Maisie started coming around the farm in 2019 or 2020. She was scrawny and underfed. Erin and I met her on a trip up to see my folks. We were working in Dallas at the time. She birthed a litter of kittens under the front porch. I remember Mom telling me about it when we called her from Dallas.
The kittens were wild and wouldn’t let anyone come near them. Maisie wouldn’t let anyone near her either.
Erin managed to catch one of the kittens a few weeks later when we came up to see the folks. She was as excited as I’d ever seen her about finally getting to pet one of the kittens. She’d been trying for days. The poor thing was so scared that we put it back with its family almost immediately.
When we moved up here from Dallas about a year later, Maisie was still coming around. She was still underfed and had spots on her side where she was nearly bald. I thought it might be mange, but a vet told me later that she was over-grooming, probably due to anxiety.
After Erin and I moved up here, I spent more than a year feeding Maisie every day before she finally stopped running away when I tried to pet her. She’d put on some good weight from regular food. She was pregnant again. Maybe the added hunger of her having to eat for the kittens in her belly made her less interested in running and more interested in eating.
It was winter at this point, and I decided to let Maisie weather out spells of freezing temperatures and snow on the south porch—especially the nights.
Once Maisie had gotten pretty comfortable with me petting her, Erin started coming out to sit with her on the porch. The first time Erin came out, Maisie went over, smelled her hand, and then got into her lap—something she’d never done with me.
A few minutes later, Maisie’s water broke. It’s not quite the same as with people—it means that a kitten was entering the birth canal, so she was already in labor.
We stayed up with her all night while she birthed her litter. She kept reaching her paw out for Erin’s hand while she gave birth.
Looking back, that was the night when Maisie went from being a stray we were feeding to being one of the family.
The stairs up to the second floor of the house are in the bedroom Erin and I shared. We made her a nice, cozy spot upstairs inside a cabinet with the door cracked. It was plenty secure. The concern was that one of the kittens might crawl away and we might accidentally step on it if one of us got up in the night.
Maisie didn’t like that idea. She kept running the kittens down the stairs, which meant I had to grab them and take them back up. Sometimes I’d pass her on the stairs, and she’d turn around. We finally had to close the door to the room she was in to keep her from bringing them downstairs.
Maisie got used to having the kittens upstairs and stopped trying to bring them down to us, though she would come visit when she needed a break.
And the kittens grew. They started running down the stairs to see us, but by this time Maisie had decided she wanted to keep them upstairs. They would run down, and she’d grab them one at a time to take them back up. Erin usually wanted me to intervene, but depending on the day, sometimes I was carrying kittens up the stairs and sometimes I was carrying them down—sometimes with Maisie’s help, sometimes with her working against me.
I don’t remember all the details. I just remember a lot of time with Erin and Maisie and the kittens, and a lot of laughter.
This would have been around 2021. I have journal entries from the night she gave birth, but I don’t want to go back through them. Not right now.
When Erin died in 2023, Maisie lost some of her spark. She was still very sweet—rescue animals always seem to have a level of gratitude that isn’t present in animals who were never homeless, at least in the ones I’ve encountered. Erin and I rescued many during our time together. It was one of the first things that really clicked between us.
After Erin’s death, when I’d approach Maisie, she’d look at me and then look around me, as if wondering where Erin was. Before she met Erin, Maisie always kept her eyes on me and the food I was carrying.
About a month ago, I noticed that Maisie was losing weight. I made sure she was eating, and she was. I noticed that she was always emptying her water bowl, even when I filled it several times a day. I made an appointment with the vet and took her in on the 6th.
They agreed she was a little too thin. They checked her for parasites, but she didn’t have any. They wanted to get some blood but couldn’t while she was so dehydrated, so they kept her overnight to give her some fluids. The next day, they managed to get some blood. She was a little anemic, but nothing life-threatening. She was eating and drinking, so they were sure she’d start looking better. They wanted to keep her overnight again. Friday morning, Maisie was still eating and drinking, but not really looking much better. They were going to keep her over the weekend, and I could pick her up Monday.
She was doing what they expected her to do—they just wanted to monitor her.
My phone rang with a call from the vet at about 7:50 AM the following Monday morning. When I picked up and it was the vet, rather than one of the receptionists, I figured something bad was coming. Maisie had stopped getting up to eat or drink Sunday. She’d started respiring blood out of her nostrils, so they decided to do some X-rays. She had advanced cancer in both of her lungs.
The doctor said that he’d recommend a veterinary oncologist if I wanted one, but—
He didn’t finish his sentence.
“Can I come see her?”
He said I could. When they brought her to me in the examination room, she didn’t even look like the cat I knew. When I went to pet her, she didn’t move her eyes to look at me. She just lay there, breathing hard, audibly wheezing, with little droplets of blood coming out with the exhale.
She didn’t respond at all when I let her smell my hand or pet her. She just stared off into the distance
The vet brought in the shot to end her pain, but I left before he gave it to her. Her heart may have still been beating, but she wasn’t there any longer.
After weeks of constant clear skies and sunshine, it was overcast that morning, with a streak of dark clouds coming from the east that seemed to end right over the clinic. When I got home, not knowing what else to do, I checked the weather. There was a tropical storm approaching the East Coast.
Tropical Storm Erin, as it happens.
It’s a coincidence, of course.
Erin wouldn’t ask God to send a storm.
Well, no—she would. Erin was as bold as a person can be when she wanted something. But God wouldn’t do that, would He?
If that had been the case, I don’t know if Erin would have made the request because she was mad that an animal she loved had suffered, or to send some rain for me—to bring some relief from the heat when I needed something to make the morning a little bit easier. She knows I prefer rain over sunshine in the summer.
There’s been an excess of death in my life the last few years. Off the top of my head, the count is four pets, six close friends (five of whom were in the 20–30-year-old range—and one of those had been a significant romance, not long before I met Erin), two uncles, one aunt, my mother, and, of course, Erin.
I could add another five or six people who have passed that I’ve known, but wasn’t close to nor related to.
However, today it’s about Maisie. The world wasn’t very kind to her for the first part of her life, and when the end came, it was a pretty hard ending. In the middle, we did what we could to give her a few good years.
And that’s really all we can do.
I brought Maisie’s ashes home today.
She was the last stray Erin and I rescued together. I thought Erin was gone when she died in June of 2023, but she wasn’t. Not entirely. Pieces of her lingered. Some of them I was aware of. The others, I didn’t realize they were here until they went away.
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