Warning: This poem refers to the murder of a kitten and contains a brief description of a medically assisted euthanasia of a cat.
I got you a little over six years ago
As a replacement for Simon
A little stray kitty
Who was murdered
By I'll never know who
Only six weeks after I got him
I got you the very next day
You were this tiny bit of gray fluff
When I brought you home
You weren't a sweet cuddly kitten
You were distant
Wide-eyed looking for trouble
Sometimes you'd want affection
But when you got it
For some reason, you were threatened by it
Then you'd get aggressive
And bite and scratch me
I never played roughly with you
But you were still aggressive
I refused to play with you
When you got that way
When you were little
I'd told you that you were a good girl
I wanted you to know that you could be
I loved the color of your eyes
They were a beautiful shade of gold
You had the softest fur
Your belly was a checkerboard pattern
Of white, peach, and gray
You'd show it off trying to entice me
To touch you, and I wanted to
But I knew from experience
That you'd attack if I did
I can't blame you for all your problems
I am as equally to blame for them
I feel as though I failed you
I'm sorry I wasn't a better owner
I'm sorry I wasn't the alpha of our pack
But I didn't know I needed to be
You were the first cat I really owned
I thought all I had to do
Was to give you shelter, food, and water
Clean out your litter pan
And love you and play with you
And you'd be fine, but you weren't
You needed more
Since I wasn't the alpha
You decided that you had to be
You should not have had that role
It should have been mine
But I didn't know how to be
I can only imagine what an
Overwhelming task
That must have been for you
To feel as though you needed
To control everything
When there was no way for you to
In all honesty, I was afraid of you
Afraid of your anger
Afraid to even touch you
For fear of being bitten or clawed
So I just let you do what you wanted
I did love you
I wanted you to be happy
And I wanted to be happy, too
I met someone, and we moved in together
Unfortunately, she had two cats of her own
These past four years have been
Anything but happy ones for you
Or us, or the other two cats
You seemed to be angry all the time
And you had to share your territory
When for two years you had
The entire house to yourself
I'd hoped that the years
Would mellow you out
But they didn't
And I'd hoped that you would learn
The other cats were going to stay
And you'd learn to share
But you never did
I am so sorry for yesterday
Sorry that it all came down to that
I know you'll never understand
Why I had you put to sleep
I had to think of what was best
Not just for you, but the whole house
You'd terrorized the other cats so mercilessly
That one of them was a nervous wreck
And has been losing her fur
She looks like she has mange
I had to do something
I tried herbal pet calming drops
In your food, it had no effect
You just hated the taste of it
The vet suggested drugs
But couldn't guarantee that they'd work
And they might have made things worse
With the side effects
Then there'd be the trauma
Of giving you a pill twice a day
The vet also suggested therapy
Which was very expensive
And might not have worked either
Giving you away wasn't really an option either
I couldn't in good conscience
Give you to someone else
Knowing how aggressive you were
I tried the humane society
Thinking they worked with troubled animals
That they might be able to help you
And they just told us
To take you to the shelter
Where they already had 900 animals
We drove by the place
It reminded me of a concentration camp
And I saw you in a mass grave
There was no way I could leave you there
Where a cat like you would
Have no chance for adoption
So even though it broke my heart
And I absolutely hated to do it
I opted to have the vet put you to sleep
You may not have died
In the same terror as Simon
The vet gave you a shot
It was quick and painless
But I know you were still scared
And didn't understand what was happening
I didn't let you die alone
I stayed with you
And petted you all the while
Without fear for the first time
The house is much quieter now
Without your soft meow
Always begging for food
Or you messing with the gate
Or you scaring the other cats
Or starting fights
There will be no replacement for you
I will not get another kitten
I will feel the guilt and pain
I will grieve for your loss
Maybe now you'll be at peace
And know the calm that
You never knew in this life
I will always love you
My Lucy Blue
My squirrelly girl
My Venus flytrap
My big gray breast
1.12.05
Putting Megan to sleep was one of the hardest decisions I think I've ever had to make. It was also a decision that I put off making for as long as I possibly could.
Over the past five months, Megan's aggressive behavior towards the other cats had escalated. She particularly went after Akasha mercilessly. Megan chased her anytime she'd try to move from one room to another. There was no place this poor cat really felt safe. She couldn't even make it down the hallway to the office to use the litter pan without Megan chasing her, which caused her to start using any corner she could find. This only increased the tension in the house for everyone.
Then Akasha started losing the hair on her stomach. But we never saw her licking at it. When Kodi and I took all the cats to the vet for their shots around the end of November, we mentioned it to the vet. She gave us the technical term for it and said it was basically a high stress or anxiety reaction, which is what we figured it was.
We explained about Megan's behavior and that we were considering euthanasia. She suggested that we could try putting Megan on a prescription of Prozac to be taken twice a day. The medication would most likely have side effects (including anxiety), and it might not even help. It would also be expensive. She then suggested pet therapy. A three-hour session would have cost $130 dollars, but she couldn't guarantee that it would work either, and it would most likely need to be ongoing.
All of those suggestions were costly and would cause Megan a lot of anxiety, which didn't feel right at all. So, I came up with what I thought might be a temporary solution, one that we have used before whenever Kodi and I have gone on vacations in the past. We put up two baby gates, one on top of the other, at one end of the hallway. This separated Kodi's two cats (Akasha and Felix) from Megan. Megan had the front part of the house, while Felix and Akasha had the back.
Megan was a big cat. Well, she wasn't only big, she was also overweight and weighed in at nineteen pounds. And she never was one for jumping up on the kitchen cabinets. So, I thought if we just used one gate and left it up all the time that maybe Akasha would begin to feel safe and stop licking her fur off. It only worked to separate Megan and Akasha. But it didn't stop Megan from trying to torment her. Megan would make noises by clawing at the gate. This was annoying, not only to Akasha, but I couldn't sleep through the noise either. Then I had the idea of putting a sheet over the gate, but Megan would pull some of the sheet from the backside through the gate, still managing to make noise. I know Megan didn't like being kept out of the bedroom away for me at night. But I felt that Akasha needed a place to feel safe from being attacked by Megan.
Kodi and I lived with having to straddle the gate for six weeks. And even though Megan wasn't getting over the gate, the plan wasn't really working. Akasha was losing even more fur from the backs of both her hind legs, the fronts of her front legs, the end of her tail, and on her back at the base of her tail. Then came the night and morning of January 10th and 11th. That night, Megan learned how to jump over the gate, and she did so repeatedly. Kodi and I at different times that night picked Megan up and put her back on the other side of the gate. I know Megan only wanted to be near her human, but now Akasha would have no safety at all.
It was early that morning that I knew something had to be done, and it had to be done that day. I'd run out of time. I called into work and took the day off. And thus began one of the hardest days of my life. Then the next day at work, I was in an unbelievable amount of pain and wrote the above poem to try to lessen it a bit by trying to explain to Megan why I did what I did. It is my sincere hope that she does understand and forgives me.
Megan's death also brought up some unresolved issues I still had surrounding Simon's death. I got Megan from a pet store the day after he was murdered. So, I don't think I ever really dealt with his death. That may be why Megan's hit me so hard; I wasn't grieving for just one cat, I was grieving for the loss of two.
I wrote a poem for Simon a few weeks after his death. It was in an old notebook. I found the poem and have posted it along with a photo of Simon. The poem is called "In Loving Memory."
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