Mitzi’s loud, repeated cries pulled me from a deep sleep. I stumbled out of bed and started to go to her. She was standing at the top of the stairs, looking down to the first floor, and continuing to cry.
“What’s the matter?” I mumbled. No answer. She didn’t even look at me. The crying continued. But I closed our bedroom door and snuggled back under the covers.
“Do you think that she is trying to tell us something?” I asked my still half-asleep husband. “Maybe there is an intruder downstairs.”
With that thought, I felt a pain in the middle of my chest as though my heart was being squeezed like a wet sponge. I was hoping that Micha would get up and go investigate. But he had fallen back to sleep.
I was hesitant to go downstairs myself, both because I was a bit frightened of what I might find and also because I was still very sleepy. Despite the pain in my chest.
The crying had stopped, and soon I was asleep again.
But I didn’t forget what had happened when I woke up two hours later. A residual ache in my chest still remained.
“Why do you think she was crying like that last night?” I asked Micha.
“There was no intruder,” he replied.
Usually, she wakes us up by knocking over the plastic cup that I keep by the bathroom sink. Or she tickles me in the face with her whiskers or kneads at me with her paws. And usually, she doesn’t wake me up until later. She seems to understand somehow what days I need to get up for work. On those days, she wakes me between 7 and 7:30 if I don’t get up first by myself. Other days, she lets me sleep an hour later.
Why was this morning different than all the other mornings? Why on this morning, did she feel compelled to wake me up so roughly at 6 AM?
I heard her scratching at the bedroom door and opened it. “Come, Mitzi, I’ll give you some water.” We follow our usual morning routine as she follows me into the bathroom.
Mitzi only likes to drink water flowing from the faucet.
Afterwards we go downstairs and I look around as I head to the kitchen. No signs of an intruder. And no “gifts” from Mitzi that I need to clean up. Micha and I need to patrol the rooms every day now to make sure that Mitzi has not pooped outside her litter box. She seems to avoid the rooms that are used the most—the kitchen, the family room, and the bedrooms. She picks the rooms that we use more rarely now—the living room, dining room, and the little den. It doesn’t matter how clean I keep her litter box. But it isn’t something that happens every day. Sometimes, several days will pass with no problems. We are always bound to find something waiting for us if we have spent a whole day or overnight away—even though a neighbor will come to feed and check on her. Seems that she do this on purpose to signal us when we aren’t paying sufficient attention to her.
Annoying as it is, I realize that her “poop problem” is one of the challenges of living with an elderly pet. She is eighteen years old, quite a senior. Still a beautiful, long haired calico cat, even though she is now very skinny. The vet ran a whole series of tests on her and assured me that Mitzi is a very healthy, old cat.
She has always been very sweet, very affectionate, and very patient. But now, she is even more docile. She used to run and hide when we had a lot of guests over the house. Now, she likes to hang around in the midst of the action. And she seems to have lost her sense of self-protection when it comes to little children. We have to be vigilant on her behalf and remind the children to be “very gentle”, because Mitzi will not protect herself.
