which she used to
tell us what she wanted. She went in and
out many times a day. We were very well
trained.
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Mandy was an amazingly tolerant cat. She put up with our young daughters’
sometimes exuberant love. They were
always picking her up and carrying her around.
She never bit or scratched us on purpose, even when we were giving her
medicine. Mandy was not a particularly cuddly cat but she did enjoy sitting on
our laps. I have many photos of her
stretched out on somebody’s lap. When we
returned home from a trip, she was a lot more vocal and demanding—her attempt
to make up for our absence.
Mandy developed a couple health problems in the last years
of her life. She began to lose weight
and we learned she had hyperthyroidism, a common problem in older cats. We began feeding her whatever she would eat
and would mash up her pills in her favorite food. Mandy also developed skin cancer on her
nose. The bleeding got so bad at one
point that we broke down and let the vet do surgery on our then 17-year-old
cat. The nose was better but the vet
could never get it all and the cancer eventually came back worse than before. Mandy got even skinnier—I think our girls
were rather shocked when they saw her last summer.
Mandy continued to have an amazing will to live and explore
her world, even as we watched her fade away.
In fact, even after she had stopped eating, a few days before she died,
she walked around the yard as she always did.
Gradually she became so weak that she couldn’t walk straight and would
cry out for me. I held her a lot in
those last days. The morning before the
day she died, Mandy put her paws up on the bed and meowed—she could no longer
jump—so I picked her up and held her.
That night I knew the end was near when I put her on a blanket on the
floor near our bed. It was too quiet
when I awoke the next morning—she had died during the night, having crawled up
right next to the bed.
Mandy was a dear family member and our house still feels so empty without her. She will remain in my heart forever.
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