Sometimes in life, a sequence of events takes place… and you don’t really have the mental pathways prepared to process it. I am struggling with one of those right now and as a result, I am in a bit of a funk. The above picture is of a cat that is not ours… but the one on the left was going to be. We lost my baby Kenzie in December of last year, and it has taken me a long time to process that as well. Recently my wife has been on this kick of bombarding me with kittens and claiming that we need one. On one hand, I agree that Kittens are adorable and I love them all… and on the other hand I have been slowly trying to bring Mollie our exceptionally skittish cat out of her shell. The latter has made me extremely hesitant to do anything to upset the delicate balance, especially given that the death of Kenzie threw her into a bit of a tailspin.
I had finally come to terms with the idea of getting a cat, and one of our friends about an hour away had a litter of adorable babies. My wife drove up to visit them and the cat on the left pretty much adopted her. I would show you some much cuter pictures… but they also include my wife and she would probably kill me for publicly posting them. Essentially it was decided that we would end up with this baby and started going through the planning phase for a new kitten. We were effectively waiting until she was good and weaned, and had set a date for this last Wednesday. I had taken the afternoon off and we were going to go pick the kitten up and then take her back to our veterinarian where she would get tests and such to make sure she did not have anything communicable that could harm our existing babies.
We did not go to get a cat on Wednesday, because on that morning three of the kittens… were just missing. These babies were indoor/outdoor animals or as we generally refer to them in rural America “barn cats”. The problem with outdoor animals is sometimes things happen to them. I remember as a kid having plenty of barn cats that would occasionally disappear never to be heard from again. We don’t know what happened to them… we know that the kitten we were about to adopt is gone. At this point a few days later, we have to assume the worst. I am struggling with this a lot. I had gotten attached to the idea of us getting this kitten… that granted I had never actually met myself. I had been flooded with pictures of the said kitten… but never actually met her.
Now I find myself in the position of my wife starting up the kitten bombardment.. and talking about how we need to go to a local shelter that is at levels of overflow that might trigger euthanasia. I however find myself still mourning a cat that I never actually knew. It is like I don’t really have the emotional hardware to process this one. My wife is largely fine because she went into this with the logical realization that outdoor cats can and do disappear. I, on the other hand, am far too soft-hearted for this and while I can shrug off the loss of a human… animals are precious babies that need to be loved and protected. I know that I will probably concede to being drafted into this mission of kitten hunting this weekend, but for now, I am exceptionally melancholy about that prospect.
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