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.

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Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

It hasn’t happened yet, but there’s a possibility that I might be taking in a fourth feline. A couple of months ago, a cat-loving neighbor asked whether I’d seen a “tuxedo cat” hanging out in the neighborhood. I hadn’t, but this guy eventually wandered past my house a few weeks later — and we haven’t been able to find evidence that he has a home. I’ve been giving him water and food for the last week and he finally let me pet him two nights ago. He’s purred for me two nights in a row and he let me take a low-quality selfie with him Thursday night. Tonight, though, he let me pick him up and bring him inside to look around. This went surprisingly well, as you can see from this photo. I don’t know whether he’ll be joining the family, but I’m certain that Alex, Oliver and Sam would vote no, at least until they get to know him. I’m trying to make certain he doesn’t have a home, but if he does join us, what do you suppose his name will be?

It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

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