Our Beloved Bogart Crossed the Rainbow Bridge

Bogart in 2014

After a fitful night of sleep and crying, I woke up this morning imagining that I heard Bogart’s meow from his room. The house seems oppressively quiet and empty without him. The large candle I lit yesterday is still flickering on the mantle.

I opened the windows – the sun is up and the sounds of the forest are alive with the happy chirping of birds. The resident squirrels are busily collecting acorns from the large oak tree in front of the deck. They are not alarmed, the cat is away forever. It’s been a long time since Bogart had been able to chase squirrels, snapping turtles, or raccoons. Always fearless, he encountered a few foxes and a coyote in the woods, but came away unscathed.

Bogart’s stoop is still on the deck and so is his favorite stainless steel water bowl. He enjoyed making huge splashes before he dug his paws in and licked them of water. Only then did he actually start drinking with gusto.

On a very snowy day a few years ago, Bogart was trying to dig out his water pan from underneath the frozen whiteness. It is not really a bowl; it’s an expensive cooking pan with a handle which my mom designated as a deck water bowl. Bogart seemed to like it; when I tried to replace it with a real bowl, he refused to drink out of it and the pan came back out.

We are not entirely sure how much he was able to see or hear in his last months of life. But he liked sitting on his hind legs like a majestic statue, enjoying the fresh air and the sunshine. In the last few weeks, he had difficulty assuming his favorite position as his motor skills had devolved due to arthritic pain and toxins in his body.

He no longer panicked when a draft of wind shut the deck door – he probably could no longer hear well. He always hated being closed into a room without the possibility of escape. He destroyed a carpet or two by scratching and digging his way through to the floor around the door, in a vain attempt to escape.

Months ago he also stopped being afraid of the vacuum cleaner and followed Dolores around when she dusted. He had come a long way from the shy and skittish rescue cat who hid under our daughter’s bed for the first three years after he was adopted, coming out only at night to play, eat Cheetos, and drink from the commode.

Despite IV fluids twice a week for almost two years, his kidneys were on the cusp of failing in June and we increased his dose which kept him alive until October. In his struggle to stay alive, Bogart taught us important lessons about a life well-lived, unconditional love, and death. Despite the weekly fluid infusions, the built-up toxins in his body were affecting his motor skills and his brain. Kidney failure cost him the loss of almost 40 percent of his body weight.

 

Christmas 2016

 

I think he was hanging on to life to please us because he loved us so much and we adored him. I carried him to the vet even when Dave was sick and going through chemo and when I was trying to recuperate from knee surgery this year. He had become so skinny, it was hard to find a patch of fresh skin that had not been injected with IV fluids and he started to cry. I knew it was time for him to go. Throughout his illness, he remained the same sweet and loving fur baby. He had lived a long and pampered life for almost twenty years and I have been a caring and loving mother to him.

My friend Susan Soden gave me a priceless gift, a beautiful portrait of Bogart painted by Sonora. He is so life-like, from a time when he weighed 15 pounds or more. He had shrunk to a mere 8 lbs. Sonora did such a fantastic job that his beautiful blue eyes seem to follow me from every angle of the painting.

 

Our beloved Snowshoe Siamese, who was never fond of snow, taught us in his almost two decades of life with us to be better, more loving, more caring, and more patient human beings. A precious loan from God, Bogie has enriched our lives in every way.

Finding his paw tracks in the carpet behind my chair where he last slept the day he died, his often favorite and quiet spot, brought me to tears. He liked to be near me when I wrote. If he did not fit between the keyboard and my body, he was not shy about putting his paws on the keys, purring softly.

 

 

Ten years ago the vet was surprised when Bogart jumped from the examining table and got stuck behind a large cabinet and the corner wall. He had to call the maintenance guy to actually move the entire cabinet before they could extricate a much heavier Bogart out of a tight squeeze.

On the short ride to the vet, Bogart sat in my lap and was agitated, trying to look out the window to the right. He did not understand what was happening, but he knew something was not right and was making guttural and frightened sounds.

 

 

Even though we know euthanizing him was the right and humane thing to do, putting him out of pain and suffering, the grief is overwhelming, and I cannot stop crying. He was my fur baby and part of my heart crossed the Rainbow Bridge with him while part of his is in my heart.

After the first shot the vet administered, Bogart threw up, I cleaned him up, and, while the anesthesia took over, his eyes remained open and he was breathing. I showered him with more kisses and the doctor gave him the second fatal shot. His heart stopped at 6 p.m. on October 3, 2018, while I was cradling his bony and furry body.

Memory Eternal to our sweet Bogart! He was beautiful even in death.

On his stoop the day before he died

 

 

Kitty Litter Trivia

A little trivia about kitty litter:



18-year old Bogart

In 1954 Edward Lowe from Cassopolis, Michigan, started selling his Kitty Litter clay pellets invention to grocery stores around the country. It was an instant success. Until then cats were doing their business in smelly sand boxes.

