Bastet and Freya, Do Us a Favor

Peaches says thanks for all the good wishes this afternoon! She’s looking pretty relaxed after she spent some time reading them.

Her mom decided to take action and write a letter about Peaches, but deciding which omnipotent being would receive it was a quandary. Appealing directly to one who either was a cat or who likely lived with cats would probably be more successful than appealing to one of the other beings who had more general interests.

So we’ll see what happens.

Dear Bastet and Freya,

As the main cat goddesses, I’m appealing to you on behalf of Peaches. I’d like to know if we could have a little more time together. I have many reasons for wishing this—the anniversaries of several losses happen around this time, things are changing in my business, other things are happening, and I’m just not ready yet—but most of all, Peaches and I just haven’t had enough time together. I know she’s 20, but she’s only been with me for five of those years, and Peaches and I don’t feel we’ve done all we can together yet.

Peaches has seen me though quite a bit in the five years she’s been with me, including the losses of six other feline family members, and that including her sister. She’s also been instrumental in contributing to my work as a painter, a photographer, a writer and a merchant. I’m just beginning some new ventures, and since Peaches is responsible in no small part for getting me to this point, I want Peaches with me on the rest of this journey, still inspiring me every day with her sweet, gentle demeanor and petite beauty.

Please see if you can do something about this. Peaches and I have an agenda, and I think you’ll be pleased with what we do with the extra time you’ll give us.

Bernadette and Peaches

If only it was that easy. We never know when the time will come, and it may not be immediate for Peaches, but I feel it will be soon.

We’re not sure what’s wrong, but she’s just felt tired and had little appetite since last Friday morning. Usually, especially if it’s her renal failure, I can turn her around from this in a day or two with some aggressive fluid therapy, special foods, and a variety of naturopathic and homeopathic treatments. But this has been nearly a week and I’ve needed to resort to some steroid use to make a change.

We’ve always suspected she had something deep in her right ear, a polyp or infection, that affects her balance and breathing and swallowing. She’s often shown irritation in that ear, scratching it and shaking her head, but the stuff that builds up down in her ear canal never tested positive for anything, and short of an MRI no one can see anything. A polyp or infection can flare up and in that tiny sensitive area wreak havoc on balance and swallowing especially, but disappear just as quickly. However, now that she’s a little weaker she just may not be able to compensate, and the condition itself may also be growing more aggressive.

She was on the bed with me this morning, then left and came back, thinking I’d follow her the first time, very normal. She’s been eating but swallowing is a little difficult and sometimes distressing. She’s walking around but with stiffness in her hips and hind legs, and she’s not jumping onto things as she was even yesterday; she’s capable, but I don’t think she can see well and doesn’t want to take the chance. Confusing and distressing to me, she’s kind of wandering, walking from one room to another, considering the basement, circling the table in the kitchen, as if she keeps forgetting what she’s doing.

And strangest of all, she wanted to go outside through the basement door. She’s never even acknowledged that there is an outdoors unless I’m in it and she wants me to come inside from it. She walked around the yard but the grass wasn’t comfortable, but she kept heading for the gate, then along the fence, to my side yard, even walking into an overgrown area at the end of my lettuce bed. I turned her around or I’d have had a difficult time getting her, and she walked back to the gate and eventually back to the basement door and we went back in the house. Perhaps she was actually looking for the way back into the house, and perhaps she was looking for something else; my intuition tells me it was the latter. It may be the “outdoor remedy” that has helped to heal and comfort many other of my cats—simply being outside livens their senses and brings back their emotional immune system.

If Peaches is anything, she is definite in her decisions. There is no equivocation that she does or doesn’t like something, or does or doesn’t do something. She lost her person, she came here, and she accepted the new home as her own and me as her person. I don’t even remember a questioning sniff or expression.

Her health condition has been the same. She goes day to day then suddenly she’s in kidney failure, or she had no need for fluids and suddenly she’s dehydrated, or she’s been “going” fine then she’s constipated. I’m pretty perceptive, having been trained by the lives and losses of many other cats, but Peaches gives no warning, compensating as cats do until they can’t.

And even without renal failure and other conditions, I can’t avoid the fact of her age and that sometime soon we would have to part. As I’ve learned before, I’m not afraid of losing her, only of not listening, seeing, hearing what I need to in these last days, weeks or months, and of not honoring her needs and doing my part for her in her transition.

Right now she’s actually sleeping comfortably on my desk and I can be happy with that. Giuseppe, her protector, carefully curled himself behind her.

And I need to move the injured fledgling robin to a safer place. It was nestled in the grass while Peaches and I were walking and held completely still as we approached, but I could tell it needed assistance. Sometimes an injured animal is part of the process or a sign. I’ll see if I can do this right.