I’ll have to apologise in advance:
This is a long story, with a long intro, but it is all worth reading because it’s one whole complete story.
You just need this bit of background in the beginning, to realise just how the events in the second half of this story impacted me.
Another disclaimer: I have never, EVER told anyone this whole story. I have tried writing it down multiple times over the years, but I just couldn’t finish it.
Even for a Fantasy & SciFi fan like me, it’s all just a little much to take in.
On to the background (which is based on a memory from a long time ago).
Ever since I was a little kid, for as long as I can remember, my family always had cats in the house.
It started with Polycarpus and his brother, whose name (or at least the spelling) to me is lost in the throes of time.
Polycarpus’ brother passed when I was very young, and I have very few memories of him. We got another cat not too long after, so Polycarpus wouldn’t be lonely.
It’s usually a good idea for a cat to have another feline buddy.
Sadly, within a few short years, his buddy didn’t come home and disappeared.
We searched far and wide, and wide and far, to no avail.
My parents even drove many miles, scouring the area, putting up posters and leaving their number in case someone saw our missing cat.
On one of their trips, they came across a building site where they had taken in a stray cat. Not our missing cat, but relevant to the story in the near future, hang in there, we’re getting to the better bits.
Weeks passed and still no sign of our missing cat.
(Sad spoiler alert: months after the disappearance, the local municipality was dredging the nearby pond, and found a decayed collar with our missing cat’s name and our number on it)
One day we got a call from the building site.
They were about to pack up and head back home because the project was nearing completion, and none of them were able or willing to take home “their” stray, so they asked us if we wanted to take her in.
She was a beautiful cat, completely ginger, which is fairly rare for lady cats.
Sending such a beautiful and sweet cat to the pound would be criminal, so we took her in.
We took her to the vet, to get her checked out, dewormed, vaccinated, chipped and registered.
As the vet was checking her out, he noticed that she was a little on the chunky side.
Turns out, she wasn’t fat, she was pregnant, which eventually resulted in a healthy litter of four.
I could write on and on about how those four kittens brightened our days, but I won’t.
This bit of the story is about her, the ginger lady cat, whom we named “Lola”.
Lola was a loving mother to her kittens.
Sure, she had a bit of a feral streak at times, and was a fierce and ferocious hunter who had absolutely no chill around anything that would squeak, cheep, chirp or make any other kind of cutesy noise that would mean there’s a delicious little critter to shred and eat.
(unless it was too young / small to eat, but again; another story)
Aside from the severe cruelty to tiny animals (and one time a big fuckoff adult male Mallard duck which she obliterated), she was an absolute angel.
Lola even took me in as one of ‘her kittens’, as I was still fairly young (I’m thinking 4-5-ish years old) and would try to ‘educate me’ by treating me like one of her kittens.
She’d slap me if I did something she didn’t approve off, she’d curl up with me and soothe me when I wasn’t feeling well, and she protected me when I was scared.
One day, I had a classmate over, who was terrified of cats. Our neighbour-cat of course took that time to drop by in our garden, scaring my friend.
Lola noticed his fear, her motherly instincts kicked in, and she beat the absolute fuck out of that cat, then attempted to soothe my scared friend.
His fear of cats diminished significantly that day.
Lola was always protective of her young.
Until they left the nest.
We kept two of the four kittens, while the other two went to our neighbours.
(the asshole cat from the previous paragraph ended up being best buddies with the fat one we kept, and they used to terrorize dogs together, but that’s a story for another time)
Lola kept an eye on all four, and me, but had decided that Her Garden was only for her, the two kittens (now cats) that lived in our house, and me.
Her two kids living next door would get not-so-gently beaten and chased out of our garden more often than not.
If not by Lola, then by their two siblings that had claimed the garden as their own.
Lola was fierce, and protective. Sadly, Lola’s mild feral streak turned out to be her end.
See, Lola loved fish.
The fresher, the better.
I still have a traumatic memory of when I went fishing, and for the first time caught a tiny fishy.
A proud 6-7 year old kid, I hurried back home with my catch in a bucket of water.
I called out for my parents to present my hefty haul (a little 2 inch common rudd), and in the time it took for me to open the front door, shout for my parents, and turn around again, she had slammed one of her claws into the bucket, picked up the fish and pissed off to have a nice mid-day snack.
I was inconsolable, while my parents (rightfully) nearly wet themselves with laughter.
Her love for fresh fish ended up with her catching liver fluke, which was detected too late for any treatment to work.
Basically, her love for fish destroyed her liver.
