Remembering Cindi…

“When you are sorrowful, look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.” –The Prophet

You cannot have a pet for any length of time without them weaving heartstrings into your life and your family.  Indeed my cats are important members of my family.  They know their names, they have Christmas stockings filled by Santa, they get special meals on holidays, one on one play time, they get driven to their doctor’s appointments for immunizations and sick visits, they each have a special hand made quilt and their birthdays are even written on the calendar!  My kids wouldn’t hear of it any other way.   Each cat is unique and cannot be replaced.  We love Cindi and she had real personality all her own.  Now it is time for us to treasure up those memories we have of her and not forget them.

Cindi was born on July 14th, 1994 in the heat of a Cincinnati summer.  Not all cats come with an actual birth date but the people who left Cindi on the stairs of the shelter provided at least that much information on a very young and very sick litter of kittens.  At the shelter the workers set these kittens up with a blanket over their carrier each night with a humidifier forming a sort of breathing machine hoping the kittens would survive one more night.  Those kittens were fighters… anyone who ever met Cindi would agree that this trait was a part of her character certainly.  She was strong and she and her littermates pulled through to good health to everyone’s surprise.  We found some spunky little kittens in mid-September that year about a month after our marriage and chose Cindi to bring home.

The interesting thing about Cindi’s birth date was that July 14th was the day I drove to Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada to get our marriage license issued followed by a trip to Cincinnati that same day to bring the paperwork to Rick.  So I remember the date for not one but two reasons.  Cindi has been a part of our family since a few weeks after we formed a family and she was Rick’s very first kitten.  In fact, I believe he named her for “Cinderella” which was the musical he put so much time into that fall in his very first teaching year and we just shortened the name to “Cindi” which seemed to suit her well.  My Aunt Jacquie sent him a book called “How to Pet a Cat” which he studied avidly during those first months.  He knew from the beginning that if he had me then he had a cat.  Now he had 2!

I want to share some things about Cindi, fond memories, mostly so that I can remember them along with my children but also so you can catch a glimpse into her personality and how we felt about her.  You can’t really “know” an animal unless you’re an insider, of which there are very few. 

Cindi took a liking to our 4 year old cat Samantha immediately as a kitten.  It was so important to Cindi to have Samantha around that it caused a few problems.  Upon one occasion I took Samantha on a car trip up to Rochester, New York for a visit to our “old” home and since Rick was here in Cincinnati working a million hours I left him in the company of our kitten, Cindi.  While I was gone there was a big storm and Cindi could not find Samantha anywhere so some time in the early morning hours during the storm Cindi found a window in our basement apartment partially opened and pushed the screen out in search of her Samantha.  Rick enjoyed sleeping in that Sunday morning, something Cindi NEVER let us do for want of more food.  She was always a very hungry little kitten.  Eventually Rick decided it was too quiet and he’d better go check things out only to discover that she was gone and the window was pushed out.  For 2 days he plastered “lost” signs all over the place as he searched and whistled high and low for that kitten.  He got his parents to come over and walk around to help him look.  Finally he heard a distant “mew” in a tree by the woods and payed some young boy $20 to climb it and rescue our poor kitten.  Ever since that rescue she has been Rick’s cat loving him more than any other human.  She let Rick do things to her that she would never have put up with from anybody else like when he would swing her back and forth in the air singing in a deep voice “Swing low Sweet Cherry’O”.  And after that Cindi made a few car trips up to Rochester for holidays so that we didn’t separate those two cats again.  By now Cindi had a taste of the outdoors though so we bought a leash and every night at 10 p.m. she would howl in our front hall to go for a walk out around our building to check things out before bed.  She would actually walk on the leash!  We also took her on a leash to the “lake” (or pond) near our apartment and she would try going after the geese and ducks that lived out there.  When we left the apartment the windows had to be closed.  On one occasion we returned to find our apartment in such a state that it looked like we had been robbed!  She was full of mischief as a kitten that subsided only a little as the years passed by.

Cindi was a born “huntress” as we called her.  It started simple with spiders in the apartment which she gratefully saved me from followed by larger spiders later in the basement of our house which she would rescue me from.  All I had to do was whistle and point and she was on the job.  I remember one time when she caught a bird from the balcony of our second apartment and brought it in.  This stirred up some excitement as she let it loose to fly in circles through the living  room, down the hallway to our bedroom and back again as Cindi chased it followed by our two cats Samantha and Tobey who were also interested followed by me and Rick running from one end of the apartment to the other.  We were in it for the interest of saving the bird’s life.  The bird was eventually safely let go and after that Cindi took to jumping from the balcony to go after birds outdoors.  Sometimes we retrieved her and sometimes a neighbor would bring her back to our door.  We tried to deter her jumps by putting up chicken wire around the balcony but before long we were able to introduce Cindi to her very own backyard to have adventures in.  Adventure she did!  I remember being about 7 1/2 months pregnant when I heard Cindi knock at the back door one afternoon right after I’d put kids down for naps.  Absentmindedly I opened the door for her realizing too late that she had something in her mouth.  She immediately ran to the basement with it.  I followed to discover a baby bunny.  I chased the cat as she chased the bunny for the next two hours as we repeatedly tried to eat the bunny, find the bunny, chase the bunny, find the bunny, and rescue the bunny.  Cindi was quick.  A mouse in the house never survived long when she was around.  She took her territory very seriously as she patrolled from window to window when something interesting was happening outside.  In her earlier years she liked to follow us on walks through our neighborhood without a leash until one night she lost us and showed up in the middle of the night with a gash that needed emergent attention.  She never really tried to follow us very far again after that.

