Posts Tagged ‘Sad Goodbyes’

  1. Goodnight, Callie Mae

    February 3, 2010 by ChiaLynn

    Doc and Callie Mae - Rest in Peace, Sweet Dogs

    Callie Mae Meads was my mom’s Catahoula. She was a marvelous dog – brave and silly and clever and kind. She got my nephew over his fear of dogs, and when my mother broke her ankle, Callie Mae was there to take care of her. She kept my step-grandmother company in the last years of her life, too.

    Big dogs, as anyone who’s ever had one knows, just don’t live as long as smaller animals. But Callie was bucking the trend. She blew out a knee a few years back, and she’d gained quite a bit of weight, with the reduced mobility. When NovySan and I went to Wyoming last Thanksgiving, though, she’d slimmed down, and she came bounding across Mom’s lawn to greet us. I hadn’t seen her move like that in years.

    It didn’t last long, though. In the past few weeks, she’d stopped eating, and then she stopped drinking, too. Today, Mom fed her a last few spoonfuls of whipped cream, and my stepfather, Sam, took her to the vet for the final time. The vet said she was in pretty good shape for a 94-year-old lady, but her organs were shutting down, and it was time.

    I’ll miss you, Callie Mae.

    Category Family | Tags: ,, | 2 Comments

  2. Yet another goodbye

    June 4, 2009 by ChiaLynn

    This is my very last picture of Schokie. There were two more, and I think one was better than this – you could see our eyes, at least – but somehow this was the only one that stuck. The other two just vanished.

    My ex-husband and I found Schokie at the Animal Shelter – more often called the Pound – in Laramie, not long after we moved in together. We’d gone to look for our roommate’s cat, who’d gone walkabout while she was out of town. We didn’t find him, but while we standing in front of the row of cages, this tiny, obnoxious brown kitten climbed the wire door, snagged her claws in Mark’s pantleg, and screamed at us until we took her home.

    She was always pushy. She’d wedge herself between us and shriek when Mark tried to kiss me. The first time she ever met a pizza, she landed in the middle of it, sank her claws into the molten cheese, and hissed when we tried to remove her from it. The first night after I brought Thryym home, she chased him around the apartment and tried to bite his balls off. But all that aside, she was affectionate, she was smart, and she always knew exactly who she was and what she wanted.

    That changed a few years ago. “You’re getting senile,” I’ll tell her, when I found her staring at a wall, or watched her sit down suddenly in the middle of a room, lift a leg to scratch herself, and then freeze, with no idea what she’d intended to do next.

    Last year, she went blind. High blood pressure, due to high thyroid and kidney failure, had detached her retinas. They give cats human drugs for those things; there are no veterinary drugs for them yet. A week later, she could see again, and the vet was amazed. (She even mentioned it today: “I was so proud of her,” she said, “for coming back from everything like she did.”) She had a urinary tract infection, which we got cleared up, and then she had another, and another. She weighed less than half as much as she did in her prime, and she got crankier, and scrawnier, and more and more vacant. Getting enough food into her was a struggle, and she rapidly rejected every new flavor.

    This past weekend, while NovySan and I were at Maker Faire, she hardly ate at all. Or rather, she hardly ate her own food. She was, instead, determined to eat her despised neighbor’s food – Spooky, our housemate’s cat, gets Friskies, and Friskies, for whatever reason, are ever so much better than the Evo that she loved when I first got it for her. She lost weight, and when we came home, she’d hardly get off the bathroom counter. Her abdomen was distended, and under the fur and the dust (she loved to sleep in the bougainvillea litter outside) I could feel a hardening lump where I imagined her liver ought to be.

    I wondered whether to take her to the vet. “How much more can we do to you?” I asked her. But she was miserable, I could see it. So, today, I took her in.

    It was, as I thought, her liver that I could feel. That, and a mass in her abdomen that wasn’t there three weeks ago. She’d had lab tests that recently, with no sign of liver failure – just the anemia we’d been battling for months. It might have been lymphoma – that moves very quickly.

    “We could do a lot of tests,” the vet said, “and do chemo.”

