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Perhaps the Storm is Finally Over, 2013

cat in spot of sun
Namir, from 2008

Hurricane Katrina, Namir, a household of cats and realizing a lot about love after multiple losses.

I originally posted this article on August 30, 2009, and each year since I’ve posted it on the Sunday nearest that date which, this year, is September 1. It contains a lesson I learned about living with, caring for and losing pets that is so important I want to be certain I renew it each year with myself, with current readers and to reach new readers, and it’s also a personal anniversary with what I do here on The Creative Cat.

Originally written two months after I lost Namir, his passing represented what seemed like the end of a long cycle of loss that led me to understand the continuum of love all throughout our lives. Though very few people who visit The Creative Cat knew of Namir when he was alive, he was the inspiration for The Creative Cat in January 2009, and he’s right up there in the header in a oil pastel painting entitled “Warm Winter Sun”. I hoped to encourage myself to write more with this blog because I had amassed more knowledge than I could remember in treating him for the disease that eventually stopped his heart, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy or HCM, and hoped to both share and learn from others not only Namir’s care but also the care and treatment of all the other cats I’ve lived with through the years, and along the way I’d share my portraits as they progressed and a few photos now and then.

Namir’s passing helped me realize a long-time dream of designing my set of animal sympathy cards. Most of the ones I received for him and all those before him were not animal-specific and a few senders actually apologized for them in advance. I had determined years before that I would design animal-oriented sympathy cards but, probably with losing a large number of cats over a period of time, I hadn’t gotten to it yet. After my initial wave of grief eased, I decided to use the quiet time of summer in the two months after Namir died to undertake this labor of love in dedication to him and all he’d inspired. I visualized the style, wrote out a list of sentiments that were my most heartfelt yet brief and general enough to be used by others, and spent time looking through all my photos, print and digital, to find the ones I wanted to use and designed, one after the next, one dozen cards, while I was still deep in the grief of losing this remarkable cat. I am constantly complimented on the sentiments and appropriateness of these cards, used by individuals and animal clinics alike.They came right from my heart.

That’s an awful lot for one cat to inspire, but Namir was like that.

And in 2009 as the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approached once again I remembered that fearful night of pacing in the emergency hospital as I watched Hurricane Katrina come toward landfall. In designing the cards I had just spent nearly two months both experiencing grief and studying it in all its aspects to design the sympathy cards and remembering that night and all that had happened since. And while I had been posting articles to The Creative Cat once in a while for a few months prior to this article trying to get the feel of blogging, it wasn’t until I wrote this essay in the memory of Namir that I began writing in earnest and developing The Creative Cat into what it is today.

Wrapped up with the coming of Hurricane Katrina so far away as both reality and metaphor, every year at this time I remember him and all the cats in my household who touched his life as part of the continuum of love in my life.

. . . . . . .

I remember the night Hurricane Katrina was headed toward New Orleans, partly scoffing at the hyperactive media reports and partly worried that the storm of the century really was heading for the Gulf Coast and knowing that, if it did, many people, most people, would not take it seriously. For all the dire warnings, natural disasters rarely fulfill their potential so it’s easy to sit back and wait for a while, much easier to stay in the place where you feel the most safe and guard the things you hold most dear; just stay home. At the beginning, we can never know the final impact of the event, or what the disaster will encompass.

And sometimes a public event marks a time or a circumstance in your life, in fact stands as a metaphor for your circumstances, even though it has no connection with you or your life at all;  yet, whenever you encounter a remembrance of that event, it brings back that time in your life as if it was a slideshow playing for your review.

I don’t have a television. I heard about the storm on the radio and read about it on the internet, then visited The Weather Channel to actually look at the meteorology of it. I would naturally avoid all the hype of 24-hour news stations making a story out of possibly nothing in the slow news flow of late August. The only reason I saw any television coverage was because it was on in the waiting room of the animal emergency hospital where I was waiting for the diagnosis of Namir’s sudden, frightening condition. I paced all night long between visits from the attending veterinarian as they x-rayed, blood tested and medicated Namir, then placed him in an oxygen cage. The veterinarian’s face was blank to grim, though no final word was given until nearly dawn.