Lowe tried to sell his clay pellets to chicken farmers who used hay to line the chicken cages but he failed because clay pellets were much more expensive than hay.

One day his neighbor ran out of sand for her outdoor cat sand box and asked for some sand. Ed gave her a bag of his clay pellets instead.

His product, kitty litter, became an over 100 million dollar company and cats were invited in and became the number one indoor pet, outpacing dogs.

Thanks to Lowe's invention, I can keep my beloved pet, Bogart, indoors.

Contemplating Mortality

Handsome Bogart, 18-years old
Photo: Ileana Johnson 2017

I used to think that it was rather morbid that my in-laws had purchased their burial plots when my husband was a small child. Every time we went for a visit, we stayed in a hotel across from the hilly Memorial Gardens, with a large white praying statue on top. The lush green grass and the occasional Canada geese grazing on the slopes were peaceful and comforting evidence of perennial life.

Every time Ray would drive by he would joke in his inimitable dark humor that he bought his wife an anniversary gift and she never used it. It gave me shivers, imagining my husband’s parents deceased.

As the way of all flesh goes, it seems to be closer and closer that Joan may have to use that anniversary gift from long, long time ago. Time flew by and, as it did, we thought of living, of family, of togetherness, of life’s accomplishments, not of mortality. We thought of ourselves as living forever until someone close or known to us got really sick and died. We brushed away the annoying thought of death, as if it would never happen to us eventually. Yet we all leave this earth as dust, a short lived spark in the memory of those who know us, perhaps love us, who are still alive and left behind.

I had an eerie feeling the first time I visited my Dad’s grave. It was perhaps because I was really sick when he died and I could not attend the funeral so many thousands of miles away. In a sense, I never really had closure. I stared for hours at the pictures of his funeral my uncle had sent me, but it was not the same. It was as if he was still alive in some far away corner of the world.

But I was staring then at this corner of the world and reality slapped me in the face. My Daddy was but dust and my memories of our lives together for the first twenty years of my life. With the grace of God, Dad and Mom made me, cared for me, and loved me enough to let me go to a better place so far away. How do you ever thank your parents for choosing life?

I knew Dad’s mortal remains where interred there, but his spirit was somewhere else, in Heaven, but in some ways it lived inside of me. It was so quiet around me, you could almost hear every sound nature made, buzzing of bees, the wind moving the tall grasses, and the leaves twirling on tree branches in the gentle breeze. The earth was alive but my Daddy was part of its dust. His bones were resting in a bag deep in the earth, the wooden coffin perhaps long decayed. I planted a flower on his grave wondering if sufficient rain would keep it alive after my departure. How long would it be before it withered and died, turning to dust?

My mom is losing her battle with dementia and she hardly remembers her life in the correct sequential order. We are happy when she remembers our names.

My mother-in-law is paralyzed following a botched spinal operation and will be sent soon to a hospice, closer to the ultimate chapter of her life. Her beautiful blue eyes are still the eyes of the little girl she once was, not understanding what happened, why time flew by so fast.

Bogart is our beautiful Snow Shoe Siamese whom we adore. He is turning 18-years old sometime this year, we don’t know when because my daughters adopted him from the pound. The vet told us, he was one year old then. Although his previous owner abused him in the first year of his life, we gave him a good and loving life and home.

Bogart is showing signs of old age, turning lean and meowing more than usual, probably from arthritis pain, but can still do a hippodrome routine once in a while, running up and down the stairs, thinking he is a race horse. We clip his twisted claws which sometimes get snagged or tangled on various pieces of furniture, tapestry, or leather chairs. He is an old kitty, a centenarian in human years.

As hubby and I are struggling with profound health issues, we are now fully realizing that we are no longer the immortal young who thought we could live forever. It seems like yesterday when we met, the years flew by, but we never had enough time together, we wasted part of our youth with other spouses who were not our soul mates.

My husband is an American hero who dedicated his entire adult life to his country and I hope that someday he will take his proper place at Arlington National Cemetery.

We cannot understood why we were here on earth and why God created us, for what purpose, but we now understand that we are no longer immortal and we hope that we are going eventually to a good place, part of the circle of life, leaving traces of us in our children’s DNA.

Does it matter for most people where the final resting place will be? The sun will rise again, rain and snow will soak the ground, the moon will cast ghostly shadows in my beloved woods, the fierce hawkish wind will blow, and the earth will renew itself as it had done for millennia. We become again invisible atoms in the universe.

 

On Happiness

I took up photography because I wanted to capture those moments of beauty, of tranquility, of temporary happiness. It was perhaps because I was unhappy in my own life or at least I thought I was unhappy. Most people do not really understand happiness and expect to be in a state of non-stop glee. Nobody wants to suffer disappointment, rejection, pain, loneliness, and loss. Humans don’t understand that we experience moments of transitory happiness with so many other emotions that fit into the puzzle of life.

