Brielle
About fourteen years ago, a family restaurant opened in our very rural neck of the woods. Their specialty was barbecue sandwiches, but they had a broad menu, and our kids loved to eat there. This was within about the year after our son Daniel had died, and I was making great efforts to do things as a family as I knew a couple of the kids had been having a hard time, and needed to get off the farm and have some family time. This also helped a bit because there had been a family restaurant there prior to this one, and Daniel had come with us, so it felt comfortable to be in the same building with the family. In addition to the barbecue, the present restaurant made fantastic burgers and homemade coleslaw. The coleslaw was so fantastic, I used to place some of it on my burger. For a time, we tried to eat there about once a week, and our kids came to know the menu by heart.
In addition to serving the farmers, the farm families, the occasional home builder, and providing a place to have a date night for local couples, the restaurant owner also fed some feral cats who hung around the dumpster at the restaurant. You couldn't blame them. Even the cats knew that it was the best food for many miles.
It was tough for the owner to prepare such a large menu and to procure and then prepare a lot of the food each week. We learned that he chose and picked up most of the food he used at the Sam's Club which was about fifty minutes from there. He loved what he was doing, but he soon found that he had no time for anything else. Eventually, he and one of the waitresses decided to get married. He decided that he wished to close the restaurant and try something new.
Of course, we were disappointed, but we understood. By then, he had already agreed to let us bring one of the cats home because he had not had time to take her to a vet, and we'd had concerns about her. My eldest son named her Brielle. In the weeks that followed, before the restaurant closed, other people took each of the cats, mostly for their barns, and so none of them would starve when the restaurant closed.
Brielle was a smaller cat that most. She had medium long hair and a strange meow. The vet thought she might have suffered some significant nutritional deprivation as a kitten and that she may have some neurological issues. For a semi-feral cat, she was a strange one. She was a picky eater, and was often demanding. If a human petted her, she didn't like him to go, and she would knead your lap, arm or anything else while sinking her claws into the legs of your jeans. She also drooled pretty profusely when she was petted. She also didn't drink a lot of water unless you gave her a really large water dish, the kind you might give to a German Shepherd. It was as if she intended to conserve water unless she knew she had a large supply.
We had a large two story garage/art studio built on the farm, in part, to provide a place for our eldest son, who was studying at the university to become a sculptor, a place to work. When the rooms were completed, and the welding machines moved in, Brielle didn't want to be anywhere else. She especially liked doing what looked like cat ballet on the large beams within the building. The building had lots of nooks and crannies and she would explore the building for hours. At night, after she was fed, we would close her into the office which stayed warm, and had food and water for her. During Winter, we placed a heated mat under her cat bed. We even had a painting of a cat, that looked like her, up in the office.
When our son was working in the building, he often opened one of the garage styled doors, and out she would go. She enjoyed walks in the forest and usually returned at dusk when he would lock up the building, and leave a light on in one of the rooms. Brielle had the strange habit of stalking much larger animals. There were often deer at the edge of the forest grazing near the building, and she would size them up as if preparing for a take down. Once, our eldest son saw her in a fight with one of the ravens that lives on the farm. Brielle was hurt during this interaction and had to have the vet remove one of her long canine teeth from one side of her mouth, which had been broken and seemed to be infecting. She eventually healed, but was more careful with groundhogs and other animals afterward.
When our eldest son got married and left the farm, Brielle had to adapt to life without his working there. Since there was a no pet policy where he and his wife were living, she could not come with him. In some ways, remaining where she was familiar and had lots of space may actually have been better. She saw him occasionally when he returned to work there occasionally, or to pick up something he'd left there, or used rarely. The rest of us tried to make up the difference by visiting often, and by opening the building so she could wander on days when we might be out with the horses or other animals. She liked being a part of the action. She even adapted and came to terms with another semi-feral cat, Albinus who came to live in the barn with the horses. He liked Brielle, but she had to be convinced that he was a worthy overseer of another part of the farm.
As Brielle aged, she became thinner and we were concerned that we could not monitor her food and water intake with her being in the art studio, and so during Winter, we brought her up to stay in our eldest son's bedroom. At first, she was delighted. It was nice and warm, and surely he would return with his wife, since his bed was made and his bookcase was full and his furniture was there. Sometimes he did, and over the next five years, he told her about the new little daughter he and his wife had, and then a couple of years later, about the new baby son. Brielle met them a couple of times, but they seemed to move a little too quickly for her liking.
I still let her dance in the rafters in the art studio sometimes during good weather, but in the last year or so, she became more content to remain in our eldest son's room, and receive visits from the rest of us. Sometimes, I would open the window and she would sit by the screen enjoying the sun. Sometimes I would let her play outside, and often, she and I would go for a walk with a light leash. Last year, during one wandering episode, she became lost and a neighbor called us to pick her up. We knew that her days of wandering alone safely were over.
Matthew, also one of our sons died suddenly in November not long after he had turned 32. Although Matthew had not been her human, she took this hard. We had to work to get her to eat and drink, and I spent a lot of time with her. It was almost as if she had decided to go with him.
Consultations with the vet yielded that she had been experiencing urinary tract infections and hematuria. This was treated for a time and she seemed to improve. We did this for several months and then one day, three months to the day after Matthew's passing, Brielle refused to eat or drink. She lay peacefully on her bed, which I moved to our eldest son's bed. I spent the day with her, and our grandson was also in attendance. That evening, after he went home, she peacefully went to sleep with my sitting beside her.
Even when a beloved cat lives a decent lifespan, their loss is sad and difficult. She was an important fixture and personality here for so long. My hope is that she located Matthew and Daniel in Heaven and that they are caring for her now. Thank you for being our cat, Brielle. I wouldn't have missed it for anything. We will always remember you, and we will always love you.