As her liver was failing harder and harder, she started suffering.
And as responsible cat-slaves cat-owners, we made the extremely painful but correct choice to have her put to sleep.
I’m not gonna lie, I cried fucking hard when that choice was made. She was like a second mom to me, even if she was “only a cat”.
Nah, scratch that. She was my second mom. She was more than “just a cat”.
The day she was scheduled to go to sleep, the two kids of her that still lived with us were in our front garden, doing cat stuff as far as I’m aware.
The other two, living next door, were also in our front garden, much to our surprise.
They tolerated each other, for once.
It was almost as if they knew, as if they were all saying goodbye to their mom.
That was the first moment in years they were all together in the same small patch of garden, and it was also the last.
When we returned from the vet, all four of them were still there.
Then, as we exited the car without their mom, they all went their own way again.
As far as I remember, they never were all four in the same spot ever again.
Congratulations!
You’ve made it through the sad, then uplifting, then sad-again background!
Go have a breather, make a cup of tea or something, and ready yourself for the real story; the whole reason I just wrote three bloody pages, causing some very old emotional wounds to painfully reopen a little.
Now, onto the main story.
In the years after Lola passed away, I started having dreams with a recurring theme.
They were nightmare-ish dreams, but not quite yet a full nightmare.
Just bad dreams that, at one point, could tip either into nightmare territory or into kinder, more friendly dreams.
The one ‘thing’ that could tip them over the edge, was someone I called ‘My Guardian’.
She was a redheaded lady, always looking at me with an almost melancholic, but loving smile.
If she showed up in one of those nightmare-ish dreams, they would almost always shift to happier dreams.
I started calling that lady ‘Lola’, as her red hair and the way she protected me in my dreams reminded me of our beloved late cat.
As I was reaching my late-teens, I had an Angsty Teen phase, like many of us did.
Don’t kid yourself, you probably had a similar phase as well.
Yes, it’s embarrassing, but thankfully it’s only a phase.
(for most of us, that is)
One evening, there was a hefty storm brewing, and Angsty-Teen-Me loved storms.
The ominous dark skies, the deafening roar of thunder, the blinding flashes of lightning, the smell of petrichor, it was an absolute delight.
I put on my jacket (long, black leather, obviously), put on a baseball cap to keep my head dry, put on some headphones for some music because the thunder was so loud it was a little painful (I’m guessing Linkin Park, but wouldn’t want to put money on that bet) and I headed out into the storm.
Walking over the dyke behind our neighbourhood (yeah sure, go ahead and make a Dutch-joke about dykes, go ahead, take a moment, this is your time, not mine, I’ve already written this and you’re still reading), I headed to the lake named after our little village.
It was surrounded by nature, with a beautiful stretch of land to view on the opposite side.
That dyke had trees grow on both sides, on the right side mostly younger ones like pollard willows, and on the left side older trees, but I can’t recall which kind.
Getting close to the lake, I heard someone call out my name.
Now.
Let me remind you:
1. There was a loud-ass thunderstorm going on outside
2. It was extremely windy
3. I was wearing headphones and listening to music
And I heard someone call out my name.
I swear, on everything and everyone I hold dear, that I recognised that voice.
That was the voice of ‘My Guardian’, the voice of the dream-entity I named ‘Lola’.
Obviously this startled the bejeezus out of me, so I stopped and turned around to where I thought the voice came from.
Not a moment later I felt the ground tremble beneath my feet, and something brushed the back of my jacket.
With shivers running down my spine, I turned back to where I was going.
A massive tree, at least 3-4 foot wide, had fallen over and landed right across the road where I had been walking.
If I hadn’t stopped.
If I hadn’t heard that voice.
If I hadn’t been warned.
I would’ve very likely been a smear on the pavement, right underneath that tree.
Having nearly wet myself out of terror, I turned back around and immediately went home, shaken.
That night, I had another dream where Lola showed up.
In that dream, she just smiled at me, started walking away, and then vanished.
That was the last night I ever dreamed of Lola.
I firmly believe that our feisty feline somehow had stuck around for a while, and somehow either granted me one of her nine lives, or spent one of them just to save mine.
Without Lola, I wouldn’t be alive to type this story now.
Lola: Thank you.
You were loved, and you are missed.
There is no real ending to this. No closure. No punch line.
Just a story I’ve been trying to tell for a really long time, but haven’t been able to do until today.
Thank you for taking the time to read this, for sharing my story, and for sharing my memories of Lola, who even in death was looking after me.