Love to the end

If you could hear my 17 year old cat right now, and didn’t know what you were hearing, you might think that you were hearing an elderly person calling out in a very loud state of confusion.

 I guess that is kind of what my cat is doing, howling out for me, wondering where I am, and wanting to ensure that she is not all alone in our house.

I stand up to look over the edge of my office loft wall, and call out her name.

“Kiki”, I call,
 She howls.

 “KIKI” I yell louder, but she still howls, almost with a sound of terror and pain in her meow.

” KIKI!!!” I shout out very loudly this time.

 She looks around, knowing that she heard something, but with her senses now dull with age, I can tell she doesn’t know what the sound was, or where it even came from.

I wave my arms and yell out again. Finally she looks up, sees me, and calms down.

She just needed to know that I was in the house and she was not alone.

This experience takes me back to when I would visit my grandmother in the nursing home.

 I remember seeing elderly people walking up and down the halls of the nursing home, calling out, with what at the time seemed like senseless ramblings.

I wasn’t very old then, but I remember feeling sad for them.

 Is that what their life had come to? What had happened in their life that they seemed to be so lost, sad, and who were they looking for? Where were their families and loved ones?

It seemed like some of them never had even one person to visit with them.

 Now looking at my aging cat acting out in almost the same manner as those people in the nursing home, I think that those elderly people must have just been looking for someone familiar as well.

A loved one to ensure them that they were not alone either.

They weren’t necessarily rambling on, or howling, as I had originally thought, but rather, calling out for someone to hear them, comfort them and love them.

Let that be a lesson for all of us.

 We need to be there and take care of our loved ones no matter how old they are, or how much they may howl and ramble on.  They need our love to the end of their life on this earth, just as much as we will all need to be loved to the end.