Heavy

I have been reluctant to write about the loss of my cat, Racecar. In fact, when she died late in the day on Thanksgiving, I set down my phone and didn’t touch it for two days. My heart is too heavy to talk to anyone about it.

I feel that writing about it could help me move on. Maybe putting my grief here will lift the weight from my heart a little.

Many of you have lost pets that were a family member for you, so you understand. Like many cats, Racecar didn’t seem to love me unconditionally, and that is why I adored her so much. She loved each of us with a heap of conditions. She had her specific preferences: on what her food should be, on what my routine should be, on where she should nap (her favourite spot was across my forearms as I typed – SO annoying). When we let her down, she was not content. She would make her displeasure known until we complied. Cats can be good at finding exactly what annoys you and doing it casually, with a look of pure innocence on their whiskers, so that you begin to doubt yourself. Don’t be fooled.

She was born September of 2006 in a barn at my Uncles’ place in Scappoose, so no one knew exactly what day it was. One day was as good as another, and I chose the 22nd to be her birthday, because it is also Frodo and Bilbo’s birthday. Back then I was in Boston and sharing parenting of Kellen with their dad, who lived in California, and we had agreed to move to Portland after both of us graduated from college. He got there first, in 2006, and I wasn’t around when they adopted the cat, which Kellen named Cookie, after their favourite thing in the world. In the Spring of 2007, I graduated Brandeis University and about 20 hours later I was driving back home to the West Coast.

Kellen’s dad decided that Portland was not for him, and he moved back to California, leaving Cookie with us. More critically for me at that time, he also agreed to let Kellen stay in Portland, after a custody battle. That was around 2008, when besides the potential to lose time with my child again, everything else in the world was awful: the economy was terrible, my boyfriend at that time couldn’t keep a job, my job paid next to nothing, my renter in Massachusetts stopped paying their rent, and with two mortgages and student loans we barely had enough to survive. He and I actually skipped meals so that Kellen could eat. I did finally sell the house in Mass for $50k less than what I paid for it. Wells Fargo would not help us (Troubled Asset Relief Program TARP) with our mortgage on the Portland house unless we went into default. Left with no other choice…we stopped paying, and then I got served foreclosure papers when I was at home alone, which was one of the hardest things I’ve ever gone through. Then they agreed to reduce our mortgage payment. Here’s a post from one of those hard days:

Moldy cornbread

Also about that time, Cookie got lost. She has always been an indoor/outdoor cat – allowed to come and go as she pleased. She would sometimes prowl all night and not show up till noon the next day. So with everything else going on, we were late to notice when she had been missing for longer than usual. Can you believe that FIVE MONTHS later she turned up again? We suspect she had been caught and trapped inside someone’s home, and it took her that long to escape. She was our miracle kitty.

We had brought Big O (O for Orange) from Massachusetts, a gigantic fluffy, playful, orange, boy cat. He wanted desperately to be Cookie’s friend. Cookie would have none of it, and tried to live her life as far from any other pet as she could. She hated all cats and dogs viciously, considering herself to be far superior. It was also around this time when Kellen remarked about their kitten, “She’s so fast! She’s either zooming, or stopped, like a race car!” And…the name stuck. She was Racecar from then on, and RC for short. Racecar never, ever accepted the presence of another pet in the house with her, and we tried several times. She began collecting scars and notches in her ears as battle wounds. (But they always got it worse – she was a tough fighter.)

The boyfriend never did get a job that lasted, and his mother came to live with us and began dominating the household while I paid the reduced mortgage and her son hid in the basement and refused to defend me. So yeah, the relationship ended for those and other reasons. He refused to sell the home and split the profits, and refused my offer of six months rent if he would move out. I quitclaimed the damned house to him, and in 2011 moved out with Kellen and Racecar, and left Big O, the mother, and the boyfriend, who accused me of abandoning him in his time of need (though we had dated for six years). It was the first couple of steps toward a much more beautiful life.