I’d noticed that Namir wasn’t his goofy self for a few days, just subdued, then on that day he had begun crouching on the floor instead of sitting on my lap or my desk. I noticed his breathing was shallow, he wouldn’t eat dinner. He had had a compromising bladder condition for several years so I always observed his activity and took action with whatever seemed appropriate, but these symptoms were not indicating that condition. I had talked to my veterinarian and we’d decided if his condition didn’t change I’d take him to the emergency hospital. He looked up at me imploringly in the evening, those lovely, slanted, gentle tourmaline eyes telling me this was serious. I called the emergency hospital, packed him in a carrier and drove with cold, stiff fingers and my own shallow breathing, knowing this was not good.

As the veterinarian and technicians went through their paces and I watched Katrina spin toward New Orleans, I was sure, in my middle-of-the-night fearfulness, that the world was really coming to an end. I took hope for both New Orleans and Namir when the storm was reduced to a Category 4 sometime in those hours; even the smallest improvement could have a vast positive outcome.

Yet as the dawn began to open details in the black outside the windows the veterinarian told me that Namir had developed congestive heart failure through hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. I fully understood the detailed explanation the vet gave me, following his sketches and descriptions in my own visual language, visualizing Namir’s damaged heart inside his delicate feline chest, struggling to move the blood through but not quite moving all of it every time, the blood circling and swishing around in the chamber, the walls thickening, the fluids building up instead of washing away. I understood that Namir was in very serious condition, that the condition could not be cured.

The hospital closed at 7:00 a.m. being only for overnight emergencies, but in the same rooms the specialty clinic opened at 8:00 a.m. Namir would stay there and see a doctor who specialized in his condition the next day, have more comprehensive diagnostic tests done.

They allowed me to say goodbye to him in the oxygen cage. I couldn’t touch him, and he didn’t come to the window but crouched close to it with an IV in one leg and several shaved patches and looked at me with those same eyes, but instead of the worry, near panic, I’d seen earlier, I saw hope, and perhaps he saw the sadness and fear in my eyes temper with it. We would work together on this, no matter what happened.

Katrina was reaching landfall as I drove home through the growing dawn and early morning traffic and I equated the gray misty light with the howling gray images I’d seen of New Orleans and elsewhere along the coast, pondering the veterinarian’s prognosis of Namir’s recovery: about a month with no treatment, six months with medication and careful observation, perhaps a year if we were lucky. Even with recovery his quality of life might not be optimal, he might actually experience a lot of discomfort and even great pain. I would know more the next day after an ultrasound and other tests.

At that time in August 2005, I was occasionally dosing Stanley with sub-q fluids for chronic kidney failure, but he was overall well—amazing for being somewhere past 20. All the others were fine, Moses at 19, Sophie at 16, Cookie at 13, Kelly at 11 as was Namir, and even the two new senior fosters, Peaches and Cream, estimated at 15, were adjusting well.

Namir’s loss was the metaphorical storm I was waiting to make landfall, but where I thought I’d be losing Namir first, in the following year, 2006, I would lose four members of my household, my four oldest cats, and three of them my oldest friends, Moses, then Cream, then Sophie and finally Stanley; shortly after Stanley I’d lose the kitten I’d taken in and simply adored after all that loss, Lucy, at 15 months. It turned out to be a much bigger storm than I had ever considered it could be.

And Namir lived almost four years with his condition, and hardly evidenced any discomfort though he hated his twice-daily medications and needed to stop back at the emergency hospital for a tune-up now and then when he slipped into congestive heart failure. I don’t know how many times in those four years I said, “Namir was first diagnosed with congestive heart failure the night Katrina hit New Orleans…” Namir and I certainly had a better outcome and what we experienced in no way compares with what happened there, but whenever I hear about Hurricane Katrina I remember that night when my own storm began, my own little life inexorably pulled apart by circumstances beyond my household’s control, but in much the same way as the aftermath of Katrina it was the hidden reserves of strength that determined the final outcome, individuals pooling and sharing their strength and supporting each other.

