This past Sunday my sweet cat Lady passed away. We think she was 16 or 17 years old. Maybe older.
My daughter named her Lady after she watched the movie Lady and the Tramp. I could not convince her that Lady was a dog's name, but sometimes there's no convincing a 5-year old of something that makes sense to them. I rarely called her Lady. Sometimes I called her Stinky Pete, Stinky Petersburg, Shue Shue, My Love, Lover Lover, but she always called me Momma (or at least I imagined she did). She never really liked Stinky Pete. She told me not to call her that because that was a dog name (I used to call Whiskers the Dog "Stinky Pete" sometimes. Yes, Whiskers. That's what happens when a 4 year old names the family pet).
In this picture she was "helping" me sort through some fabric scraps. She often "helped" me with folding the laundry too. She enjoyed "helping" me when I would lay out a new quilt top on the floor, she would sit right in the middle of it. I guess she wanted me to see what it would look like on the bed, since she was always asleep on my bed!
She was quite the character, especially when she was very young. After my daughter would leave for school, she would go into her bedroom and pull off the bed covers, pull off the pillow (sometimes drag it down the hallway), pull out all her dirty clothes in the hamper and drag them out, and she would go through my daughter's drawers and pull out her jewelry. I told Eleanor that Lady acted exactly like a little sister, going though drawers, making a mess in her big sister's room, stealing her stuff.
She was a cat that could only love two people at one time. When we first brought her home, she loved my daughter and me, and when Eleanor moved out, she learned to love John, but I was the constant in her life.
She died peacefully, in her favorite place, on my bed in the sunshine. The night before she finished all her food, after she ate she hopped up on the bed and slept between us, as always. When I woke up, she was asleep in the crook of my folded arm. She acted normal in the morning, begged me to pick her up and hold her like a baby while I sat at the computer and she purred, which was our daily routine. Then it was time for John and I to leave for the morning. When we came back a few hours later, she was gone.
We found a box to fit her, while John was digging the hole, I wrapped her in the blanket I made for her, and set her in the box. I didn't close the lid of the box. I left it on the bed, and when John brought the box out and set it in the hole, he had tears rolling down his cheeks.
Lady the the Cat was my BFF, Best Furry Friend.
We think we are done with pets. It's just too hard to say goodbye.
