Shannon Costello

Part I

I often thought that his mother looked like a tabby cat that had been hit with a bucket of white paint. I had never seen a cat look like that before. Gatito was the best of the lot in that respect—he was a normal-looking tabby with a white underside, except for a small patch of white on his back, which Tara always referred to as a discrepancy.

Gatito was born sometime in early 1997, as near as I can guess. I suppose he had already been born by the time I arrived at El Retiro, near El Blanquillo, Mexico. His mother wasn’t overly friendly—I’m not even sure she had a name. (In that part of Mexico, people were mostly poor, and the idea was that if a cat were not fed much, it would kill mice.) In return, she didn’t seem to trust people much. Still, I did manage to sketch her a couple of times and take a few pictures. Then one day I found her along the highway, dead. They had re-painted the yellow lines on the highway without bothering to remove the cat. The yellow line went right over her face.

Eventually we realized that her kittens were on the roof of the dormitory. They got me a ladder and I climbed up. There, in a pit in the roof, were her four kittens. They were small, but old enough to have their eyes open, and old enough to fear and distrust people. I had some difficulty getting them off the roof and into the laundry room of the little house where I lived. The laundry room had a separate entrance and was more like a garage than a part of the house.

Joel was around at that time. He was probably about 12 or 13 and he was with me one day as I was contemplating the cats. My Spanish was fairly limited, but he did pretty well at communicating. “Joel,” I asked, “What should I do when it gets dirty in here?” Of course I meant, “What happens when the cats go to the bathroom?”, but my Spanish wasn’t up to that point yet. Joel’s response was clear and concise: “You wash.”

I took pictures of the kittens. I have pictures of the four of them sitting in the laundry room window. One of them was a beautiful blond cat that looked more like a Persian than anything else. I assume it took after its father. The other three clearly resembled the mother. Gatito was the prettiest of those in that his coloring was the least rakish of the three.

One day we tried to introduce the kittens to the big German shepherd who lived on the property. Neither the director’s wife, Dina, nor I knew that he had been trained to shake kittens to death. It happened so quickly. We showed him the kitten—the blond one—he grabbed it, shook it once or twice, and dropped him. I think the cat twitched once or twice, but it was over—a broken back, I imagine. I cried.

The other three continued to prosper. It was so much fun to watch them play in the garden in front of the little house. I had never really watched kittens play before. They would jump and cavort and roll over each other. I then understood from experience why we refer to kittens as playful.

One day a woman came to visit us. I didn’t quite like her, to be honest. She was looking at the kittens and asked, “Puedo llevar uno?” (May I take one?) While my Spanish had improved, it still had a ways to go, as I found out. In school we are taught that llevar means to take or to carry. I thought she was asking if she could hold one. Much to my sorrow, she took one away. I cried. Mae thought we had too many kittens anyway. And so there were two.

I never really named the cats. I would go out in the morning, mew, and call, “Gatitos!” (kittens!) and they would come running, tails in the air. Their tails were the funniest part about them—thin, straight, and held high, when they wanted to let the world know that they were most certainly cats. Once Rosie, the children of the orphanage, and I were walking along to the director’s personal house about a half mile or so along a dirt road. I looked back and saw that the cats were following, some distance behind. I called to them and they immediately slowed down, their tails rising in the air at the same moment.

While they trusted and liked me, they still lived in a dangerous environment. Frequently I would see them on the rooftops in the morning. I have no idea how they got there, but I imagine they felt safe spending the night up there. And it certainly didn’t hurt that their position of safety also allowed them to survey their domain from up high…

Once we left for a couple of weeks to go to Texas. My biggest fear was that they wouldn’t remember me when I got back. Not that I ever gave them a chance to prove it—I ran to them the moment I returned—but they didn’t forget. Once or twice I brought Gatito into my room, which had an outdoor entrance, to spend the night. It never worked well. He would curl up next to my head on my pillow and purr all night long. It was unbelievably loud.

