A Mom & More: Meows in heaven

When I wrote about losing our dog Stark in February, I had no idea I’d be writing another goodbye column two months later. In fact, I really hoped against it.

In fact, the first thing I said to our cat Felix when we got home from making arrangements for Stark was, “You better hang around for at least six more months.” It was part jest, part truth.

All she made it was two months. Her passing was not unexpected — unlike Stark’s. After all, our best estimates for her age was 18-20 years. We actually expected her to go long before Stark.

But Wednesday was her time. Her body was failing, and she was down to three pounds. We tearfully said our goodbyes to her as we held her in our arms. It was not easy, but it was the best thing for her.

Where Felix came from into our lives is a mystery. She showed up one late spring night in 2007 after Jason and I got off work. We both worked second shift at the time, so it was about midnight or 1 a.m. Jason enjoyed sitting on the screened-in front porch when he got home to unwind. One night, Felix made her appearance and kept coming back.

We got a lot of questions over the years about having a female cat named Felix. Well, she was black and white, and when she started hanging around, that’s what Jason started calling her, and she started to respond. When she trusted us enough to handle her, we found out she was a girl but the name had already stuck.

After several weeks of her showing up and feeding her, we decided to keep her. We made an appointment with the vet to have her checked out and vaccinated. He told us she didn’t appear to be pregnant and that there were no health concerns with taking her in. We were to return in two or three weeks for some booster shots.

Well, imagine our surprise when we got home one night during that intervening time to find her giving birth to a trio of kittens on top of my shoes. We cared for all three kittens until we eventually found them all good homes.

There as another time we thought we had lost Felix. She was an indoor/outdoor cat for much of her life with us, and during the dead of winter one, year about eight years ago, she went outside and didn’t return. We didn’t see any sign of her for weeks, maybe even a month or more.

It was during this time I convinced Jason to let me get a dog. He had said once we didn’t have cats anymore — in addition to the kitten, we had also done an extended foster with his cousin’s cat Jimmy due to pregnancy allergies — we could get a dog. Wouldn’t you know it, as Jason returned home from the overnight shift the morning we had agreed to go look at dogs, Felix finally showed back up. Those weeks are the other great mystery of her life.

Over the 15-plus years of our time with Felix, the memories have built up. There was the time we were having the flooring replaced and she climbed down the floor vent in the breakfast nook. The installer had to come find me so we could figure out a way to get her out.

At one point, she found a tear in the lining of the bottom of our box spring and started to climb in there to hang out. Once we finally figured out where she had gone, we continued to look for the telltale sag of the material anytime we had a hard time finding her.

In our first home together, when we winterized the house by putting plastic up over the windows, she found a way to make a hole in the big window behind our bed so she could still fit in the windowsill.

But perhaps my fondest memory of her is how she took to Colin when he was born. When he grew into a toddler, she started to sleep with him almost every night. I often thanked her, as I checked on him after he fell asleep, for watching over “our” boy. He became very attached to her, and she was his baby as he grew.

Felix was never a “normal” standoffish cat. She has always enjoyed cuddles and had a very sweet disposition toward humans. She laid in bed with me often in her early years, but came to favor Jason and Colin in time. That was fine — Stark was my near-constant companion at home, and while they coexisted peacefully, they did not directly interact.

However, in the weeks after Stark’s passing, she began to come to me more. She would hop on the couch with me more times than not, and would come lay on the top edge of the pillow I kept propped up for reading in bed. I think she knew I was in need of comfort and provided what she could.

Felix’s purr was a comforting thing, and she provided that to me often over the past two months. In fact, she was purring almost to the end. Colin was understandably very upset as she left us, but I told him she was content because she was still purring.

As she went, I told her how much we loved her and what a blessing she was to us. I also thanked her for choosing us. There were a number of homes she could have chosen in our neighborhood that night many years ago, and she chose us. I will always be grateful.