| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
 |
I had a cat named Sapphire. I grew up with her. I had her all through grade school, high school and college. She knew all my secrets. We were absolutely best friends. After college I got married and took her to live with my husband and I. We had a really nice place that we had inherited from his mother. Sapphire was quite old, about 17 years. She had her problems, as with any elderly kitty, but she held her own. She used to loved to sit at night in the den (which was next to the master bedroom) and watch the car headlights streak through the vertical blinds. This would make her crazy. She would howl and howl--she had a voice unlike any cat---eerie. If you ever heard it, it was absolutely chilling---it almost sounded as though she would try to talk like a human (thank goodness she was not a very talkative cat most of the time). Time passed and Sapphire was now over 19 years old. My husband got me up for work one morning in May 1995 and said that something was wrong with Sapphire. I rushed her to the vet---she was in acute kidney failure---she was terminal and in pain. To cut the suffering of her last few hours on Earth, we had her put to sleep. Needless to say, I was hysterical. We buried her that day and it was a terribly sad day. That evening my husband and I were woken up from our sleep by Sapphire's howling coming from the den next to our bedroom. At first I was confused, then I remembered that she was dead, but she was clearly howling from the other room. Neither my husband or myself got out of bed to look---God knows what we would have found. We pulled the sheets up to our ears and waited. Finally the howling stopped---sleep came hard that night. For almost a week, the nightly howling continued, but with each passing night, it became a bit softer and softer until finally it was barely a whisper, then it just faded away and never happened again. I guess Sapphire wasn't quite ready to give up her nightly attacks on the shadows of the car headlights streaking though the vertical blinds. An absolutely true story!