We settled in at the new house we were renting, which we called the Blue House, because it was painted blue. (I couldn’t buy, because the old house still had my name on it, and ex boyfriend was not making regular mortgage payments, so I was considered a bad credit risk.) It was an amazing neighborhood called Montavilla, where Kellen could walk to middle school. They made an outstanding group of friends that got even tighter when they went to Madison High School. I made friends and calmed down and did some massive work in therapy. I got promoted, and promoted, and promoted again.

I finally had the courage to love again, and dated Arno. It was the best relationship of my life so far, as I learned how to be healthier and care for myself and treat a partner better. But it was not ideal and we decided to break up on our third year anniversary of dating. I grieved so hard. Five months after we broke up, he was married. MARRIED. I grieved some more. Kitty’s fur soaked up my tears.

Before we broke up, my mom died in 2011. It fully wrecked me. I mean…it was trauma that I have yet to recover from while I nursed her through her death with my cousin who came to help. It was yet another occasion when I bawled into Racecar’s fur.

The ex boyfriend FINALLY had managed to make mortgage payments on time for 12 months in a row, which meant a mortgage company would be willing to take a chance on me again. Quickly, before he lost his job again, I got myself pre-approved for a loan and went house-hunting. Kellen graduated from high school in June 2015, and exactly one month later we had moved once more and were living in our own home out in the country, in Rainier, Oregon.

That’s where most of you know me from. Kellen and Racecar were tight for the first two years at Rainier, while the kiddo came home regularly from Oregon State University in Corvallis. But eventually my spawn shook us off and took on the world on their own. RC stopped sleeping in Kellen’s empty bed and began snuggling me at nights. I called her a heat-seeking missile. We both loved the heat, and spent our time on the hearth in front of the woodstove or out in the direct sunlight, depending on the season. This is when I introduced you formally to my sweetheart:

Meet Racecar

She loved the place out in Rainier. She would gallop across the fields of my property, running all the way to the back of the property by the lake, or along the creek. She climbed trees, and brought me SO MANY animals. Her preference was to play with them alive, so I rarely received them in pieces, or dead. She brought all kinds of live birds in, that flew around and pooped on stuff till I could capture and release them. She brought shrews, and moles, and mice, and one morning at 2:00 am I heard a banging in the bathroom and flicked on the light to see my first ever Wood Rat. They are absolutely adorable, by the way. Fluffy long tail, big round eyes and round fuzzy ears. RC would play with these creatures until she got bored, then go do something else. This left it my responsibility to figure out what to do with a live animal in my house. Cute as it was, Wood Rat had to go.

We bonded so tightly though. Living alone with Kellen gone, RC was my sole confidant and support system. She got slower and craved heat and naps more than ever, and I realized she was aging. She knew when it was about bedtime, and she would start following me around, getting in my way when I walked, reminding me it was time to lie down so she could curl up around my neck – her favourite spot. Every single night for years, and I got to the point where I had a hard time sleeping without her hot little body on me. It was so hard to sleep in hotel rooms because I ached for my kitty. Emotionally, I needed her to just to get through some of my days.

And then you know what happened: I found someone to love again. Only this time I had lived alone since 2011 and I had been through six years of therapy and I was emotionally smart, and financially secure, and confident. When Pedro came into my life I was ready for him and we fit together like puzzle pieces. Racecar was not ready for him, and hissed and spat. She was convinced that he wanted to steal her food, so she would stand guard at her bowls, and when he walked past, she would hiss and swipe. Pedro was willing to accept her as part of the deal to get me.

Racecar started changing. All her life she had been one of those silent meowers. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. But she grew deaf, and the less hearing she had, the more voice she had. Her meow became a grating scream like nails on a chalkboard. All her life, she had only ever wanted the same dry kibble, day in day out. I tried to spoil her with special foods, but she refused to eat anything else, but now she seemed to lose her appetite. She began drinking gallons of water, and losing weight. In February of 2022, she was diagnosed with kidney disease. It made her feel yucky, and very hard to please, and she let us know with that meow.

