Tonight was so hard. Around nine in the evening I heard the dogs go running and the scream of a kitten. I ran from my office as fast as I could. It is so frustratingly hard to get from behind my desk into the front yard. It’s inches away but the distance on foot is ridiculous with so many turns. I was too late. I found Clive in the darkness with Chocolate Milk in his mouth as he was trying to kill her. I got her out of his mouth and she went flying. As far as we know, the other dogs never got to her.
She fled and went to the neighbors. We searched for a while and finally found her. She seemed okay, scared for sure, but moving okay. Her dad came to watch over her, but she kept disappearing. After an hour Liesl came running to get me, they had found her laying in the grass behind the garage. She was barely able to move. Barely able to breath. It was clear he had punctured internal organs. We had already scheduled a vet for the morning, thinking that she seemed just fine or maybe a little limp. We weren’t able to catch her and she didn’t seem injured at first. But once Luciana had found her out back, it was bad.
We called every emergency vet that we could find and got one that started heading towards us, but it was too late. We got Dr. Jorge on the phone eventually too, but he mostly just was able to tell us how to check for vitals. We spent probably thirty minutes all standing around her crying watching her shallow breathes, the occasional cough or gasp, but there was no hope. Long before the vet arrived, her heart and breathing stopped. It was heart-wrenching. Not just losing such a sweet little baby, but also the timing. Just last night she had gone from timid and always avoiding us to playing with the girls like a comfortable house cat. She had totally changed and loved playing with us. Liesl had been sending me so many videos of her playing in the house last night. Exactly twenty four hours before she died. She had come into our yard tonight to get to the girls in the house to play like last night, but last night the dogs had been locked up. Tonight they were loose and found the kitten in the yard.
The girls were petting her and talking to her as she passed. Dominica and I stood with them in the darkness with flashlights as she passed away. This is so hard, the girls don’t remember Oreo dying. We weren’t with him at the time. We were in Italy, having been away for months and he was with my dad. He was old and died of heart failure that we knew would take him one day. And the girls were very little, Luciana barely over a year! Luciana has no memory of Oreo, Liesl only a tiny bit. He was old and blind for them and they had been away from him for so long when he died that it wasn’t so painful. But it kept Dominica and I from having another pet for much of the girls’ childhoods.
But this, this is the first death of a pet for both of the girls. This is going to be hard. This is going to be a searing memory for the rest of their lives. I remember so many cats that died back on the farm. This is so much easier to remember. They are older, and they spent so much time with Chocolate Milk. They are really struggling with processing this. They’ve been shielded from this kind of pain for so long. It’s so awful.
Luis, the night guard, and I (but almost entirely Luis) buried Chocolate Milk in a grave on the north side of the bitter orange tree that provided shade on the garage where Chocolate Milk spent her life. She’s buried just two meters from where she spent her life, just on the other side of the garage wall where she will likely never be disturbed. Right by the French drain where we first discovered the three little kittens huddled together for safety.
This will be one of the hardest days in my daughters’ memories. Sixty years from now, they will remember this clearly. This is going to be a pain they never lose. It’s so hard seeing them feel that pain that I remember from so long ago, and feel again today. It’s never easier losing a pet, a life you loved and cared for and tried to protect.
Marcela is very sad too. She was so excited to be getting Chocolate Milk. She loves cats and she had this one picked out for many months and had just played with her yesterday and was ready to take her home.