It might have been those nighttime visits that convinced him that he would like being an inside cat. I remember he would seize an opportunity to sneak in. It was possible to get inside or out quickly enough to deter him, but Mae, at 89 years, wasn’t quite that quick. Gatito would frequently get inside and have to be escorted out. Technically he wasn’t allowed in.

Gatito was accustomed to kill and eat whatever he could find. Once he pounced on an unusual looking frog. He killed it, ate it, and promptly threw it up—not a very useful defense mechanism for the frog.

One day, no one came when I called. I walked the property and checked the rooftops, but found only Gatito. Dreading what I would find, I went to the highway. The cat had been run over so many times that he was completely flattened. His fur was so dirty that it was hard to identify him—there was no more white there.

And now there was only Gatito. I tried to give him a real name, once. Rubi was there and, to tease her, I announced I would name my cat after her boyfriend Alex. It was a formality and never stuck.

The time of my departure drew closer, and I began to think about Gatito’s future. I had doubts about his ability to survive. The orphanage closed down for the summer and no one would remain on the property. There was no one I trusted to care for the cat. After some begging and pleading, I was able to wrest permission from my parents to bring him to the U.S.

This brought on a whole new set of problems. How would I get him across the border? I asked around and was told that he needed to have his rabies vaccination, but other than that he should be fine. No one was quite sure. I saw to it that he got his vaccinations and that I had the papers to prove it. On a quick trip to Texas I got a cat carrier. It was gray with a “live animals” sticker in large bright green letters on the outside. That was all I could do. If they didn’t let him past, I would have to let him go at the border. It was a four-hour drive there and there was nothing else to do. I took a chance.

I was in a van with Mae and Beni, her adopted son, who was also driving. I felt bad because the cat cried the entire time. He hated the cat carrier, a hatred that he never got over his entire life. I wondered how irritated Beni was, even though he never said anything. We got to the border sometime during the early morning hours. (Mae had decided that we should leave at night—around 11 or so.) The guards glanced at the van briefly, shone their lights on the back seat, where I was sitting with the cat carrier prominently displayed beside me, and waved us through. And so Gatito arrived in the United States—legal, but barely so.

He spent the night in the garage, making a mess on some old clothes that were lying on the ground there. I felt bad, but didn’t know what to say. At the airport, I had to give him up to be placed in the spot where they carried cats—I had no idea where. Unfortunately, with the delays in the Houston airport, Mae and I just made our connection to Newark Airport. Our luggage, and our cat, apparently, did not. I think I cried a bit at leaving the airport without my cat.

He arrived at my parents’ house at around one in the morning. The driver who dropped off our luggage informed us that he had cried the entire way there.

Mostly, my parents were shocked at how thin he was. I didn’t quite know how to respond. I had gotten used to his thinness. After some time of living at my parents, however, he became a transformed cat—a good sixteen pounds. He was fat, sleek, and beautiful. Despite the good eating he experienced in the U.S., Gatito still, out of habit, killed and ate whatever he could catch. Most cats will leave a mouse at one’s doorstep, but not Gatito. One night I awoke to hear a crunching sound…it was Gatito, crouching under my bed while he ate the mouse he had caught.

Gatito was the most affectionate cat I have ever met. He craved attention—I’m not sure that it was possible to give him enough attention. He had an impressive purr that wasn’t hard to start up. One would pet him once or twice and he would flop down, belly up. He liked to be around people…He would follow one around constantly. He was a talker, too.

When I got married, it was necessary to leave him with my parents. My mother would call me on the phone and tell me about how he cried all the time and would follow her around very closely. It took him around a year to adjust to the change, I suppose.

