Of the six cats we've had, Earle was the only one who introduced herself by name.
Sometime before 2006, My Lovely Wife had become telephone friends with a woman in Hillsdale, Michigan, with whom she played online games, but they had never met in person. The woman's name was Earle (pronounced "Early"), apparently because her father had wanted a boy. (Her sisters' names were Winifred and Honora; it's best not to ask too many questions.)
Earle lived alone in a little apartment with her cat, Prissy. Earle was obese, she smoked a lot, and she was in generally poor health. Prissy and the Internet were just about all she had. One day when they were chatting, Earle told MLW that she was planning to have Prissy put to sleep should anything happen to Earle, because she didn't know who in the world would take her in and give her the kind of attention to which she was accustomed.
"That's crazy," MLW told her. "I'll take your cat if anything happens to you."
"You promise?"
"I promise."
In April of 2006, we traveled from our home in Akron to Lansing to visit My Lovely Wife's father, who was recovering from a minor stroke. MLW contacted Earle and offered to swing by Hillsdale on the way home so they could meet at last. Earle excitedly agreed.
The afternoon before we were to leave for Hillsdale and home, MLW called Earle's number to confirm she was ready for our visit. However, a man answered the phone -- a first. After MLW confirmed she had the right number, the man identified himself as a police officer and said he regretted to inform MLW that Earle had been found dead in her apartment that morning.
The officer handed the phone to Earle's sister Honora, who had identified the body and was taking care of the onerous business that comes with the sudden death of a close relative. Honora said Earle apparently had had a heart attack in the bathroom while getting ready for bed, and had died on the bathroom floor. MLW expressed her condolences and explained her relationship with Earle and how we had intended to visit the next day. She got Honora's number, hung up and told me the stunning news.
There was nothing for us to do now but go home. As we neared the exit that might have taken us to Hillsdale, MLW told me about the promise she had made to Earle, never expecting to be called upon to make good on it. We kept discussing it beyond the Hillsdale exit all the way to the Michigan-Ohio line. We already had one cat, Buster, who himself had come to us by strange circumstances four months earlier.
"Do we really want to take on another cat?" MLW asked me. A long pause followed.
"You made a promise," I said. "If you make a promise, you should keep it."
"Are you sure?"
"No. But it's the right thing to do."
"I did promise her I'd take care of Prissy ..."
MLW called Honora to tell her about the promise and our intention to keep it if she approved.
She did. I turned the car around and headed back toward Hillsdale.
We arrived at Earle's apartment about an hour later to find it bustling with relatives organizing documents and putting things in boxes. A spring snow was melting on the rail of the balcony as the sun broke through. Honora introduced herself and explained to the others why we were there. All of the relatives were kind and welcoming to us, and no one overtly questioned our legitimacy or our motives.
Family members shared stories with us, including legends of their father as a member of the Brazilian Olympic swim team, and we tried to help with the work in whatever ways we could. My Lovely Wife tried to help someone figure out Earle's computer passwords so her accounts could be closed, but after a while they gave up. It was time for us to go.
Honora said Prissy was lying quietly on top of Earle's body when they found it in the bathroom, but the cat had been hiding under the bed ever since. Honora and a nephew were able to extricate Prissy, and Honora brought her out to us in the living room.
The cat didn't like being in that carrier, and she really didn't like riding in cars. And she let us know it. How such a tiny cat produced such a forceful bellow I'll never know.
"URL! URL! URRRRLL! URRRRRRRRLLLLLL!" The alarm sounded nonstop for the better part of an hour as we crossed into Ohio.
Finally MLW opened the carrier and held the kitty to her chest. She immediately piped down and clung to MLW's neck with her clawless paws. She was quiet for most of the remaining four hours of the drive home.
We both agreed we really didn't like the name Prissy, which didn't seem to fit this cat anyway.
"I want to name her after her mommy," MLW said. "I'm going to call her Little Earle."
"EARL!" the cat announced. And that was that.
Back at home, Buster, the most laid-back cat ever, accepted Little Earle into our home as if she'd always been there. Earle wasn't so accepting of Buster, but he didn't seem to care either way. She would get in his face and hiss and smack him on top of his head, and he would just shrug and walk away. He was three times her size but apparently saw no need to assert his dominance.
Earle reminded me of my mother in that she was small but fierce. Nobody messed with Earle, no matter the size differential and no matter that she had few teeth and no claws, fore or aft.
Three or four months later we adopted Gibby, a kitten who had been abandoned when someone moved out of our neighborhood. In less then seven months, we had gone from being a pet-free household to being Those People With Three Cats. (Now you know the real reason we fled south in late 2006.)
Earle took after her namesake in that she had some chronic health problems. She constantly had a runny nose; the window where she liked to sleep had to be cleaned frequently to remove the ample evidence of her sneezing fits. Her teeth were rotting in her head, and several eventually had to be pulled.
After more than a year we discovered one of her canines (her fangs) was abscessed, so that had to be pulled too, leaving her with a big gap. Her lips didn't know what to do with this new set-up, and as a result she wore a hilarious Elvis snarl for several weeks.
One Sunday night Earle suddenly seemed unable to walk. She dragged herself on her belly toward us across the floor, whimpering. We rushed her to the emergency animal clinic in downtown Decatur. The tech who took her in for an X-ray came out and said to us, "Is Earle yours? Sweetest. Cat. Ever." The X-ray revealed a huge hairball stuck halfway through the opening between her stomach and small intestine. If it didn't pass by morning, she would need surgery to remove it or would die.