I heeded my own natural disaster warnings as best I could with the information I was given and we’ve reached the other side. Within the next 22 months I would lose Moses, Cream, Sophie, Stanley and my kitten, Lucy, at 15 months. Now I hope that my storm is finally over for a while. I know that I will have losses again, and with older cats likely I’ll have a few illnesses to treat. Even though Peaches hasn’t seemed to age a day since she came here and can still jump right up onto the kitchen island where she eats, she is 19 years old. Cookie hasn’t seemed to age since she was about 3, but I can see her slowing down and experiencing a little hearing difficulty, though we act as if we don’t notice. Little Kelly, who has to be at least 15, hasn’t shown any diminishing of ability and it’s hard to imagine her as a senior. My “Golden Girls” as I classify them…And I now have a big jump in age to Mimi, who is likely 6, then her kids, who just turned 2, though as I learned with Lucy and FIP that illness and death have no recognition of age.

After all this I was surprised I haven’t been in pain over Namir’s loss, considering the big personality he was and how close we were. He left strict instructions with “the kids” on my care and feeding and the greeting of guests, however, and I have never felt alone since Namir’s been gone—I’ll be writing more about this later, now that I have a perspective. But it hasn’t been just Namir’s loss, but all the others, too, all of them together, through it all knowing that I’d lose Namir, too, and finally I feel that process is complete.

The one thing I can’t avoid is that in two months I haven’t done much that’s creative—no blog entries, no new poetry, I’ve had to drag myself into my studio and still I’ve only done one piece of artwork, only a few photo sessions and all the other things I’ve done daily for years to keep my creative intellect in shape have just been neglected.

I know why that is. That’s the very core of myself, and in opening myself up to those creative experiences I leave myself vulnerable to hurt. It’s easy just to live on the surface as if floating on clear water, able to look at the beauty of the depths but frightened to go there, even though the risk, the plunge, the exploration and the return with new insights to share far outweighs any pain that might be experienced in the endeavor. So I dove deeply into it and designed a set of a dozen animal sympathy cards to capture those insights and offer them to others to use to recognize and share the losses of others.

Now that the deepest part of my grief has passed, I’m ready to finish and fulfill the things I’ve planned, and to move on with new things. The hardest part of grief is letting go and feeling that who and what you leave behind will be forgotten, but we leave behind and let go in a million ways every day without ever knowing. Namir came to me with Kelly one year after I lost the love of my life, my Kublai, and if I had kept myself closed off and held on to Kublai’s memory for fear of his being forgotten, I would never have known Namir and Kelly which would have done none of us any good, or any other of the foster cats who became loves, or the people or the places I’ve known and experienced since then.

So I’m a little out of shape, but it’s never taken me too long to get back into it before. I love this time of year, and probably most inspired by it, when summer changes to autumn and I can feel the pace of life slowing a little, the pathos of the passing of frutifulness, but welcoming the harvest, and a rest.

And I have a wonderful feline portrait with which to begin my new season. I’ll post the first update in a day or two and update the images and other thoughts regularly.

. . . . . . .

That portrait was Madison, and I had a wonderful reunion with an old friend with which to begin that new season.

And since losing Namir I marked the passing of Peaches in 2010, and also both Cookie and Kelly in 2012 seeing the passing of not only my tortie girls but with them an era in my life in which they played an important role, the decade when I prepared to do what I’m doing today, working at home as an artist and writer. But as I learned in letting Namir and Kelly into my life after the devastating loss of Kublai and two weeks later, Allegro, allowing another feline love into my heart honors their memory and in no way diminishes their life or their love, and I know they smile on me. And I know they welcomed Lakota as he transitioned to spirit.

