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.

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In the coming months and years, we’re going to need inventive and productive people pursuing things that matter. We’re going to need smart and self-directed men and women who will find ideas and create enterprises that will help bypass the political class and build a new and better society. But everything I see in media right now seems geared toward telling people how to entertain and amuse themselves. The stories are full of advice about what to binge on Netflix and what games you should be playing while you’re stuck at home. We desperately need to ignore this advice and be looking toward building new futures instead. Being passive consumers got us where we are today. It’s time that we reclaim our former role — the one that made this country wealthy — as productive and free people who build far more than we consume. This could be a great opportunity for those who will take it. Turn off Netflix. Put down the video game controller. We need new ideas, new achievements, new goals — not more coach potatoes. This is the time to be thinking and creating and planning for the future that you and I both want.

The better I know myself, the more I realize that my core fault — and the source of many other failings in me — is that of believing on a deep level that everyone and everything in my world must be perfect, especially me. If I had seen any of this in myself as recently as 10 years ago, I would have dismissed it as a small failing that showed up only every now and then, but I now see it as the wellspring from which my other sins are born. It’s such an insidious belief — and one that can look on the surface like a reasonable desire to be good and right — that it’s hard to acknowledge it as the inner cancer it is. But until I understood this, it was always going to be impossible for me to get over my deep shame about my imperfection or to accept the love of another person, because she is bound to be flawed, too.

If it’s not yet spring where you are, you can at least enjoy 60 seconds of spring in the South with me. This was just outside my office late Thursday afternoon. Don’t you need a relaxing break today? See it on YouTube by clicking here.

It pays to be nice to the employees at Walmart — and everywhere else, for that matter. I was just in Walmart to buy some kitty litter when one of the employees called me over with a conspiratorial tone: “Hey, David, do you need some toilet paper?” she almost whispered. She had found a giant package hidden somewhere and she said she had been saving it for someone she really liked. So I’m the proud new owner of 24 additional mega rolls of toilet paper, which are worth something like $748 on the black market. On a more serious note, be good to people when you have a chance, as this employee was for me. And remember that people remember the way you treat them. I wouldn’t have treated this woman and her co-workers a bit differently in the past if I’d known she would someday do me this small favor, but there are benefits to treating people well, even if that’s not your purpose. Be good to each other.

My neighbor Cora — a retired teacher — called me while I was driving to the office earlier today to remind me that she wants to take me out to dinner sometime. We’ve talked about going out together, but we’ve never gotten around to coordinating a time. As she was about to get off the phone, she said, “I love you. You’re such a good neighbor!” And I told her that I loved her, too. I wonder how upset the racists of the unquestioned Jim Crow world — only about six decades ago — would have been that a white man and his elderly black neighbor care abut each other in such a way. There’s still a lot wrong with racial attitudes in the world today, but small things such as this remind me that we’ve come a long way.

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