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Hi guys, I just want to officially memorialize my mother's cat Lola, who I did live with for nearly 7 years when I was still a teenager, which is no small amount of time! I mean, I'm 34 now, so it seems like a very long time ago - and I suppose it was. Lola was a very long-lived cat - she was 23 years old (very nearly 24 actually and closer to that age!) when she passed away a couple weeks ago, which definitely made her the oldest cat that I ever knew or encountered at all. I moved out west this past December, and the last time I saw Lola she was still looking exactly the same as she'd always looked - the same as she looks in that pic down there. Her fur might have felt a bit more brittle than it did a few years back, and she didn't seem nearly as prone to darting around for no reason at all, something she did for a very a long time. But she was still the same old Lola, just as affectionate-yet-aloof as ever. I've talked about Lola a bit before on here. She was a feral kitten with a broken leg when my mom found her, left behind by her mom and siblings and fairly close to dying. After a vet visit, my mom nursed her back to health over a period of several months, and was very dedicated about it; I was an idiotic ~11-year-old at the time and was probably much more concerned with avoiding doing my homework and thinking about the possibility of looking at pornography. I remember actually feeling vaguely annoyed at the time, just because it took up a lot of my mom's attention that might otherwise be spent on me, but again, I was 11 and did not understand at all. Lola was very much bonded to my mother after that, and was very skittish with just about everyone else - including me. I wasn't too happy about this either, because when Lola was finally a bit more like a house-cat and less like a feral cat, she still only liked my mother and would hiss at me and scratch when I tried to approach her. It was not a great fit, but Lola learned and got nicer, largely from the influence of an older black kitty named Fidel my mother got. I remember the two of them as always being together, even though Fidel died 10 years ago. Lola has just *always* been there for my mom, though, and I've always been happy of that. And after the first few years, the last twenty years of knowing Lola has been great. It was very sudden - she got very sick very quickly, and with her age there wasn't much choice. Again, she wasn't... MY pet per se, but she was definitely OUR pet, and it was devastating to hear she was just.. gone. She's just always, always been there whenever I'd visit my mom - she would always greet me with the same happy chirp, the same triple-brush against my legs before she would let me pet her... She was always skinny too, despite being free-fed dry food AND getting extra wet food she never gained weight. She was never a mean cat either, please don't get that sense - she was incredibly sweet. She just would get overstimulated like a lot of cats after ~90 seconds of intense petting/purring, and she was never very good at holding back when it came to her scratches - she only scratched one way, and it went deep and drew a lot a lot of blood. Again, I was a kid and I really did not "get" what it was all about. Thinking about it all now, it really makes me aware of just what a saint my mother is - and she absolutely is - in that she's one of those people who is just... She can't not willingly give of herself, so of course she had to save Lola and take her to the vet and take her home and nurse her back to health and pay for it all without a single grumble or complaint. while also being a single mother raising two kids and working full time. The pic below is quintessential Lola, it's how she's always look for decades, literally! I know she was somewhere between 17 and 19 when that pic was taken, but I'm not sure when... That's her eternal expression, too - very inscrutable. It's crazy, though, when I look at this picture. Because my mom did save this frail little half-dead kitten, she lived for nearly 24 very happy years, sneaking through gardens in the summer, lazy naps in the haze, cuddling with grateful humans in front of fires. That's a pretty lovely way to look at it, honestly  LOLA  1997 ~ 2020
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May 19, 2020 07:54
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 17:06 |
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