Gatito couldn’t quite get used to being an indoor cat. Periodically he would get outside and stay out for a night or two. He had a technique down for getting out. He would lie out lazily on the front porch and wait. Sooner or later, someone would make a mistake. If the door was open, he would wander closer, but not as if he was going anywhere. Then, at the last minute, he would start to speed up. Once he got out, he could take refuge underneath a low spreading blue spruce, where it wasn’t easy to get him. Typically, he would spend time fighting with the neighborhood cats. Often he would come back somewhat bloody and very tired. He would sleep for a day or two and then be back to normal. It was on one of these ventures, I suppose, that he contracted FIV.

There was quite a fuss when we realized what was going on. Gatito could no longer be around my parents’ other cats without a danger of infecting them. By then, CJ and I were no longer living in an apartment and had no excuse not to take him. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Gatito, but I knew CJ wasn’t overly fond of cats and that this would not be an easy sell. It wasn’t. I actually had to promise to sweep and mop the house on a regular basis, agree that the cat would go if he got out more than 3 times, and agree that we would not spend thousands of dollars on drug cocktails for a sickening cat. We would be a cat hospice, CJ said.
I also knew that I wasn’t as attached to him as I once was and that if he came, I would get attached once again. I remember complaining mildly that he would come, I would grow deeply attached to him, he would die, and that it would hurt.

At the very least, I managed to work it out so that my mother brought him down to me. I was sure the cat would never make it down to Maryland if CJ had to put up with six hours of a crying cat. And so Gatito arrived.

It took him a year to fully adjust to living here. He panicked when visitors came. He would hide, upstairs or downstairs, switching from one to the other with a dash. If he was feeling very brave, and only after a time, he would sit at the top of the basement stairs, where he could see what was going on, but be able to escape quickly. CJ and he did not adjust quickly to each other, as well. Or maybe they did, in their own way, and I didn’t recognize it as such. CJ would scare the cat and he would run. At least after awhile, the running away wasn’t too serious. Scamper was a better word. And he wouldn’t run from me easily…if I got too close he would simply flop down, belly up.

Gatito wasn’t discriminatory in accepting affection. He would request it from CJ without a qualm and, eventually, CJ gave in. It is hard to argue when a sixteen-pound cat crawls into your lap, purring. We never minded him once he settled down; it was the settling down process that was frustrating. He would have to knead his paws and turn round and round before he settled down.

Gatito also required playtime. He would race up and down the stairs, mrowing. This was known as “Jungle Cat” mode. If he was being chased, he would race all the way up to the top and dive behind the plant stand, where he could get his back into a corner and slash out with his claws. Slash was a game that had started back in New York. There it was always played on an office chair. If the cat drew blood, he won; if he fell off, the human won. In Maryland the stakes were higher in that slash was played on the open staircase. It added an element of danger that made the game that much more interesting. He only fell once, a few weeks ago. I was on the stairs and CJ was on the lower stairs. Of course we didn’t let him actually fall, but he would have fallen.

Once Gatito fully adjusted, he also requested affection from visitors. Unfortunately, all of our close friends are allergic to cats. And so Gatito would find himself locked up. He never cared for this. He would tolerate it at night, mostly, but would start crying early in the morning for someone to let him out. On school mornings, I would leave the bedroom, let the cat out, and then have devotions, usually while fighting to keep the cat, along with his ample collection of hair, off of my skirt.

We never let him in the bedroom, hoping to preserve our clothes from cat hairs. He would wait on the back of the couch, right by the bedroom door, or sometimes on the second or third step, about as close to the doorknob as he could get. He would have something to say the second someone left the bedroom. If we were in there too long, he would start crying loudly and insistently. It really messes with the romantic atmosphere when there is a cat crying outside your bedroom door.

For a time I didn’t understand why Gatito preferred certain spots in the house—until I realized that those spots coincided with the heating vents. He also liked the sunny spot on the carpet upstairs in the hallway, the twin bed in the study, and the footstool in the living room. We got a blanket to put on that which, fortunately, he liked.