    “She’s 18 years old,” I said, “and I don’t want to do that to her.”

    I took her to a room with a soft couch and low lighting, and the vet clipped a sign to the door that said, “Euthanasia in progress. Please be considerate.” I spread a towel across my lap and held her. There was a purple bandage around her left right front paw, to hold the catheter in her vein. She went limp before the last of the solution entered her body. A moment later, I felt her heart beat against my fingertips for the very last time.

    I don’t have any pictures of Schokie as a kitten, but on my way out with my empty cat carrier, I saw this little creature, who looked so much like her that when I went back to the photos I’d taken this afternoon, I wondered for a moment how a picture of that obnoxious little furball Mark and I brought home from the Pound had made it onto my phone.

    She wasn’t my first cat, and she’s not the first I’ve lost. But she’s the first one I had for so long, and it’s the first time I’ve lost an animal without another one waiting at home. I’ve cleaned out her catbox already, and thrown out her medication, but NovySan just told me we should keep her bowls, and I will. They’ll be there whenever we need them.

    Category Random Babbling | Tags: ,,, | 19 Comments

  3. Stories about a friend I hardly knew

    May 21, 2009 by ChiaLynn

    Have you ever had to write one of the those blog posts that had to be written before you could write anything else, only it was so hard to write that you put off writing it for weeks and weeks and didn’t get anything else written, either? Yeah, this is one of those posts.

    On April 16, near the end of the work day, NovySan told me that Frank A. Lauro was dead. Frank was Novy’s best friend in high school. They drifted apart in college, as friends sometimes do, but they’d been back in touch recently. The words didn’t make sense to me – less sense, even, than John’s call to tell me that Shawn was dead.

    At Frank’s wake, on the 21st, a lot of people got up to tell stories. Frank’s family… his friends… his coworkers… And when NovySan got up to tell his stories (and out himself as the person one of Frank’s favorite stories was about), he said that Frank, more than anything, was a storyteller, and he asked everyone to keep their stories about Frank alive. Tell them to other people. Pass them around. Make sure that Frank isn’t forgotten.

    I don’t have a lot of Frank stories. I only met him a few times – I doubt I spent a total of 10 hours in his presence. But he was a part of NovySan, and that makes him a part of me. I thought of him as a friend, and I always thought there’d be time enough to know him.

    If Shawn’s death taught me anything, it should have been that there’s never enough time.

    On the 17th, though, as NovySan was finalizing plans for our trip to Chicago for Frank’s wake, and I was sitting at this very table, trying to wrap up as much work as I could before we went, staring at a computer screen blurred through the tears (just as it is now), I did what I do when I feel frustrated and helpless – I went chasing stories.

    There are a lot of stories about Frank online. The first one I found, courtesy of Comic Book Resources, might have been the most important. Several years ago, another member of a comic book forum to which Frank belonged died suddenly (and, like Frank, far too young). Frank, who lived near the funeral home, offered to take the board’s condolences to the family. Afterward, he submitted a full report. I won’t quote from it here, because the situation led to Frank being banned from the board in question (and I really have no desire to involve myself in whatever politics led to that decision), but if you follow the links, you’ll get a good sense not only of the controversy, but also of who Frank was.

    That article at Comic Book Resources also led me to Imwan, which was Frank joined on Christmas Day 2006, and which became his undisputed online home. Imwan is where I found not only stories about Frank, but also stories by Frank. In The Writers’ Block, I found a story he’d written in grad school. I’d known Frank was a writer, but it was the first time I’d been able read something he’d written. And it’s good. It’s damned good. The formatting is important, as Frank noted. “It works perfectly in Word,” he said. It works perfectly in OpenOffice Writer, too – and I hope his family doesn’t mind, but I’ve uploaded a PDF version to prove it.

    It’s been more than a month, and it still doesn’t make sense to me that Frank is dead. I’m grateful, though, that so much of him still lives online. His last post on Imwan, dated April 13, was a single word – Graphology. As last words go, that one’s not bad.

    Category Friends | Tags: , | 3 Comments

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