Midrina

In December 1999 Midrina came to live with me, a very large black short-haired cat, about 5 years old. I had seen her first in November at the Humane Society when I was still looking everywhere for Grimalkin, who had disappeared one month earlier. Midrina looked very stressed, and she had lacerations on her face. I looked briefly, then went to the cage where the only gray cat they had was kept. It wasn't Grimalkin, so I went home. A few days later I went to the County Animal Shelter, saw another gray cat, and even though it wasn't Grimalkin, I fell in love with the sad little animal with a white heart on her tummy--Griselda. She came home with me a few days later, and I was able to bring her back to health, with the help of the neighborhood vet. I still hoped that I'd find Grimalkin, so I'd stop at various cat rescue homes to look.

At Hooterville, in Woodinville, I saw Midrina again, looking healthier and less stressed. There were no gray cats, and I was beginning to absorb the horrible fact that Grimalkin was not coming home. When I asked if I could take the black cat out of the cage, the volunteer said yes. The black cat's name was Meena, she told me. Midrina cuddled onto my shoulder as if it were the best place in the world, and so she came home with me, and I instantly changed her name from what sounded like Meanie (she had been given up by a family with a toddler and a baby; the toddler had been bitten by the "bad" cat, so they couldn't keep her).

Midrina's name came from a combination of Midi and Reina, because she looked like a midnight queen (I mixed it up, though, because Midi actually means noon). People who speak Spanish thought her name was Madrina, which means godmother, something this wonderful black cat was definitely not.

She thrived, living with me. Each time she had a bout of what was diagnosed as feline eosinic granuloma, we treated her with predisone or cortisol, and she recuperated. Until this past year. Last winter I was away for three months (with one week break at home in between the 2nd and 3rd month), giving talks on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. When I came home for the break I saw Midrina had lost weight, so I called in the visiting vet, Dr. Hannah. Possible thyroid problem, she said, and took some blood. No significant results from the lab work, and I was off again.

When I returned the second time I realized Midrina had continued to lose weight. No longer the 16 pound chubby diva, she was about 12 pounds. We began a new regime of prednisone, feeding her on demand 3 to 5 times a day. Gradually she stopped losing weight, stablized, even gained a pound. And then she stopped eating entirely. The last few weeks she barely grazed on foods she had wolfed before.

On Friday, the 16th of October, Midrina died, with Dr. Jane’s help. Midrina had “asked” again several times on Wednesday afternoon. I phoned the vet to schedule her. Dr. Jane has been the primary doctor, but she would not be available until Friday afternoon, so Midrina and I had a day and a half more together.

Her last two days she lay under my bed, not avoiding me as much as making it very plain what her wishes were. She didn’t seem to be in pain, but she was wasting away, and closing down. Her eyes were clear. Every once in a while she would come into the living room, sit in one of her spots. She even went out on the balcony and smelled the air once, enjoying the sunshine.
Friday, at 4:45 Melissa was with me, on my request. I put Midrina in her carrier, but I was very uncertain that this was the right thing to do. At the vet’s we were soon shown into a small examining room. I left Midrina in her cage, where she felt secure, and petted her. Dr. Jane weighed her again, to help me make the final decision. In just the few days since we’d been in on Monday, Midrina had lost another half-pound. Dr. Jane talked with me, and answered my questions about what would happen if we did not euthanize her—as starvation and dehydration progressed, she would lose cognitive functions, as well as organ functions, and she would have some pain. We could wait a few more days.

I made the decision not to wait. Dr. Jane described the process she would follow. I breathed into Midrina’s neck after the first shot of morphine and anesthetic, and breathed into her head to relax her into her final sleep. When she was unconscious—[oh God, this is hard to write; I’m sobbing again]—Dr. Jane shaved Midrina’s foreleg, and gave her an IV overdose as I continued to gently stroke her. Within a few minutes her breathing stopped.

Melissa and I were both crying. Melissa was crying for Blackest (her cat who died in 1991), for her father, for any and all deaths she had endured. Dr. Jane stayed with us until we were able to leave, even told us we could stay longer if we wanted to.

