Goodbye, Charlotte (2009-2016)

By David McElroy · August 18, 2016

I lost my friend Charlotte Thursday evening. She was only 7 years old.

When a young feral cat gave birth to four tiny kittens seven years ago, Charlotte looked different from the beginning. It was hard to decide what color to call her. But however you described her, one thing was clear. Among the four little sisters, she was the alpha girl.

Charlotte was tiny but she was fearless. When the other cats would run or hide from unfamiliar things, she would stand her ground, typically looking on with a bored indifference that seemed to be her way of indicating lack of fear. Her only real enemy was the vacuum cleaner.

Before we knew she was a girl, an ex-girlfriend decided this kitten’s facial markings made the eyebrows look like those of a Vulcan from Star Trek, so she was initially known as Mr. Spock.

One of her sisters died very early. In the picture at the bottom of this article, they were about 6 weeks old. The gray one which was second from the left in that photo died shortly after the picture was taken. There was never any warning and I never knew the reason. The vet said it sometimes happens that there is something genetic wrong and it just catches up with them shortly after birth.

The remaining three girls seemed to love books — mostly for sleeping — so they were named for the writing Brontë sisters. As the alpha, the former Mr. Spock became Charlotte, the oldest Brontë sister. The gray one on the right in the photo was named Emily. The black one became Anne.

Charlotte was a beautiful girl — with amazing green eyes and a unique golden-colored coat of fur — but her incredible confidence made her seem much bigger than the 4.5 pounds of her body. (She and her sisters were all tiny, just like their mother Molly.)

Emily died last year. She had always had a slightly lower weight than her two surviving sisters, but she started losing weight and continued to do so. The vet couldn’t identify the problem. She was tested for feline leukemia, parasites and all sorts of other possibilities, but the tests didn’t tell us anything.

Emily ate well while she was losing weight, but there was something in her body that stopped her from absorbing enough nutrients. The vet said it was as though her body was slowly losing the ability to convert her food to usable fuel. And during the eight months or so that she was going downhill, she had persistent diarrhea. She died in my arms 17 months ago.

Close to a year ago, Charlotte started to have the same persistent diarrhea. It was my first clue that there was something seriously wrong and I immediately remembered what Emily had gone through. The vet could find nothing specific wrong with her, either. The pattern was just like Emily’s.

Although I had used steroid pills with Emily in an attempt to lengthen her life, they didn’t seem to help and it was a constant struggle to get a pill into her each morning and evening. Charlotte was even more resistant to pills and I decided I wasn’t going to put her through something so upsetting twice a day if it wasn’t going to save her anyway.

Even though she’s acted healthy and normal for the most part, I knew Charlotte had been going downhill for months. She slowly lost body weight. She was still strong. She still ate well. She was still confident — some might say arrogant — but she couldn’t keep on any weight.

Last week, I could tell that her condition had taken a turn for the worse. She didn’t look quite like herself and she had reached the point of feeling like skin and bones. I knew I didn’t have much time left with her.

How do you say goodbye to an animal you love? Do they have any understanding of what’s happening to them? Or that you even care about them? Logically, I assume not, but emotionally, I somehow believe otherwise. Thursday evening, I told her I love her and I thanked her for sharing seven years with me.

I moved her to my bed, which was her favorite place to sleep. And then before I knew it, the last bit of life left her little body. Her shallow breathing ceased and she started turning cold. I kissed her head but she was gone. I had lost her.

Charlotte was special. I’m going to miss her very much.

Share on Social Networks

I have changed radically about some things over the years, but probably none of those changes have been as great as the ways that I feel about people who are viewed as evil or criminal. When I was young, I was eager to see criminals or foreign political enemies killed. Today, I don’t view such people though rose-colored glasses and I don’t view them as blameless folks who are going to turn their lives around if we just think happy thoughts. But I can’t celebrate the death of anybody, even if he might deserve it in some ways of thinking about it. Even if it’s sometimes necessary to kill someone — and those cases are often debatable — I regret the death of someone who will now never have a chance to discover love and change his life. There are some evil people in this world, but I can’t celebrate their deaths.

There was a time when I was idealistic enough to believe that if a writer expressed his thoughts clearly and simply enough, any bright and honest person would understand his point. I know better now. We all bring so many unconscious assumptions to the things we read that we often see what we expect to see instead of what the writer intended. This is incredibly frustrating to me as a writer, but I’m trying more and more to just say what I need to say — as clearly as I know how — and then ignore the inevitable responses which show that others perceived something which was not intended. I have to write for those who “get” where I’m coming from, not for those who see my words through personal filters that change my meaning. I hope my intentions are clear to you and I hope what I write can be useful to you, but if not, maybe my work just isn’t right for you. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I found out this evening that someone I casually knew killed himself last Wednesday. I didn’t know him well — and I never found him personable — but he had started work a couple of months ago at a restaurant where I go. He was a 26-year-old who struck me as a confused and unhappy person, but I didn’t think much about it since he stayed to himself and resisted my efforts to chat with him. It turns out that he had a history of depression and had a lot of gender confusion. He seemed very androgynous to me and I learned today that he presented himself as female in some situations. He was rejected by a romantic interest last week, so he went to the woods and killed himself. His body wasn’t found for three days. It’s tragic how miserable people around us can be and how we so rarely know the truth about things they struggle with.

I’ve been with people for most of this day, but I feel lonely tonight. I’ve had things on my mind for the last few days that I feel the strong need to talk about. I need someone to share my thoughts with — someone who’s interested in ideas and how they affect us. Someone who gets excited to discover new things and can find joy in seeing new ways those things might change our lives. I feel lonely tonight because I painfully remember what it feels like to have that — and I’m craving that sort of connection. I miss having someone I can call and say, “I’ve been reading something and it’s sparked some thoughts I want to share with you.” Those sorts of conversations have lasted for hours for me in the past — or for thousands of words if it’s an exchange of mail — and it feels wrong that there is nobody who wants to hear such things from me tonight. I used to think being lonely was about being alone, but I understand now it’s a longing for one particular person. The loneliest place to be when you need one person is in a crowd composed of people who cannot be who you need.

I don’t agree with everything the late Neil Postman wrote, but I would argue that no other recent scholar gives coherent structure to the last few hundred years in the way his books do. I’m currently re-reading his book, “Technopoly,” and I’m comforted to have a scholar give structure and definitions to things which I’ve observed and barely understood. I was enough of a technophile when I first read this book that I bristled at much of what it said. I didn’t want him to be right and it was easier to dismiss him as a Luddite. But as I see technology continue to enable an information glut which is changing society for the worse, I find comfort in his explanations for how we got here. I don’t yet know the solutions, but I finally understand the problems more clearly. I suspect that much of what we need to make life more meaningful can be found in things we accidentally threw away in the past to make room for technologies. I strongly urge you to read the book and think about its implications.

Related Posts