Pet Bereavement Support Group

My beautiful Tommie, mother of my kittens, has been killed. She did not come for her late evening feeding on Wednesday night, June 25, 2008. She did not come for breakfast on Thursday morning at 6:00 a.m. She did not show up all day Thursday. I was frantic by that time. Friday morning around 10:15 a.m. I went across the street to a neighbor who told me there was a cat dead in the road about a quarter of a mile up. I ran up to discover my beautiful Tommie dead. She must have died in the early evening on Wednesday.

I found her on the edge of the road that leads to the lake at the golf course. I did not know there was a lake there since I'd never been very far up the road along the golf course. Tommie knew the lake was there. I'll bet that she was going to scamper across the golf course to play at the lake. She was the adventurous explorer.

Finding her dead in the road was a horrible trauma. I ran home, took a wicker basket and two towels, and returned to place her in the basket. I placed a towel in the bottom of the basket and placed her in it with the second towel covering her. I could not bear to look at her again.

My landlord dug a hole in the garden. I placed her body, concealed by the towels, in the grave.

Tommie was far more to me than a cat. She was my beloved soul mate. I have her six kittens to remind me of her. Ennis and Agatha have her colors and markings, as does Tommie's brother Luc-Noel. I'll think about Tommie every day for the rest of my life. She was a free spirit -- she loved to run and jump, clamber up trees, jump onto the railing of the deck so I could pet her. Sometimes she liked for me to pick her up and cuddle her. Sometimes she did not want to be held at all. She did not like confined spaces. Once in a while she'd come into the house when I opened the glass storm door. Immediately, she'd want to run back out again.

I was there with her on the deck around 4:20 p.m. on April 20, 2007, when her water broke and her first kitten poked his head out. She jumped into the cat house on the deck to deliver her other five babies. I brought her into the house on April 20, 2008, on the kitten's first birthday. They'd not been near her for nine months, but I am sure they recognized her. They sniffed her and licked her.

I took the attached photo on June 9, 2007, when Tommie was nursing her babies. They were 50 days old. Butterball, Titus, and Agatha (in that order, from bottom to top) are the kittens in the photo. Notice how much Agatha looks like Tommie.

Now all six kittens are grown cats. Tommie was only a few years old when she died. She was supposed to live with me for the next twenty years, but that hope has been destroyed.

Let's hope there will be a time when she and I are reunited. Her beautiful cat soul has left the Earth. My home is not the same, even with her brother Harry, her half-brothers Luc-Noel and Fluffy, her six kittens, and all my other cats. Tommie was the center of the home, and all her siblings and offspring were defined in terms of Tommie -- Harry was "Tommie's brother," Agatha was "Tommie's daughter," and so forth. Now there is no Tommie, except in my heart and my memories, and I feel a giant emptiness without her.

Kenneth
Posted on 07/09/08, 07:07 pm