Dealing with loss on the road

Penny and Demi were an important part of my life, it was devastating to lose both my beloved cats to a fire while I am travelling

Demi is on my sister Barb’s lap, Penny and Max are on the ottoman in Barb’s Ottawa apartment a few days before I left for Europe in late August.

I was at a laverie in Montpellier, France, Saturday morning, planning on a leisurely day getting ready for the next leg of my European adventure, when my sister Judie called. “What are you doing right now?”

“Laundry. Why?”

It was about noon in France, which meant it was 6 a.m. in Ottawa. That should have set off a mental alarm, but my bells are apparently jet-lagged.

Judie works in long-term care. She knows how to deliver an upsetting message. “I have some bad news for you. There was a fire at Barb’s place. She is okay, but Penny and Demi are dead.”

My heart skipped a beat. Barb is my youngest sister. When I was planning my trip, she graciously, generously agreed to take in “my girls”—4-year-old Penny and 12-year-old Demi—while I was away. It was a huge relief to know that my fellow cat-loving sibling would take them in, even though she already had her own ward, 12-year-old, Max. But I knew she’d love them as much as I do. I even worried it would be hard for her to give them up when I came back.

But it turned out the heartache for both of us was destined to be much worse.

The fire had started in the recycling storage area behind her 4-unit apartment block at about 7 p.m. ET Friday. It was just starting to spread to the building when she pulled into the back lot. She couldn’t enter from the back, so she pulled out to the street then opened the front door and called for the cats. It would have been foolish to do anything more. Neighbours had already called the fire department, all she could do was wait and worry as she watched her home go up in flames with three innocent little creatures trapped inside.

Max—Miracle Max as she now calls him—was recovered by firefighters, drenched and soot-soaked. He had somehow found a spot away from the worst of the smoke. Firefighters found Demi and Penny, too. They had removed their bodies and they were wrapped up at the side of the house. Swallowing her sorrow, Barb opened the wrappings to verify it was the girls, pet them, and say goodbye.

A CTV report said the Ottawa Fire Service had tried to revive one of them, but was unsuccessful. The other (we don’t know which) was DOA. I don’t want to dig too deep into this—some questions may be best left unanswered, images left unimagined—but I was relieved that they both appear to have died of smoke inhalation rather than fire. The alternative would have been just too much to bear, my dreams haunted for years by thoughts of their fright amid the flames.

Miracle Max survived unscathed.

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Charlie (the dog!) and Euphony were a match in more ways that one. I adopted Euphony when she was a 8-week-old kitten. She was born in 1993 and lived until the age of 18. Her sister Harmony lived to 16.

I adopted my first cat 30 years ago, my second a few days days later. They were sisters, both “tortoise shells,” a mix of two colours, usually black and cream or gold (never white) and which are almost always female. It’s not a breed (since only 1-in-10,000 is male, and the males are sterile … you do the math) but a colouring. And I love those colours. My first girls, Harmony and Euphony, were with me for 16 and 18 years. They share the records for being the longest relationships I’ve ever had, excluding family. But they are family, and I remember their passing like it was yesterday. Both were euthanized after becoming ill, and I stayed with them at the vet’s office until the end, stroking their heads as their respiration slowed then finally stopped.

Penny and Demi were alone this week when they stopped breathing. That thought took me back to the worst of the pandemic, when hundreds of thousands of people died alone, frightened but unable to hear the soothing voice of a loved one and feel them stroke their brows. We lost both my parents in that horrible year, and I have always been so enormously grateful that neither left this world alone, that their children were able to be at their bedsides right until their final breaths.

Penny (left) and Demi loved sharing the best nap spots.

I adopted Penny from a rescue organization in December 2019, just a few months before the covid lockdown. She would join Demi, whom I had rescued from a Point St-Charles back alley in 2011. I already had two cats at the time I added Demi to the mix. The cute tortie kitten who would come to my back porch to beg for tuna had wormed her way into my heart.

“Tu as combien de chats?” someone asked me around the time was debating taking her in. “Bien, deux.” I hesitated, then added “… et demi.” When I took her to the vet to get her spayed a few weeks later, he told me “don’t worry, she is just a very small cat. Otherwise she is perfectly healthy.”

That settled it, my half cat was baptized Demi.

Demi, the shoulder cat.

When I was living in a more suburban area of Verdun for a while, I would let Demi roam outside, since there was no appreciable traffic. She had a tag with my phone number on it, tho, so I often got calls from people telling me they had found my “kitten.” They would inevitably turn out to live around the block. “Will you come get her?” I would laugh. “No, just let her out of your house, she knows the way home.”

When Demi’s buddy Boonie passed in late 2019, she acted distressed. Demi would walk from room to room, calling out like she expected a reply. So it didn’t take long before I was looking at websites of local rescue organizations, searching for another tortie.

Demi didn’t take it well after Boonie passed.

What can I say? I have a type.

The agencies were pushing their older cats, understandably. They are much harder to place. If I hadn’t just spent a small fortune in vet bills trying to keep Boonie alive, I might have been amenable. But, no, I told myself I had to adopt a kitten because I wanted to avoid big vet bills for the foreseeable future.

Ha!

Wait, I am jumping ahead of myself. Back to Penny, or Pénélope, as her adoption papers call her.

So I took in this adorable tortie kitten that had been part of a wild litter found in the hill country north of Montréal. As soon as I let her out of the cage at my place, she ran into the bathroom and squeezed under a vanity cabinet that was impossible to move.

Checkmate.