We are so bombarded non-stop by the media’s false sense of happiness, by beautiful people, with beautiful bodies, and perfect lives and families that we begin to expect such a fantasy, such an idealized life where disappointment, failure, pain, misery, disease, and loss never exist.

We are certainly happy to be alive but in the tumult of daily life we forget this essential joy. We are happy to have a family, no matter how many or how few members are left. We rejoice in a few good friends and stories from the past that people known to us still remember. We have our daily struggles and pain but, in dealing with them, we are reminded of how lucky we are to be able to resolve them. And if we can’t, we have to move on. Life has a purpose that we don’t understand but we keep chasing it in hopes to at least catch its train. Pain hurts, tears are normal part of pain, and pain, physical or emotional, changes us, it makes us stronger.

Happiness is transitory but so are pain and unhappiness. I take my worries, tears, and deep sorrow to the woods. The solitude and the natural beauty are cathartic. Squirrels, a butterfly, the occasional deer, a fox, an interesting tree with foliage I do not recognize, a spider web, a brightly colored mushroom, and an occasional snake slithering across my path help me forget my problems. The momentary joy floods my mind and there is no room for negative thoughts but for sun rays shining through the dense canopy, drawing strange shadows on the forest floor. Even a deep and pristine snow washes my soul with its white blanket that silences the woods. It seems to silence my negative thoughts.

Worrying or complaining about life’s difficulties would not bring about resolution. Unhappiness and regret about the past would certainly not alter the present reality.  It is hard to focus on parts of our lives that are going well because we are too busy worrying or crying about the past. The scars on my soul remind me that I survived the pain and misery in the past and I grew into a stronger, more experienced person.

When people treated me poorly or told me no, I had to shrug my shoulders and I tried harder to succeed, always remembering not to make the same mistakes with other people. Happiness is not just smiling at success; happiness can be a step forward without pain.

Happiness is Bogart purring in my lap, mom’s smile, the hearty giggles of my grandchild, and the sparkle of curiosity in the innocent eye of a child. Happiness is sometimes living surrounded by those we love. There is no magical formula, only moments of joy.

Happiness is taking a chance, loving your life in the moment and enjoying simple pleasures, a sight, a smell, a taste, a hug, the wind in your hair, a warm sweater in the icy cold of winter, or reading a fairy tale to your child by the fireplace.

Happiness and unhappiness are sisters in life, who may or may not like each other, but are connected by a strong bond. You cannot possibly be happy all the time but there is satisfaction in a life well lived, laughing when you can, smile, frown, and cry when fate throws lemons in your lap.

Enjoy it now, happiness and life are temporary.

Bogart and a Violin

Photo: Ileana's cross-stitch 1992

A friend reminded me through a touching story that, despite the fact that we are experiencing heavy hearts each day as our country we love so much sinks further into depression, strife, and irreparable damage, we should take time to notice something beautiful in our lives every day. Some say that living well is the best revenge.  Is this revenge against the inexorable passage of time?

This morning, as always, I fed my purring cat, my 14 year old Bogart. He knows his name and perks up when I call him. While I clean his litter box with a mask on, he touches my legs with his snow white paws. His beautiful blue eyes stare at my face and my every move. Heavily co-dependent, he meows for attention the whole time. He is so old that not even the birds coming to the feeder outside seem to mind his presence – he has become part of the landscape, a garden statue, a former threat who is no longer eager to chase and kill anyone. I cannot imagine my mornings without him. He climbs the steps painfully in synch with my steps, not an inch ahead. He turns his head sideways to make sure I am right beside him like a child afraid to lose sight of his mom.

We make strange attachments in life. My former literature teacher in high school brought so much joy and light into our drab existence with his lively presence and his violin. The lovely instrument came to life when he touched the strings. He always chose a song he felt expressed the mood of the characters and the story line in the piece of literature we were studying. Some students, mischievous and immature, chuckled and snickered, while the rest of us were mesmerized. He filled my heart with music and made my imagination soar in the depth of despair and misery we lived every day. I felt like an eagle for a few minutes, soaring to freedom in the blue sky.

He took his violin everywhere. Sadly, I forgot his name, but etched in my memory are his snow white hair, his face, and his grey, well-worn, but impeccably pressed suit. His expressive eyes would close with the softer notes as if transported on the wings of an angel to a faraway place that brought him inner happiness and peace. I’d like to think that somewhere in Heaven my former literature teacher is playing music for the angels.

I sometimes close my eyes when I’m in the forest, surrounded by dense trees, wild flowers, and birds chirping. I hear a symphony of masterful sounds created by God and remember my teacher and his violin.