I won’t ever know for certain what was wrong with Midrina, but the probable explanation, according to Dr. Jane, was that she had inflammatory intestine disease which had progressed to intestinal lymphoma. The eosin granuloma, which is an auto-immune disorder, probably had something to do with it. There was nothing we could have done except prolong her life for a few more months, with the discomfort of chemotherapy.

So now it is time to remember Midrina, my funny clown cat who thought she was a dog. She loved to sniff people when she first met them. She greeted me, and everyone else, at the door. She liked to chase her tail, and play with little stuffed toys. She would bring a stuffed toy in her mouth from room to room, meowing like a mother cat. She sometimes liked to sprawl in the sunshine, lying on her back just like a dog. I miss her terribly.

And Griselda (my gray cat) is beginning to understand the alpha cat is no longer around to plague her, but she won’t go to the chair Midrina liked to sleep in next to my bed. It’s as if Midrina’s ghost is still there, at least for Griselda. Her essence lingers all over the condo. Each place she claimed as hers. The toys I find underneath the furniture. I can still see her sniffing the wind while standing on the balcony, surveying her kingdom.

Autobio...Toddling into the Woods

The phoenix is born in isolation, one of a kind. The phoenix simply is.

Early morning, just after feeding my oatmeal to Patsy, our dog, I wandered out through the French doors. It was summer, and a breeze blew in the trees, so I headed to the pine woods next to our driveway. I didn’t know I was a phoenix yet. I was just a little girl. An old sepia photograph shows a two year old girl with very curly, golden hair sitting on the lap of a woman who is looking into the distance, not holding the toddler. My mother was a beautiful woman. Photographs and paintings of her frequently show this same faraway look.

The trees sighed and whistled. The smell of pine needles mixed with the smell of Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susans growing on the edge of the drive. I toddled into the woods, barefoot. The trees were planted in even rows so they could grow straight enough to be used for telephone poles. It was easy to kneel on the soft bed, and make long piles of needles into walls of my house. I concentrated. Once I’d made a large rectangle, I pushed some needles aside to open a doorway. I could hear Brad and Patsy coming down the drive. I hoped they’d go somewhere else. This was my private space, just right for a three-year old.

A white cat with large black spots crept toward me. “Domino,” I whispered, “Do you want to play with me?”

The cat sat on its haunches and looked at my house outline, then looked at its left front paw and licked it. “Susie,” Brad called. He hadn’t spotted me yet, which was good. As Patsy came trotting to me, Domino stood up, and wound himself against the dog, who sniffed once at the cat’s rear, just checking it really was Domino. Brad appeared. He would be seven in the fall, and he knew his way around the whole area. “Susie, I’m going down to the pond to work on my raft. Mom said I was to look after you. You want to come?”

Brad tolerated me, just three that January. Sometimes he included me in his adventures, which were usually fun. Some boys would have kicked my house walls out, and spoiled everything, but not Brad, at least, not usually. He just looked, didn’t say anything, and headed out of the woods, down the hill to our pond. Patsy followed, but Domino decided to go his own way, further into the woods. It didn’t matter to Brad whether or not I followed, so I decided I might as well go too. We both liked to climb in the willow trees lining the pond, and pretend we were pirates.

Brad was very proud of his raft. He’d been nailing boards together for the past few days, and now he wanted to put a mast on. We didn’t swim in the pond because it had leeches, and frogs and other things we didn’t like, but we paddled around the banks, and built little port-villages out of mud. Patsy, our Kerry-blue terrier, usually helped us startle frogs or chase dragonflies.I knew Brad didn’t want me to get in the way of his project, so I climbed into the willow tree that reached out over the pond. At nursery school someone had showed me how to braid three things together, so I practiced with willow leaves. Sunlight flickered through the leaves, and I felt happy, so I made up a little humming-song, a sort of Winnie the Pooh song. Brad looked up at me, but he was used to my strange little songs. He was more interested in figuring out how to put the mast onto the raft so it would stand up straight.

A few days later, probably after some advice from Dad, he got it right. He was so proud, standing on his raft with this strange, slightly crooked branch sticking up from the raft as he pushed himself away from the pond’s shore. Mom took a snapshot. And then the raft started to lean. Brad began to slip into the water. I laughed and laughed from my grandstand seat in the willow, very glad I wasn’t the one testing out the raft.Nothing happened, except that when Brad waded out of the water, he had a few leeches clinging to his arms and legs. “They don’t hurt,” he told me.