The easy way to shut Gatito up at night (in the basement, that is) was to go downstairs and give him food. He would usually accompany me down, talking loudly all the way down. Like most cats, he never thought he had enough food. He also had a funny way of accompanying one down the stairs. He never traveled in a straight line at those times. His path had to cross mine, at least twice. Sometimes I tripped. I think he liked contact with me, even if it was getting stepped on.

If we went away for a few days, we would leave him in charge of the house. It always took him a few days to recover from those trips. He would periodically forget that we had returned and start crying loudly. I would call to him and remind him that I was there and he would quiet down.

When I came home from school, he was typically on the upper half of the steps to greet me, low enough so he could see through the open staircase, but high enough to survey his domain from above. Of course he could never be that proud for long. If I was making dinner in the kitchen, he was underfoot.

Once I didn’t go inside, but stayed out talking to my neighbor in her yard. I happened to look up, and I was being spied upon. Gatito sat in an upstairs window, watching. I’m certain he was offended that I wasn’t inside talking to him.

He discovered a love for the liquid form the tuna fish can. After awhile, he thought any can that was being opened was for him, and would have quite a lot to say about it. I would take the can to the laundry room and set it down, and he would clean it up.

One day, I came downstairs to find what could only be vomit on the floor. I think that was a Saturday morning. By Sunday night it was thick and green, and I knew the end was coming. I couldn’t sleep Sunday night. Finally I gave it up and went upstairs. I hadn’t locked the cat up, since he wasn’t feeling well. He crawled right into my lap and settled down, purring. I must have sat on the bed with him for an hour, holding him and crying.

A hard four days followed. I cried Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I took him to the vet on Tuesday, only to find that there was no easy answer and that I would need to leave him there. I couldn’t believe how much it hurt to leave him. He cried once as they carried him away. I didn’t stop crying all the way home.

Wednesday I got an e-mail from CJ at school. It wasn’t looking good. We met at the vet with the idea that this would be it. But it wasn’t—the vet wanted to try one other thing. Well, he wanted to try lots of things, but we rejected some of them—the sonogram, for instance. And so we went home again, still in limbo.
I hadn’t brought the cat carrier that day, thinking it was going to be the end, but I brought it on Thursday, maybe hoping against hope. It takes a long time to arrive at the decision to put an animal to sleep, even though it was clear to us that that is what would probably happen. The temptation is to stretch it out—wanting one more day to hope for what will not happen.

During the time that I was there, the vet left the room a couple of times, and I got to hold Gatito one more time, to pet him, to rub his belly, and to make him purr. He lay in my lap—he always was a nice lap warmer. I explained to him in Spanish what was going to happen. Afterwards I wasn’t sure if I should have told him. They make you sign a paper when you want your pet euthanized. Soon after they took him away. This time he didn’t cry.

I cried hysterically on the way home. I screamed, “I killed my cat!” and cried some more. I brought the cat carrier inside with me. I wanted to smash it. It was horrible being at home. I would see something out of the corner of my eye and think it was the cat, coming to pay me a visit and ask for attention. Or I would sit on the couch to have devotions and think I heard him crying to be let out of the basement. Only I would know he wasn’t. I look at the basement stairs, empty now, and can hardly believe that he will never patter down them again, weaving back and forth, hoping for a touch from me.

Part II

The fact that I described myself as wanting to give into the temptation to keep him alive one more day is not to say that I didn’t think God could heal my cat. I know God could have healed my cat. However, I didn’t ask Him. What I did pray for was wisdom for CJ and myself and that I wouldn’t get angry with CJ. I have to say that God completely answered that prayer. As much as it hurt to have the whole thing drag on another day, when we came home on Wednesday, it was clear to me that we had made the right decision. There was an option to try that was not enormously expensive and, while we didn’t think it would work, it seemed appropriate to try. CJ made that decision and I think it was the right one. I went to the vet alone on Thursday and I wonder if God didn’t work that out so that I would be the one to make the final decision. The anger I felt afterwards was directed at myself, and not at CJ.

