Rescue is a never-ending tug of war between life and death.
Let even one small cat pull your heartstrings, and you are in it.
You will be deliriously happy, wide awake to what you were born for.
You will be wounded, muddied, and yanked to the brink of your own strength.
Your gladness and grief will be too tangled to separate.
Lose one, and you lose the other. Live with both, and you can never lose everything.
But some days, you really need a win.
Every day is a “win” at Tabby’s Place. We are surrounded by one hundred fifty unprecedented lives.
The cats are legends and icons who scoot across the floor like sovereign Swiffers, or bask in our arms like cherubs. They gallop our Lobby for the sheer joy of existence.
They hug us back like orangutans. They gaze at us like we are sunrise. They purr at the frequency that heals us. They hiss at us and fart at us with serene confidence that they cannot lose our love.
They look to us for survival, salmon lollipops, and insulin.
We look at each other and ask, “do we really get to do this again today? How did we get so lucky, or blessed, or whatever word captures the dream of all this loving?”
We are astonished alchemists who get to turn our love into lives saved.
Except when we don’t.
Grief has a habit of clobbering us in waves at Tabby’s Place, like an imp storing up icy snowballs until he has enough for an ambush. Sorrows could scar our days single-file, but they tend to come in sixes and sevens rather than ones and twos.
So it was at the start of June.
First came the inconveniences, mincing but manageable.
Ringworm broke out in Quinn’s Corner, then Suite D, then Suite E. We felt badly for the cats who had to enter quarantine, complete with undignified baths in lime sulfur. We grumbled over the meticulous containment protocols throughout the building.
Still, we are more rugged and rowdy than ringworm. No skin fungus keeps our staff from kissing the afflicted. Clifford, Chester, and Nier would come through their treatments just fine.
Little did we know the red flakes of ringworm were just the color guard for a coming parade of pain.
Corduroy‘s seizures increased in fervor and frequency, at times so violent he tore out his own toenails.
Carson, whose soul was just starting to heal from losing her home and person, was diagnosed with the same vicious cancer that took the original Tabby (Tabby’s Place’s namesake).
Feral-born Cupcake, a trembling pastel confection in need of comfort, developed an aggressive carcinoma.
Trent made the executive decision that Giovanni‘s existence was some terrible cosmic mistake, and attempted to correct it. Hourly.
And then, a ragged scrap of grey burlap arrived.
The stray seemed to have been torn off the edge of the world. Was that really a cat behind those sunken eyes? A dim light flickered from somewhere at the back of Graham’s soul. He was still with us, and that was all we needed to know to promise we would be with him, no matter what.
But his diagnosis was devastating: parvo, also known as panleukopenia or distemper. The mortality rate is high, treatment is delicate and difficult, and the risks are steep.
If the boy inside those birdlike bones was going to have any hope at all, we would need to establish an uncompromising protocol of disease control, to protect all the other cats. It would be a grueling team effort, all for one cat who was unlikely to make it.
But it was too late for any calculations.
Graham was ours, which meant we were his.
Meanwhile, the hits kept coming.
Continued tomorrow…