I endured one of the most disturbing and sad moments of my life upon returning home from work in the wee hours last Monday night/Tuesday morning.
Upon opening the front door, I was ready to issue my usual hello to “Kitty Cat Number One, and Kitty Cat Number Two,” better known as Ziggy and Mannix, who always greeted me with enthusiasm, no matter the hour.
However, only Mr. Mannix (named after the 1970s TV detective) was at the door that night.
No big deal, Zigzagoon must have locked herself in a room or closet, I thought, as both cats were known to do occasionally.
So, I checked the kitchen closet and the bathroom, both with closed doors, but no Ziggy behind them.
Venturing a little farther, I entered my bedroom and there she was, lying on her left side, facing away from the door, dead at the foot of my bed.
Ziggy was not yet three years old. I didn’t know her exact age, but I got her as a small kitten on June 7, 2022. It was during my final week of delivering car parts for a dealership in Roswell before starting a new life as editor of The Eatonton Messenger a couple of weeks later.
I was just about to leave an auto body repair shop in Carrollton that day when in walked the shop’s owner carrying a box with the unmistakable cry of kittens within. Despite being married at the time, I knew I’d be moving to Eatonton alone, at least for the time being, and I’d already thought about maybe getting a cat for company and to share my new life adventure with.
While playing with all three kittens in the box, the shop owner explained he found them about five or six weeks earlier while collecting eggs from a chicken coop he had in his backyard at home. He said he had a “barn cat” that stayed in the coop most of the time but hadn’t even realized she’d been pregnant.
The revelation came, he said, when he picked up a hen to check for eggs, and instead came across a tiny, newly born kitten. He checked another and found another kitten. There were four kittens beneath four chickens in all, he said, though one was exceptionally tiny and sadly didn’t make it through the night.
Regardless, he and his family took the three kittens in and raised them over the previous few weeks, he said, but now it was time to find them homes. “I’ll take the big one, if that’s okay?” I answered, and that was Ziggy.
Now, I’ve heard skepticism over the chicken story before, and I have no way of proving its truth other than to ask, why make up such a tale? If it weren’t true, why not just say you have kittens to find a home for and leave it at that? So, that’s all the proof I need, and I thoroughly believe the bodyman was telling the truth. Ziggy was a chicken-cat in her earliest days.
And now she’s gone and I’m heartbroken. Devastated really.
As I looked down at Ziggy’s lifeless body, already stiff to the touch so she’d obviously died hours earlier, my mind was reeling. I mean, how could this have happened? She was a happy, healthy cat just hours earlier when I left.
I briefly looked to Mannix as a potential suspect, but there were no signs of a cat fight (which are truly scary to see when done in earnest), no tufts of fur missing from either, no visible injuries, and, plus, they were great cat friends, so that was quickly discounted.
I looked for potential poisoning threats, but there are no live plants in the home, no access to cleaning materials or solvents, nothing that wasn’t there every day they were left alone, which was pretty much every day. All I could see was a little blood in Ziggy’s nose and mouth, but even that was minimal. I was at a complete loss as to what happened.
Honestly, I was so upset and confused, I called my very recent ex-wife, woke her up, and broke down over the phone with her.
I have to thank her, too, for being so patient and compassionate and caring when I really, really needed a friend. She confirmed to me all over again that I’d married the right one, even if it is all over now.
Eventually, I was able to do a little internet sleuthing, searching for why an outwardly healthy, young cat might suddenly die, and the online consensus from various sources is that Ziggy probably had an underlying, undiagnosed heart condition that doomed her from Day One.
And unless a knowledgeable vet was specifically looking for and testing for that unknown condition, it seems unlikely it would ever have been diagnosed and treated.
Still, that does so very little to ease the pain of losing Ziggy. I really expected we’d have another good decade or more together. But now it’s just me and Mannix, elevated to “Kitty Cat Number-One-and-Only,” at least for the time being.