A long ramble. Only for those readers that have a lot of time and came to our house in Antrim or Keene.
A too-long ramble about odd justifications.
Derek had a couple of pets. Foxy and Sophie. Foxy was protective of her boy, and when he was out at night on a date, she would sleep by the door until he came home.
When he stopped coming home she never slept upstairs again and spent every night sleeping by the front door.
Foxy never recovered after Derek was gone, and she started getting more nervous. This breed of dog is known for keeping inventory of everything in the house. If Beth moved furniture while Foxy and I were out of the house, Foxy would bark at the “new” furniture when she got home. We knew things were not going well for her when we were having a yard sale to get rid of everything we owned so we could travel. At the end of the day when foxy discovered that most of the furniture was gone she ran out the back door before Leslie could get the lead to the dog-run on her. Leslie went around to the back yard to catch Foxy and when she picked her up she went totally limp. Leslie carried her around to the front of the house and asked me “is this normal?” It wasn’t. We took her in the house and after a minute or two she snapped awake. The vet told us that she probably had developed a heart irregularity and had passed out. Things were just too stressful for the little dog.
When we left for our reboot that we called “The Adventure” we left our Foxy in the care of Doug & Leslie because she would not have overcooked in the car when it was parked, and would probably not be allowed in most places that we might end up. We suspected that we would never see Foxy again. (We actually did not have high hopes of seeing ANY of our friends ever again either, but that is another story)
When we were parked in front of Lake Jenny looking at the Grand Tetons, we got the message from Leslie that Foxy had died. It was only a few months after we had left. It was a sudden death, probably the same type of incident that made her pass out.
Sophie, Derek’s cat was also staying at Doug & Leslie’s. She adapted to her living situation and actually became Doug’s buddy. They both slept about the same number of hours every day.
Derek had gotten her as a kitten because Beth was working at a veterinarian’s office and some dolt had left a box with a mother cat and a litter of newborns on the office step on the coldest night of the year.
Sophie was adopted by Derek. She was up in his room any time that he was.
“Ma! Do something about the cat!” was a common thing he said when he was trying to go to sleep and Sophie wanted to do head butts.
When Beth & I returned to the Monadnock region from our Adventure we were able to have Sophie live with us again in 2008, first in an apartment, and then in our own house with a fenced-in back yard which Sophie loved. She would spend all day in the yard, doing what cats do best: nothing. She would move from place to place and continue doing what she had been doing in the spot she had just left.
A few years ago Sophie had officially become a kidney-kitty. A fairly common ailment which is either caused by diet or by living a protected life that keeps them from being squashed by a car before they are ten years old, which is why we never had kidney-kitties when we were growing up.
Being a kidney-kitty makes them skinny, bulimic, thirsty, and have other side effects.
Our previous cat Fred (who also was a kidney-kitty) was like a tanker truck, He would load up on a quart of water and walk straight to the cat-box and deposit a quart of water and then head back to the water bowl. Sophie did her business in the back yard so it wasn’t as much of an issue, but she was getting weaker. We were having her treated by a vet with all kinds of medicines that she hated. She finally was getting so weak that we decided to put her down. We said our goodbyes and then Beth took her to be put to sleep. Our vet was out of town so Beth had to go to another vet that was covering for her, this replacement vet had never seen Sophie before and suggested that he wanted to try “one more thing”: IV fluids.
I came home that evening and instead of seeing a cat shaped body bag, there was Sophie looking all happy and healthy again.
That was two years ago. She has remained optimistic, was always happy to greet the different friends that came to visit that made a big fuss over her (Cara, Leslie, Derek E, Gabby, etc), and in general enjoyed a cat’s life. She survived through the winter and got to enjoy an entire season outside again. When winter came again she hunkered down and attempted to hibernate until the grass returned to her back yard again.
Surprisingly she made it. She once again was in her glory in her back yard.
Lately the IV juicing sessions weren’t keeping up and she was getting slower. She was perky when we woke up and when we tried to go to sleep, but her entire day was spent sleeping in the grass. And then she stopped eating again.
Last Friday we finally buried Sophie in her back yard.
She was our last living connection with Derek. His dog and his kitty are both gone now. Beth and I were VERY emotional. This was more than just losing our cat, this was Derek’s cat. She lasted eleven years longer than Derek did. Our last living connection with the Dude.
Now the good news.
A year after Derek died a nice woman from a nearby town started having phone chats with me. She was a person who claimed that she regularly talked to dead people. She seemed relatively sane, but I am not very qualified to judge people about levels of sane-ness.