Diva

When Pedro and I got ready to move back to Portland, I worried about my old lady so much. But she was fine. I think it was her deafness that helped. She loved this new house and settled right in. But she got more sick. She was diagnosed with a thyroid problem. She lost teeth. I finally coaxed her into eating something other than dry kibble, but her tastes changed daily, almost hourly. We usually had about six bowls of food out for her each day, in hopes of capturing her attention with one of them. They all had to be replaced each morning, because she refused to eat day old food. I learned to make her tuna smoothies and whipped eggs. I tried every single treat in MudBay, and discovered that she loves New Zealand freeze dried lamb lung if I painstakingly cut it into tiny pieces and sat on the floor beside her and fed her one at a time. *sigh*

She was so picky about eating that we rejoiced when her vet found a cream nausea medication that we could apply to her ears whether she felt like eating or not. When she got her nausea meds, she would eat her throid meds and the 1/4 pill of Pepcid AC I crushed for her. Every few months we had to go to the vet and get an injection of more meds and intravenous fluids and whatever else she needed. Yes, she got to be a very expensive Diva.

This year she was incontinent on top of all her other problems, and grumpy often, lacerating the air with her scream-meow when she felt bad, all during the days and usually multiple times in the night, causing us to lauch a foot off the mattress in shock each time. I began covering her bed and the floor in front of her litterbox with absorbent pads. But still, if she was warm and had at least a teaspoon of something in her belly, she was a happy kitty.

September 22, Racecar turned 18 years old. I wrote about it in that post where I ran around Portland finding cat sculptures. In that post, you can see all the gray hairs on her face, and the tears in her ears from catfights over the years. She had several bad sickness periods that lasted days, during 2023 and 2024. Kellen had said good bye to her just in case, on three separate occasions. But she always bounced back. She was having a bad week before Thanksgiving, but for the first time since she met him, Tuesday night she cuddled Pedro half the night. They had come a long way and she no longer suspected him of wanting to steal her food.

Wednesday before Thanksgiving was another really bad day when she just slept all day and would not eat. This time she also could not walk and Pedro and I both sensed that it was finally the end. We took her to the vet for fluids and nausea injections again, but she continued to decline. Thanksgiving morning we found her in a dark corner, and felt it was a signal that she wanted to be left alone. We lifted her and put her heated cat bed under her, then we took turns all day holding a dish of water in front of her mouth for her to drink. She refused to eat. She was extremely weak and slept all day. By evening she did not wake up. I wrapped her body in a tiny quilted blanket made by my blogging friend Marlene just for her, and placed her in the cold garage for the night.

Friday morning, Pedro and I dug a deep grave. I went to get her from the garage, and the weight of her surprised me. She was surprisingly heavy for her tiny size. As I carried her to the grave, the tears gushed as I had the same thought with her that I had when my mother died: her presence in my world was so huge and so constant, I couldn’t even imagine what a world would be like without that big presence in it. I told her so. I told her I loved her. Pedro got flowers and a little stuffed mouse toy to put into the grave with her. Her body wrapped in Marlene’s quilt rested heavily at the bottom of the hole and we both worked to fill it again. He found a large brick to place on top. I picked roses from the bushes around us to add to the rest of Pedro’s flowers to put on top of the grave. We both cried and said goodbye again. It felt good to spend so much time out there in the cold, dim morning and work hard digging and feeling our feelings.

If RC had died before I met Pedro, I can’t even imagine how it would have destroyed me. But she hung on long enough to see me through to the next chapter. Since she was a Diva cat, she punished me into being her nurse for three years, just because she could. But I forgive her.

Eighteen years covers a lot of ground in anyone’s life. For me, it was a journey of rebirth and discovery, healing, resurrection, evolution. Writing this post I can’t believe there was so much drama 18 years ago. I lost so much and so deeply, and I gained everything: self respect, self love, financial security, a home, peace, and finally the love, real love, of a partner. Racecar was there, patiently accepting my drama in exchange for a warm lap. She was there for all of that. I miss her terribly and I will for some time to come.