. . . . . . .

You can read more about my sympathy cards and see all the designs on my regular website, and you can also find the original set of a dozen sympathy cards in my Etsy shop. With the addition of Lakota’s card I’m going to organize different sets and take the time to list them each individually.


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All images used on this site are copyrighted to Bernadette E. Kazmarski unless otherwise noted and may not be used without my written permission. Please ask if you are interested in using one in a print or internet publication. If you are interested in purchasing a print of this image or a product including this image, check my Etsy shop or Fine Art America profile to see if I have it available already. If you don’t find it there, visit Ordering Custom Artwork for more information on a custom greeting card, print or other item.


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Bernadette

From health and welfare to rescue and adoption stories, advocacy and art, factual articles and fictional stories, "The Creative Cat" offers both visual and verbal education and entertainment about cats for people who love cats, pets and animals of all species.

9 thoughts on “Perhaps the Storm is Finally Over, 2013

  • Pingback: The Creative Cat - Animal Sympathy Cards

  • As you so often do, you touched me tonight with your words. I see now that you are right. I am reluctant to open my creative self for fear of all the hurt it will bring. I’ve closed myself off and am still living in July, back in a time when Mewdy Blue still traveled this earth. I still feel his fur in my hand, his body draped trustingly across mine in bed, his warm paw grasping my finger to claim my heart. Yes, he’s still here and it is still July.

    Reply
    • Andrea, I fully understand that, and even as you hold onto that bit of July, another part of you is coming to accept your loss. It’s how I know I’m finally “coming to”, I recognize things I’ve been doing to hold on and even mention them to others, and slowly my grip will ease and I come to accept. Mewdy Blue went deep into your heart, and this will take some time to fill with love and memories.

      Reply
  • maru clavier

    Beautiful in somany ways… there are different kind of storms, it is good to feel the learning when they are over.

    Reply
    • Maru, I guess that’s what makes us stronger, weathering all those storms.

      Reply
  • Bernadette I love reading your words. So eloquent you capture so many of my own feelings, and perhaps echo some of the same voice I had when I experienced rushing my beloved Abby to the ER with congestive heart failure. Not knowing that was what she had at the moment, nor knowing her little heart was so ravaged by HCM caused by the undiagnosed Hyper-T. I didn’t have the backdrop of Katrina but I had a monster storm brewing inside my world. Little did I know it would wash over me and bring me down just two weeks later. It’s only been 20 days since my soul kitty left this earth and my grief and disbelief is still so strong. One day I will find some balance but for now I find I am struggling to keep my head above the rising waters. I just miss her. Most of all.

    Reply
    • Angel Abby, when you visited here just after you lost Abby and saw her butterfly, I immediately thought of Namir, and when I posted this today I thought of you. I’m so sorry Abby didn’t have the chance at more time that Namir had, though that was fraught with daily worry and regular trips to the emergency clinic as well as the knowledge he could have a heart attack or throw a blood clot at any moment. Still, even with that fear, having them with us far outweighs any of our fears. The suddenness of Abby’s illness and passing really are like a big wave that builds as you realize the enormity of what you two are confronting and the few possible consequences. The deep grief really is as if you’re cast into an endless ocean and it would be so easy just to stop struggling. As each day passes, instead of feeling as if you are moving away from her, I hope you find a sweet memory and a moment of solace that make you feel closer to her. It’s very, very sweet that you added the “angel” to her name, because that’s what she is and will always be.

      Reply
  • Thanks for sharing Bernadette. It’s hard watching and waiting for the inevitable – even harder with the other losses happening in the same time period. I think someone decided you needed a break and sent you Mimi and the kids knowing that they would be with you for a very long time.

    Reply
    • Vicki, you echo my thoughts and words about the treasures the five of hem are to me. I needed a lot of healing and they have been more than up to the task. I am such a lucky human.

      Reply

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