My Lizzie 1997 - 2014

Elizabeth entered my life in 1997 while I was working at the animal clinic. I was on my way to work when I saw a fuzz ball of some sort that somebody had ran over on the road in Purvis. I made sure my tires wouldn’t hit whatever it was (I hate hitting animals even if they are already dead) but just as my hood went over it, I saw it pick up its head. It was a tiny kitten and it was alive. I pulled over quickly and made the traffic stop so nobody else would hit it and picked it up. It hissed at me. I grinned. We had a fighter on our hands. It might just have a chance.

I wrapped it in an old towel I had in my car and hauled ass to the vet with my flashers on. For all I knew it had internal injuries and was bleeding out which is not a pleasant way to die. I wanted to at least make its last moments as comfortable as I could if it was dying. When I got to the vet’s office, Dr. B was sitting at the surgery table and had just gotten through with an examination. I thrust the towel covered kitten at her with wild eyes and said, “Somebody hit it.” She said, “Is it yours?” I said, “No, I just saw that it was still alive and brought it.” She unwrapped the cat and started looking at it. The cat hissed and spit the whole time. She said, “Its eyes may be ruptured. There’s too much swelling to tell right now. It has a lot of head contusions.” We x-rayed the kitten and her right back hip was broken. Dr. B said that with animals that small and light, unless the bone was shattered or displaced, they let the bone heal on its own without surgery or a cast. She said that she wanted to keep the kitten overnight, give it some pain medicine, antibiotics and we’d see how it was in the morning. She said, “Cindy, it may be blind.” I said, “Okay.” I gave it some wet food and water, a litter pan and a fluffy blanket to sleep on and checked on it through out my shift. It was sleeping and still but still alive. I left for the day at 6:30.

When I came back the next morning, the cat was up walking around in the cage, the wet food was gone and the litter pan had been used. It had its eyes open and was meowing at me. “Give me breakfast,” it seemed to say. I did. It ate it. Dr. B came in and looked it over. She said, “Other than the broken hip which will heal on its own, she just has some cuts and scrapes. Her eyes are fine and she needs to be wormed.” She looked to be about 6 weeks old. I took her home and named her Elizabeth, which got shortened to Lizzie.

Lizzie was not a normal cat. I blamed it on the head trauma of the car tires but that cat would fall asleep on the hood of people’s cars and if it started raining, she would stay on the hood of the car, sleeping. I found her playing, elbow deep in the goldfish pond one day, trying to catch a fish. The water bothered her not at all. She would walk up to you and hit you so hard with the flat part of her head, she’s knocked things out of my lap and hands with that hello head butt.

She was an alpha cat and had a mean streak a mile wide. She wanted you to scratch her and she didn’t want any soft petting either; a real good scratch around the ears and head but only for so long or she would bite you. When you scratched her, she drooled from the sides of her mouth. It could make for a mess if she wanted lots of scratches that day. She was the only cat I had there for a while and when I adopted other cats, she let them know right quick like who was in charge. She’d start flicking her ears back and she’d hunker down, then she’d tag them, either with claw or with tooth. For no reason other than she felt like it. MEAN.

She always sat on her left hip and cocked the right one out or let the right leg hang off of whatever she was sitting on. Something didn’t heal perfectly with the hip but she didn’t limp and was still lightning fast. She caught a hummingbird one day. I still haven’t figured out how she accomplished that but she did.

She started losing weight this year and I’d wormed her twice and changed her diet more than once to no avail. She was still eating, still the same mean Lizzie, loving a hard, head scratch but she was going deaf. If she didn’t SEE me put food in her bowl, she couldn’t hear it hitting the metal bowl anymore and would sit there watching me like, “Are you going to feed me or not?” I would have to empty the food back into the container and “feed” her again with her watching before she would eat it. She wigged the hell out in cars and I honestly didn’t want to put her through a ride to the vet since she seemed to have no other symptoms besides losing weight so I was wrestling with what to do and I changed her food one last time on Tuesday. I think I hit the jackpot this time because she was already looking better. Then today happened.

It had to have been a dog and a large one at that, not a coyote, because it grabbed her by the back, right behind her front paws and you could see where the saliva from its muzzle matted her fur. The muzzle on the dog was wider than my hand judging by the width of the matted fur. It happened sometime today in broad day light and as far as I knew up until today, we didn’t have any dogs that roamed the neighborhood. Whatever it was, it got the fight of its life from Lizzie, even though it was able to grab her without her noticing, because the ground was tore up all around her body; she gave at good as she got. Her claws were still out when I found her but she was gone. She left my life just like she entered it, fighting. Whatever grabbed her broke her back so I hope her death was quick and she didn’t suffer. My only regret is that I wasn’t with her when she died. I hate that she died alone. My girl is gone.

I dug her grave and buried her and lost it when I came inside. Precious, mean girl. Seventeen years. I know that she and Chip, my Boston Terrier that loved her so hard too and who died in 2008, are together and he is probably chasing her in circles like he used to do. My babies. They are gone so soon.