An example of a typical encounter with the other side: She would be driving and see someone sitting on a curb crying, she would stop and help and would find out that this person had a car accident earlier in the day and they towed his car away and “now he had no idea how he was going to get home”. She would ask him some more questions and would figure out that the car accident was probably a fatality, this soul was freshly dead, and did not have a clue about what to do or was even aware of this new chapter in his “life”. She would have to explain what happened and try to tutor him and lead him to where he had to go.
It sounded a little far-fetched to me, but I always try to pay attention and learn from other people’s talents and skills even if I haven’t a chance of ever being able to accomplish or even understand how this would be possible. It certainly makes a lot more sense to me than any sport with a ball does, so I had several conversations with her so that I could learn a little more.
She said that folks from the other side operate at a much different speed. Our lifetimes are a very short amount of time compared to their idea of “normal”. For instance she told me about one time she was able to establish communications with her deceased mother. At the time that her mother was speaking to her, mom was busy making cookies with a young family member that was deceased, Many months later this medium attempted to contact her mother again because she wanted to ask her a question. Her mother was a little irritated that her daughter from the other side was bothering her AGAIN while she was still trying to finish the cookies, couldn’t she just wait until she finished?
I was told that when “the departed” attempt to communicate with us, we can’t catch the hint. We miss it. These messages are obvious to some people that understand what to look for but I have trouble catching any subtle hint from anybody anyhow. If you want me to hear something, don’t be subtle, it won’t work.
She had looked me up because Derek wanted to tell me a few little things,
He wanted to say that he had tried to tell us things in our dreams but we were obviously not “getting it”. He wanted to let us know that he had made a few snap decisions that night, but he “probably” made the right choices. Then he paused and added “No, he definitely made the right choices”.
I asked if she could still connect with him and she tried. And succeeded.
She asked him what he was up to, he said that he was working on his music (I figured they probably don’t have video games installed up there yet).
He had built a house. She asked him what he built it with, and he said he built it with his thoughts (which she said she didn’t understand). He uses the house to keep animals that have died and are waiting for the owners to arrive. The medium said “Awwww, that’s so sweet, I always wondered what happened to the animals”, this particular medium had never seen an animal when she was poking around on the other side of the fence.
At that time the house was occupied by several dogs and cats, a bird of some type and a horse. He gave the impression that he had stumbled onto something that was in demand because he was getting (or was going to get) many animals. I would think so, animals have a much shorter lifespan than humans, so unless you collect tortoises or parrots, you have probably burned through a bunch of pets before you finally get planted yourself.
This woman was not a huckster, she would not take any compensation because that would “taint” the readings. She may have been crazy, but she was able to describe some of Derek’s characteristics and her description of his personality seemed consistent with the Dude that you all knew.
So this has been rattling around in my head for the last decade, and I always giggle when I think of Derek dealing with a horse, that is much too big of animal for him to deal with. He always had a fondness for the type of animals that humans had messed up by tinkering with their biology. He thought Himalayan cats were the greatest thing because they were totally dependent on humans to flip them over regularly or their bones and muscle would entropy. “Hee-hee entropy… they won’t move on their own… They just dissolve if you don’t force them to move.”
He liked pugs because if they get surprised their eyes can pop out of their sockets.
He wanted a corgi dog because they are super fluffy and have legs the size of a hamster, but then a friend got one and discovered that they sometimes have the loving personality of a rock. Corgis were out. He wanted a freak of nature but he wanted a friendly freak of nature.
Derek thought it was cool that humans had modified bulldogs so they no longer could have puppies without a scalpel nearby, he liked that Irish setters could get lost at the end of their leash because of AKC sponsored in-breeding and he loved how basset hounds would do somersaults when they stepped on their own ears. Hairless cats, and talking birds that could imitate a dripping faucet or the sound of a toilet flushing. Porcupines and platypuses were entirely natural but they were odd enough that they were acceptable too.
Taking care of animals in the ether would be right up his ally. I am assuming that animals don’t crap or beg for food after they are dead. Derek would not be that thrilled with the maintenance part of a house full of animals.
I have not heard from the woman in many years now, but I often think of Derek and his “house”. Hopefully Sophie has joined her dog Foxy and they both are now reunited with “their boy”.
Beth and I will have a hard time with our current house only having the two of us, but I am hoping that Derek’s house is full of happiness.
This post was copied from Facebook, the original can be seen
HERE.
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