birthday

Someday you’ll read on Facebook or in this blog spot that we had to say good-bye to our cat, Molly, but not today!

In April we lost our cat Beau to cancer. I still wake up in the morning missing him. In May, Molly was diagnosed with kidney disease. (Note to self: Don’t have two cats the same age.) We noticed she wasn’t eating and was losing weight. The blood test the vet ran revealed that she was in serious need of immediate fluid injections and recommended an emergency vet for overnight IV treatment. You don’t want to know what that cost.

For the next couple of weeks we alternated infusions in the vet’s office and at home (and no, we aren’t medically trained!) with blood tests to see how she was responding. This meant additional expenses and many trips in the dreaded cat carrier for Molly.

She did respond to treatment and started eating again. Still, after a weekend of praying and crying (me) about what to do for her, we decided that we didn’t believe in extending her life beyond its natural conclusion, especially since we’re not signing up for extreme measures when our time comes. If that was it for her, we would just love her and let her go when it was time. A hard decision, but one that gave us and her peace.

We informed the vet that Molly would now be in palliative care. We would watch her to make sure she wasn’t experiencing any discomfort, and hope to bring her in for her final trip to the vet before she suffered any dire consequences from the disease.

For about a week we watched her closely. She sat and stared at us with a “cat stink eye” as if to say, “Why’s everyone staring at me all the time?” Given that we thought she only had a few days left, we relaxed the cat “house rules” for her. I let her wander out with me when I watered the pots on the downstairs patio, and you’d think she’d gone through the wardrobe into Narnia so thrilled was she to be sniffing around in forbidden territory. We also left the bedroom door open all night so she could come and go at will, because after all, the poor dear didn’t have long to be with us.

That was three months ago and Molly will celebrate her 15th birthday this week! In style, I might add, because it didn’t take long for her to not only appreciate her new privileges, but to actually expect and demand them! How dare I try to sneak out to water pots without her. She protests loudly from the other side of the glass door if not allowed to accompany me. And not only is she in our bedroom all night, she jumps on the bed in the early morning light, meowing and poking at me until I get up to feed her the soft kidney-care food she’s come to love. We are enjoying her in spite of her newfound diva status, however, and she’s reveling in our extra attention.

Who knows why we have all been given this sweet time together? I prayed, “Lord, please heal her or take her.” I didn’t want to have to make another one of those painful last trips to the vet so soon after taking Beau. It may be a miraculous answer to prayer that she’s still here.

And we don’t know if this will make any feline medical journals, but we’re pretty sure some cats have at least 10 lives. We’re enjoying Molly’s 10th, and we’re glad we don’t have to say good-bye just yet.

Happy Birthday, Miracle Molly!

I started writing my weekly “Back Porch Break” lifestyle column for the Gazette and the Pueblo Chieftain in the summer of 1995. Preparing to write about turning 70 recently, I began by looking back at past columns about growing older. I found three.

The first was a column titled “Anti-Aging Devices,” written as I turned 48, because in it I confessed I’d started reading the miracle ads about how to reverse aging in the back of magazines! I even wrote that I found saying “four dozen years” preferable to that “late fortyish number” because it didn’t sound as bad. I rationalized, “four dozen cupcakes would be gone fast at a Cub Scout meeting…a street breakfast with only four dozen eggs wouldn’t last till sunrise…and four dozen roses wouldn’t cover the wheel of a Tournament of Roses float…so four dozen years doesn’t seem too many.” How I wish I could go back and tell my 48-year-old self, “Honey, you don’t know anything about aging yet. Quit your whining!”

Then there was a column I wrote on “Turning 50.” Just two years later I’d gotten a more positive spin on the inevitable progression of time. “Fifty means freedom,” I wrote, quoting my then 82-year-old mom. “Free to believe what I believe. Free to spend time with people I cherish. Free to write what I want to write. Free to say what I know to be true, without apology.” Well, wasn’t I just the enlightened one? Fifty, huh?

Eventually the column became a blog and so “The 60th Birthday Train” appeared on my website. Re-reading this column now makes me sad and I apologize 10 years later to anyone who found it depressing! You see, I turned 60 just after my mother-in-law passed away, and my heart and spirit weren’t ready to party. I thought I’d said so clearly, but well-meaning friends and family insisted, and so I went through a series of thoughtful gatherings with a forced smile on my face.

The analogy that came to mind was that I was on a train looking out the window at stations passing by in a blur. I wrote, “At one station I saw my sister and her husband arriving from Tennessee…further down the track, four dear friends stood around a round table and lifted champagne glasses in a toast…at another stop a caring husband stood bearing a bouquet of orange tulips…yet remembered by a heart that grieves it’s all a blur.”

I wrapped up this amazingly uplifting column with the statement, “The one thing that forces the passenger train of life to come to a screeching halt is death.” No kidding, I wrote that! But then I got my chin off the floor to conclude, “We continue traveling toward whatever station comes next…and each station is a gift. Each age achieved is a privilege. And having people who love us enough to help us celebrate those truths, even when we don’t feel like celebrating, is God’s loving provision for us. On that, I’m not blurry at all.” Nice save, sister, I’d tell my 60-year-old self.

So now what? The train kept chugging and I’m still here at seventy. I’m not going to write about growing old this decade, however, because I know my friends in their eighties and nineties would say, “Seventy? That’s nothing, sweetie! Get out and enjoy life. These are the good years.”

How does it feel to be seventy? Mostly good, yet I find myself in a love-hate relationship with the word “still.” More frequently than ever I hear, “You’re still a nice looking woman…for your age.” Or, “You still don’t dye your hair, do you?” Or, “You still exercise? Good for you.” How long will it be before someone says, “Oh, you’re still driving?” Or, “How nice you still have your own teeth.” I don’t like those uses of the word still.

Yet I love the word still when I consider that I’m still pretty healthy, still in love with my husband of almost 30 years, still privileged to spend time with precious adult kids and grandkids, still blessed beyond all I could imagine. Added to that, I’m still a daughter of the King, still forgiven for all my sins—past, present and future—and still heaven bound!

As I look over my 70 years, the failures and successes, the joys and the sorrows, I’m still so very grateful to God for granting me this life. And I’m glad I’m still here at seventy.