“Yuck,” I said. “Get them away.” Dad took Brad inside, and put salt on the leeches. Only one let go, so he used his lighter to discourage the others. They slid off Brad’s skin, leaving little trails of blood that didn’t clot. Brad wanted to collect the leeches and take them to school for show and tell. Disgusting!

One day, probably that same summer, I vaguely remember another adventure, one that didn’t end so easily. Brad and I took walks together, exploring our neighborhood in the countryside. Not far from us a farmer kept a few sheep in a field. I thought they were cute, and wanted to pet them. So, one day I walked by myself to the field. “Here, sheepie, sheepie,” I called. They weren’t very smart, so I held out some deliciously fresh grass. Next thing I knew one of the sheep butted me from behind.

I fell, scraped my knees on some rocks, and began bawling. No one was around, so it didn’t take me long to stop crying, get up, careful to watch where the sheep were, and run back down the field to my home. When I came in the house Mom was very angry at me.“Where have you been?” she asked. “And look at you. Your overalls are ripped and muddy.” I ran away from her before she could spank me where the sheep had butted me, and hid in my closet under the eaves.

That was an okay place to be during the day, even though there wasn’t any light in it. But at night it was really scary. Lots of nights I knew something lived in that closet – I could hear it make sort of a “whoo” moan over and over. One night it seemed as if it was about to come right out and attack me, so I ran into Mom and Dad’s room, crying.

“It’s just an owl, Susie,” Dad said. “Go back to bed.”

Another time I knew I was going to be killed by the train because it was going off its tracks. Every few nights I could hear the train go by several miles away, but this night was different. The wind was totally still. The train whistle seemed to go on and on, and I could see the headlight of the train coming closer and closer, and it couldn’t if it stayed on the tracks, but nothing was stopping it, and it was about to get me.

I knew Mom and Dad would be very angry if I came into their room and cried like a baby, so I rocked myself back and forth, sitting up in my bed holding onto my knees, and trying to tell myself the train was on its tracks. Yes, I was very young when I first learned how to cope with becoming a phoenix.

My fourth birthday was an extraordinary event, in a Florida hotel. Grandad, Mom, Brad and I had come to Florida by train. Grandad collected sea-shells, so he came down to Sanibel nearly every winter. We visited Barnum and Bailey and the Ringling Brothers winter circus area, and watched the clowns practice their acts. And saw the trapeze artists practicing, as well as the tightrope walkers.

What I remember most, though, was my birthday party in the hotel dining room. The waiters brought out an enormous birthday cake for me, and the entire dining room sang me “Happy Birthday!” I was a star, and I loved it. A few days later Mom let me play a slot machine, and I won $5. “What do you want to buy with the money?” Mom asked me.“Some pretty flowers for the hotel manager because she was so nice to me.” Perhaps I had been prompted to be generous, for that was certainly one of the many rules in our family.

While we were there Brad made friends with someone who had an enormous black snake. There’s a photo of him standing in the man’s shack with the snake draped all over him. I wasn’t ready to play with snakes, and thought it was a strange thing to do. Later in our childhood, though, Brad and I caught snakes and tried to keep them as pets, without too much success.

The Phoenix

The phoenix is my totem, as I have re-invented myself time after time, and have faced my own death a number of times.

How does one become a phoenix? It is a path which is rewarding, but difficult. The process is what counts, more than the end result of becoming, or dancing with, a phoenix. For once you are a phoenix, you are going to repeat the process.

The myth of the phoenix is found in many cultures, with different variations. In most, this extraordinary bird is not only self-generative, but is the only one alive at any moment in the entire world. The lifespan for the phoenix in some cultures is one hundred years, but this varies. In my life, my first incarnation was probably from human birth to an age of 16. My second incarnation lasted about another 15 years. My third incarnation was longer, 21 years. And I'm in my fourth incarnation. Fortunately I have not been alone, but have found other phoenixes who are becoming aware of their identities.

Empathic Communication

Empathic communication occurs as part of nonverbal communication.