What is the role of a mother?
To protect her children, to comfort them when life acts up, to guide and to amuse them, among other things.
It’s a big job when shared with a partner. It is an impossible job when attempted alone. As a single-parent, I’ve welcomed any and all reinforcements.
This week, my family said goodbye to this mother’s little helper.
Tana, our nearly seventeen-year-old cat, passed away with family surrounding her on May 8th.
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| Tana |
Tana was much more to me than a cat. She helped me do the impossible; parent two traumatized little girls who blossomed in to sassy and self-confident young women.
To tell her story properly, I have to take you back to the spring of 1996. I’d been reunited with my daughters in Greece two years after their abduction. They were 7 and 8 years old. While we went through a series of court hearings, my girls began to regain their English. “Can we have a cat when we go back to Alaska?” Not a cat person, I hesitated, but the girls had been through so much. “Sure,” I told them, hoping they’d forget.
They didn’t forget.
Two daughters. Two cats. Tana was the second one to join our family. A friend bought her as a gift to us at the animal control center on base. A military family had moved abruptly and put their two kittens outside in the brutal Alaskan winter. Tana survived, but her feet were frostbitten. The other kitten didn’t make it.
From the beginning, Tana was quite an individual. She enjoyed being with the girls constantly. She wagged her tail and fetched toys. When I took a bath, she sat close by on the rail, flicking her tail in the water. She easily mastered our electronics, turning the channel of our old fashioned cable box by pushing the buttons, and turning the CD player on and off at will.
For a while after Tana joined our family, I was busy with my job, a paper route, and graduate school. There were nearly three hours a day the girls were home alone after school. They amused themselves by stuffing Tana into baby doll dresses and putting blush and lipstick on her. She appeared happy to let them. When I neglected changing the kitty litter, Tana kindly pushed the litter scoop into the box and placed a plastic bag into the corner of the litter.
Through my daughters re-learning English, through grade school, junior high, high school suspensions, and college, Tana was there. Through the girls’ first dates, and first dumpings. In sickness, and in health, Tana was there. She shared her love indiscriminately, once scratching a hole in the next door neighbors screen door in summer, barging in and making herself at home on their bed. Though self-proclaimed cat haters, my neighbors thanked me for Tana’s company and got a kitten of their own after they returned Tana two days later.
Tana enjoyed spending time with her family, meeting strangers, eating tuna with gravy, and watching the Real Housewives of Atlanta. Anxious when alone, Tana spent her afternoons often sandwiched between stuffed toys until my daughters returned home.
Tana is survived by my 24 and 25 year-old daughters, and by her cat sister Nikko.
If Tana felt pain towards the end of her life, she never let on. Kidney disease plagued her the past three years, and then cancerous tumors grew at a dizzying rate. She died as graciously as she lived, and kept her eyes open, looking at my girls even after her last breath.
Thank you, dear Tana, for your unselfish service and for a job well done. Your memory will be eternal, and the hole left by your passing will never be filled.
Happy Mother’s Day to all you mothers, and to all of your helpers.
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My heart is broken. And I feel so deeply for all of you that knew first hand, the love and support from your beloved Tana. Resp in peace little one.