We went home and spent an anxious, sleepless night. The next morning she was fine and we took her home, grateful.
Perhaps a year later we learned through X-rays that one of Earle's kidneys had stopped functioning and was beginning to ossify. She was living on one kidney, and when that started to go she would be in real trouble.
Earle had several endearing qualities. Her tiny, disfigured feet sounded like a horse's hooves when she walked across the kitchen's laminate flooring. She didn't play much, but she had a little purple mouse toy that she treated as if it were her kitten. She had a fetish about MLW's computer earphones and would walk around the house with them, vocalizing, in the middle of the night; we had to hide them if we wanted to get any sleep.
She snored -- loudly. One night I thought I heard someone revving a Honda motorcycle engine again and again a couple of blocks away; then I realized it was Earle, asleep in the next room.
She liked to sleep on MLW's shoulder at the computer desk and perch on MLW's hip overnight in bed. And if I ever sat down for more than 30 seconds without this little white-and-gray furball jumping into my lap, I would worry that something was wrong.
She wasn't afraid of the vacuum cleaner but was terrified of the ceiling fan in our bedroom, especially when it was turned off. She often made us laugh when, in the middle of visiting with us in the morning, she would suddenly catch sight of the motionless fan, freeze in place for a moment, then skulk off the bed and out of the room, glancing up at it over her shoulder. We never knew what that was about.
In the fall of 2013 Earle developed what appeared to be another upper respiratory infection, became dehydrated and kept squinting her right eye. One vet at first diagnosed conjunctivitis, but eye drops and antihistamines didn't help very much. We took on the duty of giving her subcutaneous fluids twice a week to keep her hydrated. After three weeks, including Thanksgiving weekend, we decided to have her looked at again. We had a bad feeling about this.
A different vet, Dr. Lloyd, who specializes in cats, checked her out this time. He was concerned because her head seemed to be asymmetrical. He used a little handheld device to check the pressure in her eyes -- that same annoying thing a human eye doctor uses to blow a puff of air onto the cornea. The pressure in her right eye was twice the pressure in her left. He said that might indicate glaucoma, but she had no other symptoms of that disease. In that case, something must be pressing on the eye from behind, he told us. An X-ray might show what that was, he said. He sent us away for an hour because the radiology department was backed up.
We went and did some grocery shopping. When we came back into the vet's office waiting room, I noticed the staff members were looking at us in that certain way. Dr. Lloyd called us back to look at the X-rays.
"First let me show you what a normal head X-ray looks like," he said, and I knew for sure there was bad news. A cat's orbital bone encompasses both the eye and the sinus cavity behind it. The normal X-ray showed a smooth, clean line along the top of the cavity. When he put Earle's X-ray up, it was easy to see that the same area was anything but smooth and clean.
"See how moth-eaten that looks?" he said gently. "Something very destructive is going on in that area. I've seen bacterial infections and even some fungal infections do that kind of damage, but I'd be willing to bet that this is not an infection. We can't know for sure without taking a biopsy, but it seems much more likely this is a tumor -- a squamous cell carcinoma, a soft-tissue cancer that is now eating into the bone."
He offered us a couple of options on how to proceed, but we knew they would be grasping at straws and merely delaying the inevitable, given her failing kidney. Let's do what needs to be done. Right now.
Dr. Lloyd met us in an examination room with Earle in his arms. He passed her over to us while he explained the procedure and had us sign a document. He gave her an injection in her leg and warned us not to let her fall off the exam table because she would be getting very wobbly in the next two or three minutes. He left the room so we could say a private goodbye.
My Lovely Wife picked Earle up and kissed her again and again, tears flowing. I also kissed her on the head and gave her a little scritch. I was moved to take a picture with my phone; I'm not sure why.
The sedative took full effect and Earle went limp, her tongue hanging out of her mouth. MLW gently placed her on her left side on the gray towel on the table. Dr. Lloyd had pierced a vein in Earle's right rear leg with a needle that was attached to a syringe containing a rather large amount of red fluid.
"OK," he said. "Probably before I'm even done administering this ... "
What little breathing we had been able to perceive in her slowed to a stop. Dr. Lloyd put on his stethoscope and listened to her chest and belly for a long time, then nodded. "She's gone," he whispered.
He ever so tenderly helped MLW wrap Earle's body in a little pink blanket and placed it in her carrier. We paid and went home, not saying much.
We laid Earle out on the living room floor and encouraged Gibby and Carney (our latest adoptee) to check her out. We wanted them to smell the dead body and understand she wouldn't be around anymore. Each cat took a turn carefully smelling her. Each recoiled slightly, then turned and casually walked away.
I borrowed a shovel from our next-door neighbor and dug a hole where our birdbath stands in the backyard. It was about as deep as my arm is long. Recent rains had made the clay soft. We found a cardboard box that fit her curled-up body perfectly. We placed her purple "baby" at the end of her nose and closed the box.
With me at her side, My Lovely Wife carried the box to the backyard, where I gently placed it in the hole and put dirt over it, first by the handful, then using the shovel. I put the birdbath back in its place, and it was done.
Good Job Sweetie! YLW
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