This is a difficult post to write. If you are an animal lover it will also be difficult to read. Read it anyway.
If you have spent any time in small towns anywhere in the world I’m sure you have seen stray animals. Some of these strays seem to do pretty well, others not so much. In San Marcos la Laguna, it is very common to see stray dogs, and to a lesser degree cats. Many of these animals are sick, or malnourished. It’s always sad to see.
Several weeks ago I was walking to the coffee shop where I often eat breakfast. Along my walk I spotted a tiny orange and white kitten along the trail. She was probably only a month, or at most two, old. I stopped to pet her and see if anyone was around to look after her. I didn’t see anyone, but she was just outside a small shanty and I know that sometimes local families here adopt animals out of kindness even though they have little enough for themselves. She was kind of dirty, but otherwise she seemed healthy enough. I moved on about my day, and made a note to look out for this tiny soul.
I saw her two more times on my way to the coffee shop that week, and I was never sure what, if anything to do for her. We are leaving the lake soon, and adopting an animal in a foreign country with no plan of how to get her home to the states, or what we would do with her when we left seemed cruel at the time. About a week after I first spotted her I was walking into town with Farrah, and we saw a lady carrying this tiny kitty back up to barrio 2, where we live. I thought that this meant that she would be cared for, and I was deeply relieved.
Yesterday afternoon, Farrah went out to our local tienda to grab some beer. When she got back she was visibly distressed, and told me she had found a kitten crying and covered in flies in the alley directly outside our house. I immediately came out to see what we could do, only to discover that this was the same kitten I had seen several times in the past month. The poor thing was lying on her side covered in dirt and bugs. She was too weak to stand up, and barely strong enough to roll over, or wave her paws to try and get the flies off of her. I went and got a towel, and brought her into our apartment. We had a large cardboard box from our last grocery order, so we made up a tiny bed for her, and cleaned most of the dirt and bugs off of her.
For the next several hours we tried to get her to drink water, and milk in hopes that she might simply be too malnourished to take care of herself. Maybe she was. She lasted for about 5 hours. We sat with her, pet her, tried to get her to eat or drink anything, and we let her rest as peacefully as she could, but she was too far gone. At about 10 o’clock last night after we had tried to feed her a bit of chicken, which she initially seemed interested in, we found her dead in her box. She can’t have been more than 3 months old.
I’ve seen a fair amount of death in my life (I’m mostly speaking of people here). It is never easy for me. I suppose it shouldn’t be. Often when someone dies you can reflect on the life they led, and take some comfort in knowing that they got a shot just like anyone else. You can look back on the years of memories. It makes you sad to think that no new memories will be made, but at least some memories remain, and that person, or animal, will live on in the minds of those who loved them. However, sometimes the innocent die, and there is something unspeakable terrible about experiencing a death when the chance of life seems never to have been given.
Phoenix, that’s what we named her, posthumously, everyone deserves to be remembered by name, never had much of a shot at life. She lived on the street, and we will never know if anyone ever showed her much kindness. I don’t know what happened to her mother, or her litter mates. She was clearly too young to be all by herself. I can only hope that our efforts, however late, made her last hours more comfortable than they otherwise would have been, but I wish I had done something sooner. Maybe she’d have had a different story if I had.
As I write this we are preparing to go out and find a place in the forest to bury Phoenix. I don’t know if she’d like the forest as a final resting place, but there isn’t anything else we can do for her now.