My Beloved

In 1980, my three year old and I moved into a low-cost apartment. I was
now divorced and my ex-husband had returned to his country. There are no extradition treaties between Barbados and Canada. As a result, I was not able to get any child support and furthermore, I had lost my job.

Though the apartment was a blessing for us due to my limited income, it did have a big downfall—no pets were allowed. This clause was very hard for me to accept. I needed the apartment because I was a struggling single parent living on welfare at the time. But how could I deprive my three year old of the joys that I'd had all my life? How could I deprive my young son of the privilege and enjoyment obtained from having animals?

For the first couple of years, we did live animal free and I was very
lonesome for a pet. I had dogs all of my life and now for the first time, at
the age of 25, I had none. Coreen, my best girlfriend at the time, was also a
single parent and she always had both dogs and cats. We were always at her house and my Steven loved her cats.

On one occasion, her beautiful, black cat just had a litter of six kittens and she was giving them away. She asked me if I had wanted any and of course I said no.

As you already know, I couldn't have animals in my apartment, and I was
a dog lover anyway. I was really not that interested in having a cat. But she kept urging and Steven kept pleading and I gave in.

Still, I had to let my son, who was a six year old by this time, know that if
the landlord said we had to get rid of the cat, so be it. If you remember from my story about my poodle Tammy Twinkles, this was the same thing that my grandmother had said to me when we moved into city housing as well. Isn't it funny how things come full circle?

Steven agreed to the condition set forth and we ended up coming home with not one kitten but tabby twins!

We did have Mercy and Fancy for about six months trouble free. Then out
of the blue, Mercy walked into the living room one day and just died in front of my eyes. The whole thing took about two minutes. Steven was not yet home from school and I didn't know what to tell him.

When he came home, we had a burial for our beloved Mercy and I said a
little prayer over her grave. Since Steven was so heartbroken, I suggested that Fancy could have a litter of her own and we could keep one kitten from the litter.

Besides easing my little boy's pain, I felt it was important that my son
witness the birth experience just like I had when I was a young girl.

Chino, was a beautiful black and white long haired cat who looked like his
grandmother, the black cat that Coreen owned. We had Fancy, the mother,
and Chino, known as Chi Chi, the son. Fancy was a quiet cat but her son was very energetic. However, at the time that we named him, we did not know that chi is the Chinese word for energy, and our cat was exactly that, chi chi, double the energy.

Much to our chagrin, the inevitable caught up with us. The inspectors for
our public housing came by and saw that we had cats. They gave us an
ultimatum: "Get rid of the cats or we get rid of you." My son, who was by this time about 13, took it in stride. He knew that the day might come that this would happen. But what I did not know was that he had plans in store for us yet!

Two years later, the public housing authorities had relaxed their rules
about animals in the apartments. Apparently they had taken too many tenants to court and had lost too many cases over it. However, I still did not have animals at the time nor was I planning on getting any. Steven, however, again had different plans in store for me. He was now 15 years old and still loved cats.

And one day he came home with one. This cat was a beautiful calico coloured cat about two years old, from what I could tell. I asked Steven whose cat she was and he said that he had found her scrounging around in the garbage can. She was apparently scared to death and trembled when he tried to pick her up. When she got to our house she was literally screeching. I didn't know what to do. I told Steven that we obviously
couldn't keep her as she appeared to be scared to death of us. But when I tried to take her back outside she clung to me for dear life and screeched even louder. I knew then that this cat had been traumatized by the outside and it was better to let her stay in the house with us until we could find her owner.

The screeching had stopped about six hours later, but she hid from us for
about two days, then gradually she started coming out to see us. She would let us pat her but she would not let us pick her up. This behaviour was very
strange for us since Fancy and Chino were loving cats that we picked up and cuddled like babies. Tao would have none of that. Yes, you guessed it, we never found her owner. She was definitely abandoned and we were going to keep her. How could I say no to my son!

I named her Tao after the Chinese philosophy of the Tao, and sort of a
tribute to my Chi Chi at the same time. Tao was either called Tao, or Tay Tay, which was the nickname that Steven had given her.