Why didn’t I ask God to heal Gatito? That’s a hard question to answer. The answer might start in the private school or Sunday school classroom. When one has listened to so many prayer requests about “my aunt’s friend’s cat’s tail”, one may think a bit more about what one prays about. Maybe it bothers me, too, that we have a two-page prayer request list at church that deals mostly with physical ailments. It isn’t wrong to pray for them, but should that be our main focus? What about my spiritual needs, let alone the needs of the church, let alone all those unsaved people shopping in the center across from the church…

The second part of my answer has more to do with the way God works with us. Death is part of life on earth. It comes no matter what we do to avoid it. It is interesting to note that we don’t know at all that it was the FIV that killed the cat. The vet suspected congestive heart failure. The FIV wasn’t necessarily the death sentence, but the heart problem was. The vet said he would never again be a healthy cat. Even if God had healed the cat, he still would have died eventually, unless Jesus had come back first. Would we ask God to grant immortality to a cat?

It almost seems like experiencing the death of a beloved pet is part of being an adult and learning to deal with death. I think I learned something through this, and I think God wanted me to learn it. “It is better to be in a house of mourning…” I think God intends to use this in my life.

1) I learned that it is difficult to leave someone you love in a hospital. It is common to hear at church that so-and-so is in the hospital. I never before associated much pain with that, but for every person who has been left at a hospital or similar institution, there are probably people in pain. There is fear when someone you care about is sick enough to not be at home. There is fear that they will never come home.

2) Rather than asking why, it occurs to me that one may be thankful for the gift you were given. I was given 8 years with a beautiful cat with a wonderful personality. I never met a cat like him. I loved him, and he loved me. What an amazing gift. Is it worth going through the pain I went through this week? Of course it is!

3) I learned what emotional pain is like. It isn’t sharp like physical pain. It’s more like your heart or the seat of your emotions is getting squeezed. It leads to things like hysterical sobbing. It’s what makes me state that there is Gatito shaped hole in my heart. It hurts.

4) I learned that one needs to go on through the pain. It is a bad idea—even a dangerous idea—to let myself go when I am waiting on something. I knew that going on was the best idea. I still had devotions, I prayed about what was going on, and I kept the house clean. I continued working at school. Maybe the biggest breakthrough was Tuesday night, where I forced myself to think about what an illustrated children’s version of the story of Barak and Sisera would be like, and refused to let myself dwell on what was going to happen to the cat. That drive translated to more productive times at school as well.

5) I guess I learned something about the stages of grief. I really did go through some anger. For a while I was having real difficulty coping with the fact that I had signed a paper allowing my cat to be killed. It’s funny because I don’t feel that way right now—it’s only a memory. Even at the time, I knew the decision was right and logical, but the emotions are very powerful. One has to maintain some rationality even in grief. Smashing the cat carrier would not have been appropriate. Nor was it appropriate to keep saying, “I killed my cat.” CJ told me not to say that, and he was right.

CJ said at one point that I should “internalize” what I was feeling. He meant that I should remember these things, especially when I interact with people who are hurting. Now I have an experience as an adult dealing with death. Of course the loss of a cat is nothing compared to the loss of a person. But this experience will have more value if I can learn from it—and if I must go through it, I want it to be useful.

I survived it, and that’s something. I had some conversation with the teacher across the hall from me this week. At one point I suggested that adversity does make one stronger—whatever doesn’t crush you makes you stronger (the testing of your faith?) and, as I told her, I won’t be crushed. Today she told me that I grieve well…on the way home, it occurred to me to hope wryly that I wouldn’t have many opportunities to practice.

Sometimes I wonder why…when some great event happens, something inside me asks God, “What do you want of me?” The answer that comes to me the soonest is from Micah 6:8: “And what does the Lord require of you? To walk justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” And that’s it.