The Manx Den

Well, tonight has been a rollercoaster of sorts – we’ve been for the past week or so been trying to help my hubby’s mother with a sick pet, and she called us just around 5pm to give the news that her cat is going to have to be euthanized. We were of course sad about it – the cat is a creature that she raised herself.

Of course, few who don’t have a close personal relationship with pets wouldn’t put a great price on such a thing, but like all things in life, Bølle’s sickness means a little more than sits on the surface. She was born in an unexpected litter five months after her mother (meow) decided to move from one house to another. Bølle’s mother, Pussi (God, I know, it’s so close to a slang word for genitalia that it’s made me laugh many times, but it’s a nickname for ‘kitty’) wasn’t being fed or loved much in her owner’s house, and Mike’s mom was feeding her, so she basically just ‘moved in’ – and she was a very, very shy cat. She probably didn’t have much reason to trust the person she lived with before, and it wasn’t long before we learned why.

She had been pregnant with kittens before, and in the house she lived in, when the kittens were born, all the kittens were removed right away. Now.. In some ways this is understandable, and for several centuries been the only way to keep animals from reproducing so much they overwhelm the houses they live in, but in Pussi’s case, it was rather sad. The next litter she was allowed to keep in Mike’s parents’ home, and one of the kittens they gave to us, and the other they kept, who Mike’s mom named Bølle.

Bølle was next to Mike’s mom almost constantly. Pussi would carry her two kittens up to Mike’s mom if she was relaxing in her bed, and leave the very tiny kittens there for ‘Mom’ to babysit while she went out to catch a breath of air. Bølle was almost hand-raised, and up to this point, she even plays with her mother cat as if they were both kittens – Pussi changed a lot after being allowed to be a mother, to a more relaxed and playful cat. Of course she was spayed when she was all better from having the litter.

If you’re a regular with my blog, you might have already read about the past events with Mike’s father passing away from advanced lung cancer. He had a few months’ warning, and then passed away last June at home – when we were all there. Mom has.. dealt with it impressively, buoyed up with what her local doctor can offer in short term medications and and antidepressant, but we have been down with her very often to chat, help, and just enjoy her. Loosing a pet.. well, in less than a year after saying goodbye to the man she had loved and lived with for forty years, will understandably bring forth the grief that is still fresh.

I would never expect a person to ‘get over’ the death of a loved one, but my sentiments are, that we learn to live with the emptiness of their (temporary) passing, and hopefully, be comforted with the love of God from folk who are in that family with us.

I… Can easily run deeply philosophical, and I’m sorry if I got lost in a tangent there.

Well, hubby had just come home when the phone rang, and I picked it up. His mom wanted to talk to him urgently, so I handed over the phone, and started puttering with what should have become dinner in the kitchen. When he was finally done in the living room, taken care of his email, and done whatever else it is that computer geek vikings do when they get back from work, he came in and answered my questions. It was a real shock to me that Bølle had to be put down, because I fully expected that her condition was treatable.

Bølle has a bowel impaction – she was leaving blood on the sheets in the morning after sleeping with Mom, and in pain on the litter box. With no pet insurance Mom could not foot the bill to have her cat cared for, and we stepped in with what we could manage on a credit card. It became expensive, with the feline needing an x-ray and housing overnight for the procedure (our vet’s office here is only a satellite of an animal hospital a few towns away), but with Mom’s… state (explained above), it was a given.

So Bølle was home five days after that, on antibiotics and oils and laxatives, but with no appetite. She was lethargic, inattentive and unable and unwilling to stand at all last Saturday, but on Sunday, when Mike and I went down to bring a little food to Mom, Bølle was twitching her ears and listening to us move around, and she even tried to stand. Mom had been able to coax some water into her by mixing in a little tuna flavor.

I can’t quite reason out why it was so disorienting to me to hear about the little (well, really, with a doting mother/grandmother feeding her fish all the time, she’s really a bit fat) grey fuzzball has to be put down – I had to put the food I was using for dinner away in the fridge. I couldn’t concentrate for a while.

Back before college, when my parent’s dumb-as-a-brick dog ran out the door and lost at the business end of a four by four, my dad struggled with what to do almost a whole evening. The dog (who, for the life of me has never quite learned that no means no) had her spine severed just two lumbar below her pelvis, and faced the possibility of incontinence after healing, was recommended to be put down by the vet, but my dad decided to give us the lesson ‘Always choose life‘ and forked over money for surgery despite the risk. I think he had me in mind, for at that time I was struggling terribly with emotional burdens, having become diabetic. Anyways, the dog lived to raid the trash nightly ever after (sans tail), and to later regail me with pee puddles before my bedroom door on a daily basis when I returned from college.

*Cough* None the less, the money and the possibilities are not in our favor today, and the cat will likely fertilize the roses by this time tomorrow. We grow so close to creatures which do not think or talk, and yet they still love. It always reminds me of just.. what kind of world this place was designed to be.

I know not everyone who reads my words agree with me, but experience – my experience – plants these thoughts, beliefs and truths I would die to defend, in my heart. Love created the world, and even facing death, I believe that God will set it right.

The real surprise came when Mike and I were out on a walk here at midnight to get fresh air and clear our heads. The stars were out in abundance, and the wind still, clear, cold and moist. We were going down the hill towards the main part of town, when movement in the sky caught my eye, and I stopped Mike so I could see if it was a satellite (we can see the orbiting space station sometimes, moving slowly), a plane, or something of that variety. Mike managed to look up in time – it was a meteor, streaking from west to east, very clear against the black plain and for a moment brighter than it’s company of stars. It was for two seconds blue-violet white, with a long tail, and then reddish before it faded, and we continued our walk, talking about it.

About half a minute later we heard a sonic boom from the east, which alarmed some birds in the forest west of town. The meteor had been big enough to break through the atmosphere, and Mike made me laugh. He joked that he wanted to find it, because they’re worth a lot of money.

I know to some it’s almost primitive, but I felt comforted. I’d seen something rare, and it was special – Mike summed up my thoughts on the way. ‘Maybe God wants our minds on something else?’ Of course it was said in a joking manner, but it did make me feel better to see something like that, just then. It was like a celestial hand-wave. ‘I’m here, it’s alright’.

Silly, maybe, but I answered Mike with one of my fravorites: ‘Stranger things in heaven and earth…’