So I placed food and water near the vanity and waited it out. That night I closed the bathroom door so she wouldn’t find a new hidey-hole when I went to bed. The next day, she was less spooked, and I finally coaxed her out. As I sat on the bathroom floor in my sweatpants and placed her on my lap, she broke out into a sweet purr.

I would never tire of that sound, even months later when she would repeatedly plop into my arms in the middle of Zoom meetings. (Trigger warning: 3 minute purring video)

So my coworkers got used to me Zooming while a cat climbed into my arms and started purring up a storm. She even photobombed several of the TV interviews I had done when media were calling me almost daily to discuss covid and its effects on people like my parents, who had both been at the infamous Herron long-term care home in Dorval.

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Forward to June 2021. My current Verdun apartment is in an area with lots of car traffic and alley cats, so I had decided to keep the girls indoor. The one exception was that I allowed them out on the back balcony when I was out there myself to keep an eye on them. They never ventured far anyway, tho Penny like to go down the fire escape and into the downstairs neighbour’s apartment. Xavier, the neighbour, hates cats, especially mine, who he says run around like elephants in the middle of the night. Yes, Demi, weighing in at 3 kilos, the world’s smallest elephant.

So when Penny snuck into Xavier’s apartment one day after he left the back door wide open, Xavier thought that running after her and yelling was a good way to get her to leave quietly. Trying to teach him anything about cats was pointless. He thought I could just train them to sleep all night and save the running for while he was at work. I told him he should find an apartment that either has concrete floors or no upstairs neighbour. I even clipped out apartment ads for him and put them in his mailbox.

Anyway, one day when I was distracted, Penny also got distracted and fell from the third floor balcony onto an exposed metal futon frame that the ground-level neighbour had left right on Penny’s flight path. Now cats are famous for miraculous safe landings, but not even Nadia Comăneci could have landed this one. The slats made it impossible to find a soft landing, as I discovered when I heard a plaintive cry from the ground floor.

I went down the stairs and found Penny on the lower balcony. She was making a sound I’d only heard once before, when she thought she’d become lost.

“Come on up,” I said as I tried to coax her back up the stairs. That’s when I saw she couldn’t put weight her right hind leg. It slowly dawned on me that she’d fallen. And just to make things worse, it was the Fête National holiday and most vets were closed.

Waiting at the emergency vet a while later, we saw a dog who had just had a front leg amputated. “See, it could be worse,” I told Penny, confident that she either hadn’t understood or had gotten used to my awkward jokes. I left her under sedation with the vet, who called to confirm that x-rays showed several fractures in a cat version of a broken ankle. Cast for six weeks, total cost likely to be $2,000, no guarantee she will get full function back.

So much for my dream of avoiding vet bills for a decade. There was no choice, of course. I got out my credit card.

Have you ever seen a cat in a cast? You will now, if you look at my attached videos. Poor Penny came back with me from the vet drugged up, her neck pinched in one of those medieval cat collars, and dragging a full-length leg cast that seemed to weigh more than Demi.

I have never seen a more miserable cat. Not just hobbled, but robbed of peripheral vision and unable to drink or eat without engaging in contortions that would tie Mister Fantastic in knots.

Off with her head … restraint! That was the first advice I got from my friend Georgia, a cat connaisseuse who said it didn’t matter that the vets were trying to keep Penny from gnawing at the cast. I had called Georgia in a panic, unable to watch any more suffering but wanting to do what was best for Penny. (I shot these videos so that Georgia could see what was happening. I never thought about them again until this week.)

“Take it off. If she gnaws at the cast, worse case you get them to put on a new one. Best case, she’s happier and she doesn’t chew at the cast.”

Score one for Georgia. Don’t solve problems until they are actually problems.

The next problem, Penny and I had to figure out on our own. How to pee on three legs with a fourth leg sticking out like the counterjib of a construction crane. I say we, but I was just the cheerleader. The next two videos show you how much of a genius Penny was. Despite her huge stress levels after failing several time, she pondered the problem for a few seconds then figured it out on her own as I literally cheered out loud (sorry, that’s not on the tape 😃 ).

When the cast finally came off, Penny’s back leg was severely atrophied. It didn’t look like she’d ever walk normally again. The vet told me to give her physical therapy. “How do I do that?” She told me to Google it, I’d learn better than if she just told me how.

So I did. I gave my cat physical therapy for weeks and within a few months, you’d never know Penny had ever been hurt. Everyone was ecstatic except tiny Demi, who had been relieved at the three-month break from being chased around the apartment by an alleged elephant.

That had always been their “thing.” Penny was smaller than Demi for a few months and so Demi didn’t mind the wrestling at first. But when Penny got bigger, well, it was like watching a strapping teenage girl chase her 5-foot maiden aunt around the house while taunting her to rassle.

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I couldn’t be with my girls in their final hours, so I just wanted to share a few of the stories that show why they were such an integral part of my life. We went through a lot together over the years and they have cheered me up at some of my lowest points, including while dealing with my parents’ healthcare nightmares.

Penny, in particular, seemed to sense when I was down and would push herself into my arms whether I was at my desk or on the couch. She’d also nudge Demi out of my arms when she thought I was giving her too much love.

Is there really any such thing, tho? Too much love?

Our animals give us the answer to that question every day.

All I know is that I will miss the girls very much and this column is my small way to thank them for sharing their too short lives with me. It’s also written for me, of course. Thanks for coming along on the walk.

LAST WORD: A compilation of some of my favourite Demi and Penny moments.