Though she became used to us and loved us in her own way, she always remained fearful of people. If visitors came to the house, she would run and hide. She also remained fearful of the outside and refused to leave the house. It took her about five years just to be brave enough to venture upon the balcony of our apartment.

We did notice other peculiarities about our cat. She had no balance
whatsoever and when she would jump to a piece of furniture she would miss and fall to the ground every time. She had no sense of smell and she literally had to see you put food down for her before she would go to it. She seemed to have a short attention span and could not understand simple instructions that our other cats had no problems with. In fact, the only thing that she understood was "Are you hungry?" When she heard that she would run out to the kitchen to wait for her food which, as I said before, she literally had to see you put down before her eyes. It was obvious to me that this cat was retarded.

But she was lovable nonetheless.

At bedtime she would run from Steven's room to my room, spending a bit
of time with each of us while we slept. Though we couldn't hold her since she wouldn't let us, she was always in a room with one of us.

Tao preferred to be the only pet in the house, but she had to contend with
sharing her house with the various animals that came after her. There were other cats, and dogs as well. When a new cat came into the house, she would hiss at it but within a week the new cat became the dominant animal in the house. As far as dogs were concerned, they wanted to play with her but she would have none of it.

When we moved to the new apartment two years ago, she was the only
animal in the house and she became more affectionate than she had ever been. She sat in our laps and purred. Still, it was very rare that she would let us hold her.

Tao was aging. She was now roughly 15 years old by my crude calculation,
and I was starting to worry about her health. Her shiny coat was dulling, she was drinking less and less, and she was becoming thinner. It was getting to a point that she was always hungry but when you fed her she ate only a mouthful or two. I knew that I needed to take her to the vet for a checkup but I had no money. I had been struggling to keep a job for an entire year—working here and there for a month or two at a time. The bills were piling up rapidly but the money was not there to pay them.

On June 17, 2002, I had had a particularly hard day at my new job. I came
home and went to bed for a nap. When I woke up later that evening I noticed that I hadn't seen Tao yet that day. I asked my son, who was just on his way out the door, about her. He told me he saw Tao earlier during the day but she was not doing well. Steven left to go out with his friends, and I immediately looked for Tao. I found her in my bedroom on the floor. There was blood from one end of the room to another. Obviously, Steven had not seen this or he would have told me immediately. I called to her, and though she tried, she could not even lift up her head. I panicked as my heart broke, I couldn't bear to see my poor beloved cat like this. The pain pierced my heart like a sword.

I tried desperately to find a vet that was open after hours and one that I
could travel to in a bus because I had no other means of transportation. I
finally found one and I pleaded with her over the phone to see my cat and not to charge me a fortune because I only had $40 in the bank and I had to wait for two more weeks for another pay cheque. I cried all the way to the vet with my poor Tao wrapped up in a blanket in my arms.

Tao never moved once. If she had been well she would have tried to escape. You already know that she did not like to be held nor did she like the outside.

When I got to the vet, the first thing the doctor said was that she looked like she got hit by a car. I explained to the doctor that it could not have happened because Tao would never go out of the house. Upon examination, Doctor Chapman told me that Tao had a broken ear drum, an abscess in her ear, and was suffering from head trauma. The head trauma explained why Tao was retarded and was not able to smell things, or keep her balance and such. Dr. Chapman said that she could possibly treat her with antibiotics, but with her advanced years, she could not tell how long she would live. She said she had no way of knowing if this was Tao's time to go.

I then made the decision that my beloved cat be put to sleep. I could not bear to see her this way anymore. Doctor Chapman did not charge me for the consultation, nor the cremation, she charged me only for the euthanasia. In fact, she even gave me a 15% discount on that. The entire bill came to $36.00 which left me with $4.00 in the bank.

I owe a lot to this wonderful doctor who took pity on a 47-year-old woman crying over her beloved cat. I cried all the way back home as my empty arms ached for my cat. I had left a big part of me back there in the vet's
office.

However, even with the pain of loss, my son, now 25 years old, and I, both
know that I have made the right choice. My beloved Tao is finally in her
resting place free from the trauma of this world.

Addendum: After this story was written Dr. Sandra Chapman made a
donation to the animal research department at the University Of Montreal on behalf of my beloved Tao.