Through Cindi’s 16 years with us she saw great change in our family dynamics.  In that time Cindi changed drastically and became a real family cat.  The first time she met the “new baby” she thought we’d brought some sort of wild animal home and she was willing to climb my legs like the trunk of a tree to attack whatever that was in my arms that brought with it strange noises and odd smells.  Her claws were so sharp that her vet usually gave her a complimentary nail trim any time he had to deal with her.  We had to watch Cindi very carefully with her first experience of having a baby around.  As Santa brought noisy toys and stuffed animals to the children he left Cindi with her favorite catnip and fur mice so she could eat their tails off and play chase.  Cindi came to know that these miniature people were part of her family and that there was still plenty of love to share with her.  Over time she became a real lap kitty, curling up with the kids to love them and be loved by them if they watched a movie or if they were sick.  They dressed her in doll clothes, shared birthday cake and ice cream and she even granted Tristan his wish and showed up to pre-school with him for show and tell one day about 2 1/2 years ago.   And anytime the family gathered, Cindi was there in the middle of it all.

I remember waking up startled in the middle of the night once to a shriek coming from upstairs in my daughter’s bedroom.  I went tearing through the house, Cindi gratefully making her escape as I threw open the stairs door and headed up to the bottom bunk to comfort Lindsay from an apparent nightmare that she must have had.  I calmed her down enough to understand her three year old words and heard the story that there had been a pair of glowing eyes right next to her when she opened her own.  They had blinked and they had moved!!!  Those glowing eyes had been staring at her in the 3 a.m. blackness.  Sounding like a scary tale to me I woke up enough to put two and two together and had a good chuckle.  Lindsay had been as afraid of those lantern eyes as much as Cindi had been afraid of the sudden shrieks right in front of her in that warm cozy bed.  That was sort of a hard lesson on all of us to learn that cats eyes, in fact, do glow in the dark.

Cindi had a couple of chores (besides hunting and making beds) which she took very seriously up to her last week with us.  She was always first at the dinner table when the kids were called and sat very properly on the long bench either at the end or between two of the children.  Sometimes the kids would sneak her something as I looked the other way pretending not to notice.  Cindi would jump down to lick up bits of spilled rice cereal from the babies or bits and pieces that hit the floor.  I called her my “kitchen clean up” cat.  My kids can’t stand taking their turn at cleaning the kitchen but Cindi made sure it was her turn every week.  She wasn’t always so well-behaved though.  One time she sat between the children on the bench to wait and as our eyes closed to bless the food in prayer she silently reached up and took with one paw (and some claws) an entire bacon strip off of the serving plate!  We thought she put so much clever thought into that and really it was so funny that we just let her keep it.  By this time Cindi was fighting to keep weight on her body so we chose to laugh that one off.  While her favorite food was Fancy Feast cod, sole & shrimp she had some odd tastes in food, at least for a cat, like wanting to eat grape nuts and corn on the cob.  One time I left muffins cooling on the table while I went for a walk.  When I came home there were muffins everywhere and many of them had a single bite out of them.  She also liked cheese doodles and you had to share with her if you had any of those.

You can see from snapshots that Cindi and our older cat Samantha loved each other very much.  Cindi looked to her as a mother and we got Cindi, partially, to be company for Samantha who was used to having other cats and other people around but had suddenly found herself alone most of the time when she moved from Rochester to Cincinnati upon our marriage.  They became good friends and loved being together.  They remained this way the rest of their lives and in fact there was an instant difference in Cindi’s health as soon as Samantha left us at the beginning of this year.  Cindi’s white blood cell count was skyrocketing.  Antibiotics did nothing for her.  X-rays showed nothing anywhere.  She remained on her thyroid and blood pressure meds and took her potassium tablets each day as she had been doing for some time.  We were left to feel grateful for each new day we found to spend with her.  We tried to keep things in perspective and take it one day at a time.  She sat with us as much as possible but we could see that she was growing very tired.  It seemed that she was missing her Samantha but she was enjoying lounging in the summer weather right outside the back door.  She never strayed far from her favorite sunny spots this past year but would still follow the kids around the backyard between naps.  Then two weeks ago she completely lost the rest of her sight, then lost her hearing, became unable to keep anything down and was losing strength in her hind quarters rapidly.  She was scared and disoriented… she didn’t know what was happening to her… but she did find comfort in our arms where we held her for great lengths of time in her last days with us and she seemed to find some reassurance from our warmth.  At 11:53 a.m. on Saturday October 16th, as we stroked her poor little body the doctor who cared for Cindi her entire lifetime let us know that her heart had stopped its beating. 

Cindi now rests under the lowest bough of our old oak tree in the backyard, with Samantha at her side near the rose bush and the lilacs.  Somehow it seems fitting that they left here for a better place within months of each other.  Now they are together once again, just the way they always liked it.  

We are missing Cindi’s presence on her favorite warm spot on the kitchen floor and her meows at the back door to come in and go out… and come in and go out… and come in!  We miss the presence of our “Family Night Cat” each week when she always made sure that she was present for the festivities, warm laps and the music as she sat at the piano to enjoy the vibrations of the instrument and the singing of her family.  We are missing her curling up on the warmer fuzzier blankets that we find ourselves pulling out of summer storage now that nights are chillier again and her scratching at the vents trying to make the furnace turn on when she’s cold.  But we are warmed by our memories of her… there are so many.  Cindi grew to love her family and we certainly grew to love her.