Goodbye, Dagny (2004-2019)

By David McElroy · July 17, 2019

I’ve known for months that I was slowly losing Dagny, but that doesn’t make her death any easier.

I had a bad feeling about her when I left for work today. When I went to check on her first thing this morning, she lifted her head and looked at me, but then she settled back into the same box where she had been sleeping with Merlin late last night — with her paw wrapped around her bigger brother. (See the photo below.) She showed no interest in getting up and moving to my bed, which is what we did every other morning.

I got home as soon as I could Wednesday evening and I felt a lump in my throat as I got out of the car, because I feared the worst. Moments later, I found her cold and still — seemingly relaxed in the same position, in the same box, where I left her earlier in the day.

She was a small cat, but she’s left a large hole in this family.

When I found her under a garbage dumpster 15 years ago, she was a feisty and tiny little ball of black fur. There was no fear in her. She wasn’t scared of me. She wasn’t scared of the other cats or dogs once I got her home.

She didn’t seem to fear anything.

She seemed to carry that same fearlessness with her all the way to the end. As she got weaker and more feeble over the past months, I never saw her back down or act afraid.

She was a 7-lb. cat who acted like a mini panther — and she had the heart of a lion.

It was her combination of confidence and sleek elegance that caused me to name her for Dagny Taggart, the railroad-operating heiress of “Atlas Shrugged.” Something about her — even as a kitten — reminded me of Taggart’s character as she fought against the whole world to keep her railroad alive.

When she was very young, she was something of a loner, but after a couple of years, she and another cat I had — another confident loner who had been named for William the Conqueror — became close.

After William died four and a half years ago, she mourned for weeks. I still have audio posted on Soundcloud of how hurt she sounded as she walked around the house looking for him over and over. She was in pain about having lost her close friend.

Dagny was the only one of my remaining cats who liked to sit in my lap and get attention. If I sat at my desk and tried to work, she wanted to get into my lap. If I laid down on the bed, she climbed on top of me. She wanted to be close.

She still felt well enough this past Saturday to climb onto me and ask for attention. The video quality is terrible, but here’s a clip I posted on Facebook — the last of the countless times over the last 15 years when she asked for (and received) plenty of attention.

It’s been a bad week for the black cats of my family. Anne’s unexpected death last week set a somber tone, but Dagny’s death punctuates the week with a terrible finality. It’s hard to believe we’re down to just one dog and three cats.

I was crushed to lose Anne after only 10 years — and to lose her sisters, Charlotte and Emily, after even shorter lives. And it was tough to lose their aunt — Bessie — last year, far before her time.

But at least Dagny got to live a long and full life.

Maybe she would have had a good life even if I hadn’t heard her fierce little meow from under the dumpster as an ex-girlfriend and I walked that night in Trussville 15 years ago. Maybe someone else would have found her and given her a good home.

I’ll never know. I’m just thankful that I found her. I’m thankful that she became part of my furry family. I’m thankful that she was safe and healthy and happy for 15 years.

I’m thankful that I was able to give her love for that long, but I’m even more grateful for the love she happily gave back to me.

Share on Social Networks

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

Related Posts