Life lessons from a case of unwanted food

I came home Tuesday around noon after holding Ginger as she took her last breath at the vet’s office, hollow-eyed from grief and disbelief that two days earlier she was purring happily on my lap. The first thing I saw in the garage was a case of her special food I’d bought only days earlier – so unexpected her was sudden downturn. And I felt that surge of anger and bitterness that can only come with a grief pity-party. What is the point of all this work I do? Why does it feel like a bottomless pit? How could I not have known that Ginger’s time was ending?  

That Monday morning she would not come upstairs to the kitchen for breakfast – unheard-of for this extreme chowhound. When she did finally come up, she paused at the top of the stairs, breathing hard and open-mouthed. Alarmed, I took a video and sent it to her vet, who said her lung cancer has grown large enough to compromise her lungs, and I should consider bringing her in sooner than later, to spare her the agony of suffocating.

Even with that dire admonishment, and jolted into realizing this seemingly immortal cat was finally dying, it took me until the next day to bring myself to take her on her final, fateful trip. I managed to take a few photos of my darling girl and I on our last morning together. And then it was time for the honor of seeing Ginger on her way to the next realm.

I’ve been escorting her on that journey for five years – since she showed up in the parking lot, homeless and dreadfully sick, and was soon diagnosed with mouth cancer and given only weeks to live. I made her comfortable, gave her good food and a soft bed to lay her head. And eventually, when she began to trust me, I gave her the love she had never had. When her cancer disappeared, no one could explain why – unless it was that love that had given her reason to stick around.

For the next four years she barnstormed her way into alpha status at my house, wreaking the kind of havoc that only a tortie cat can bring. She was all attitude and cranky stubbornness – the same qualities that no doubt kept her alive this long. When she began breathing harder last summer, and diagnosed with lung cancer, I was upset but also just assumed she would escape this latest assault by the grim reaper.

It was not to be so. And her downturn was so sudden that I barely had time to adjust to the idea of not seeing her on top of the couch anymore, and she was gone. And there I was, staring ruefully at a case of food that only Ginger liked, and none of my other cats would touch, wondering what the hell I would do with it – and wondering what it all meant.

As I left the house the next morning to go on my rounds, I realized it would be greatly appreciated by the feral on my rounds, who normally eat a much lower quality food. So I grabbed the case of food, and when I started dishing it out to the excited felines on my route, I got it. Because of Ginger I wanted to stop all this and close my heart back up; because of Ginger I need to keep opening it… every day. She is in them, and they are in her. What I learned from her is that nothing is impossible when love abides, and I need to keep passing that on.

Thank you, St. Francis, for the reminder.