This is the story of Elly (nee Ellan Vannin) who joined our family seventeen years ago. We chose her at the local animal shelter, she was born there in a litter of other tuxedo kittens. All of her siblings were adopted and only she remained out of the bunch, likely because all of them had symmetrical masks and her face was not. We fell in love with her liveliness right away. As a kitten she loved to climb up my body like a tree and sit on my shoulder under my hair and watch everything I was doing. She especially loved to sit on my shoulder while I was cooking.
She was our “high places” kitty, who loved standing on the tops of doorways, on mantles, and on high bookshelves.
As the years passed she gained great fame for her hunting skills, and would terrorize me by bringing home possums, birds, lizards and rodents (both dead and alive). No one who attended our wedding dinner will ever forget the rat-of-unusual-size that she killed that night (photo not included).
One thing that most people did not know about Elly, was how she would comfort me if I ever was crying–she could tell if I was upset and would come right over to me and stand at my feet mewing until I’d pick her up and she would snuggle into my chest and purr until I’d calmed down. She saw me through some hard times: hospitalizations, surgeries, divorce, and those awful days that I put Stijn or the kids on a plane and would come home and sob into my pillow.
She loved to eat the strangest things: such as bolognese sauce, avocadoes, hummus, raspberries:
This past week I could see that she was not quite herself, she stopped enjoying cheese treats and was only barely able to nibble on the scrambled egg with cream that we prepared for her last night.
This morning it was obvious that she was not going to bounce back this time and so she and I spent a few hours telling stories and visiting all of her favorite haunts in the house and the backyard. She got a last nap in the sun and a last roll on the pavement and then just an hour ago she curled up in my arms in front of the fire and took her last breaths.
It’s just so hard to believe that I will never get to kiss that velvety little nose ever again.
Some Elly videos:
And some photos from over the years:
