ABSTRACT: This is a tribute to one of my former cats that is now in Rainbow Bridge
CONTENT: Many of my friends know that my mother was responsible for creating an over population of cats. Prior to that we always had a reasonable amount of furbabies, and there had been cats in our apartment since 1962 when I was only five years old.
In 1992 we had a grand total of eight cats. Then on a Thursday June 5, 1992, it was a horrid torrential rainfall and throughout the day both my mother and I could hear the pitiful meows of a young cat outside somewhere down the block from us. We both went out to try and find the kitten to at least give it food. When we finally found her, a silent mutual conclusion came to us...we had to take her home. She must have been maybe only a month or so old, so very young. She quickly adapted to our household and was the most affectionate little gal going. I named her Whoopi after one of my favorite people, Whoopi Goldberg. One of her traits was that of ear-nibbler...she would jump on my lap, raise herself up a bit to get to my ear and nibble on one, then switch and nibble on the other. Just why she did this I have no idea.
When she got old enough to be fixed I kept nudging my mother to take her to the vet. I couldn't go since the vet was quite a distance and I couldn't travel due to my disability. She kept saying, we need not bother as we weren't going to get anymore kitties. A few months later, our doorbell rang and it was one of our neighbors holding a cat in his arms and asking us if we could take it in. I repeatedly said no, as I thought nine cats total was already a lot. The two of them, my mother and the neighbor stared down at me, saying "Oh, it's only one more cat" over and over again---I gave in. It didn't take long to realize that this male cat wasn't fixed either. I kept urging my mother to take at least one of the cats, either Whoopi or the male cat, whom I named Keiko to the vet to get fixed...she didn't and to this day I still don't know why. I couldn't take them as I said due to my disability.
Well, as you can imagine what happened and on April 6, 1993 Whoopi gave birth to six kittens whom I named, Pixie, Dixie, Ashley, Shelby, Demi, E.T. Actually it was a wonderful thing to witness her giving birth to the kittens and if that had been the only litter, no problem. Then my mother's grandiose scheme was to get all the male cats fixed first. But oops, missed one and another litter of three kittens was born the following year in 1994 whom I named Lakota, Dakota and Cheyenne.
I need not go into all the details of what followed, from that time up until 2001, but lets just say we had a lot of cats on our hands and in March of 2001 we received an eviction notice from our landlord due to the staggering number of cats we had. We got great help from a lawyer and pet advocates that helped us out in adopting out many of the cats. Also, a pet rescuer, who lived upstate New York came down and took five of our cats....Whoopi was among them. Believe me I didn't want to give her up, but I knew she would be in good hands with Amy, the rescuer. One thing to this day that I'll never forget though was the look on Whoopi's face as I reached for her, hugging her for the last time before putting her in a traveling case for the rescuer to take...such sadness, as if to say, don't you want me anymore? don't you love me?...it was one of the hardest things I ever had to do. Of COURSE I still wanted her, but I really had no choice as the landlord due to the eviction issue had given us a stipulation agreement. We could stay in our apartment only if we kept only two cats.
So all these years, from May 1, 2001 up until now, Whoopi was in the safe hands of the pet rescuer Amy...she would even tell me that Whoopi had come to nibble on her ears as well. She kept Whoopi in her home and was never caged up, but free to roam around Amy's home.
Then a strange thing occurred though. This whole past week for some reason I kept thinking about Whoopi, and just last night I was thinking of emailing Amy today to ask her a favor. Would she let me know if and when Whoopi went to Rainbow Bridge, or as I call it Land of Bast. Then today, while scanning my emails, I came across an email from Amy which read:
Just wanted to let you know we lost Whoopie today
she was happily sleeping on her pad ( which is on a heating pad)
I was scritching her she stretched , let out a sigh and died
I miss her already
I miss her too. RIP Whoopi
©2009-This posting also appears in Pyewacketsworld which is a private blog of mine and also had appeared in Ciao.
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