I'm writing personal essays about my "Cottage Year". More about that another time. Here's one to last a long weekend. Happy Labor Day!

My Mel

The sour smell met me at the door to my bedroom. I scrunched up my nose peering apprehensively over to my bed. There in the middle of my comforter cover was a mound of puked up cat food. By the strength of the smell I figured it had been there for a few hours, which meant that the uneven circle of stomach bile had had plenty of time to seep deep into my sheets, down to the mattress pad.

This was not the first time I had been greeted with a chunky light brown pile of vomit when returning home. Chellie sat tucked under the micro throw that covered the ottoman of my living room chair. Exasperation colored my “Oh Chellie not again!”

I knew that the event of puking was long gone from her mind, in addition to the fact that she was only responding to the needs of her body not understanding that in human terms such activities would be easier to deal with on the tile of the kitchen or bathroom floor.

For me the frustration of seeing another vomiting episode was one part, “ I just put clean sheets on the bed yesterday!” And three parts, “ I’m not ready to face my 16 year old Chellie starting her final decline.”

She started out as Chelsea,” the psycho cat” when she and her littermate Venus came to live with my husband, Jack, and I six years ago. A friend was moving to India for 6 to 8 months and wanted animal loving people to provide a temporary home for her two feline sisters.

Having just faced the death of my boxer, Dempsey the month before, I was not ready to open my heart to another fur-coated ball of love. But Natasha was desperate, not wanting to abandon her kitties. I was cajoled into agreeing. My main thought being “It’s only 6 months, no time to get attached.”

I had grown up with cats. My childhood home seemed to have the permanent fixture of a Mother cat and mewing kittens in a brown box in the corner of the kitchen broom closet. Family movies show my sisters and I wheeling around baby doll dressed pusses in play strollers. We did have our share of toms. They roamed the neighborhood, brought back gifts of half eaten mice and birds proudly placed on the back porch mat. And we had a few crazy cats, the ones that didn’t get why they had to have humans around at all. They marked us all with their personalized signature of gashes and scratches mostly on our hands and arms but every once in awhile too close to an eye or ear.

When Chelsea and Venus came to stay, Venus was 96% true to her name. She was the storybook cat, all love, licks and purrs. The other 4% was rarely shown to humans but was reserved for her sister Chelsea. Venus knew how to trigger Chelsea’s uneven temperament. Thus they never were the kitty cat calendar sibs that curled up in a tangle of tails and paws. They always kept their distance from one another but an eye out for each other too.

To friends visiting, Venus was the delight, the one that came and rubbed her soft grey and white coat across your shin and looked up at you with sparkling clear baby blues. Chelsea needed to be coaxed to come out and when she did, she showed her dismay with a series of guttural growls and purposeful hisses.

The story often goes when you close off a room of your heart to try and contain the pain of loss, circumstances demand that you stand at the entrance and either crack the door a bit or slam it tight and lose the key. The “Kitty Sisters” as I came to call them in my missives to Natasha in India, pawed the door to my closed heart room open and snuggled up fur ball tight in the hole left by Dempsey’s passing. And in true fable fashion, Natasha found her love in India and ended up staying for a year. She returned to the States with her new husband, but by then the Kitty Sisters had become an intricate part of Jack’s and my life.

As the girls settled into our lives my nicknaming habit went into full swing. Everyone close to me is fated to have some silly derivative of his or her name label them for the length of our relationship. Jack, who was already a moniker for Jacob, became Jack a Boo. Venus was christened Vennie Bean and Chelsea morphed into Chellie.

We drifted into a comfy life of four on the bed at night. Vennie Bean keeping Jack a Boo’s baldhead warm atop his pillow. Chellie perched by my feet, emitting her now famous throaty growl each time I turned over and upset her position.

The day I sat in the chair at the Vet, the same chair, I had sat in six years before, when I cradled Dempsey while he took his last breath and this time it was to witness the passing of Venus, a month after Jack died; I monitored through a daze of grief, the once again collapsing room of my heart. It seemed surreal that Venus decided to follow Jack to the other side in such close course. “What about me?” I screamed feeling trapped inside my shrinking heart room. “Don’t I need a bit of comfort too?” I wondered if I’d get the kind of furball love I craved to keep me sane, from the psycho cat, Chellie. In the moments when I wasn’t overly obsessed with my own sadness, I questioned whether I could be a support to Chellie. Would she be aware that the one constant in her life since birth, her sister Venus, was no longer around?

After Jack’s death I felt the need to move from the home we shared into a smaller space. Each room of our house echoed with a vibe of memory. The scrape of the spatula on the frying pan as he flipped his yummy toad in a hole egg, made especially for me to start my day with a warming breakfast of protein and love. Sunday afternoons, punctuated with the roaring encouragement of “Go left, go left!” or “Oh my God, you coulda had that one!” while watching the football game. And the whispers that called to me from the bedroom walls of before falling asleep, nightly conversations.

Chellie and I moved into a small cottage in the same part of town. It offered me new walls to decorate, something I truly love to do, and a territory that was defined solely by the person I was becoming, but in an area of San Diego that I had grown to love and had established favorite haunts.

Over the next few months through my confusion of, “Now where did I decide to put the ice bucket?” or the often thought, “Did I sell that rug or decide to keep it?” I monitored Chellie’s behavior. I noticed that bit-by-bit aspects of her personality that I only saw glimpses of with Venus around began to emerge.

We have developed our routine of mutual support. My heart room hinges, rusted from grief tears, squeak each time I come home and she appears from wherever she had been napping to give a meowing hello. Working at my laptop she sits centurion-like in the small gap between the edge of the desk and the rim of the computer covering my arms with her warm kitty butt, flicking her silver flecked tail as if in response to a beat of music from an IPOD playing in her head. Demanding attention while I write is a copycat move from Venus; only Chellie still holds her outward defense, giving me less harsh, but still a growl when I try to work the keyboard from under her butt. When the ache in my arms becomes too much, I lift her off the desk to perch her someplace else close by. But within a few minutes she is back in position again.

I observed her favorite snuggle spots and tried to make them cozier. I put a blanket-covered pillow in front of the heating unit in the hall. Once after doing laundry I placed an extra comforter folded at the base of my bed before putting it away. Chellie called it her own. I left it there.

Now when she hears me pull out the chair at my kitchen table to sit down to a meal, she is immediately at my feet offering an insistent meow of “Lift me up, let me join you in eating. You don’t have to eat alone.” She waits patiently in my lap while I eat, sniffing the plate occasionally, every once in awhile enticed by a smell. The paw then comes out, gently padding my arm or face as if to say, “I’d like some, please.”

She snuggles so deep into my chest when I sit down to an evening of book reading or TV. Her little heart positioned directly over mine. Her hue changing blue eyes looking up at me. The purr of surrender bears witness to the psycho cat, allowing her scaredy cat fear to shed like a winter coat in spring.

With each development in our ever- evolving relationship, I’m touched to my soul by how in her kitty cat way she has chosen to not paw but battle ram her little calico swirled Siamese body against the door to my heart room. Her name mutates once again. Chellie has now become Chell-Chell.

Then the vomiting starts. Her once thick coat of black, silver- white and tan thins to bone peeking skinniness. I buy every kind of cat food in the store, wet, dry and gravy softened. I go on line for tips to tempt her to eat, and to calm the raging belly noises. We visit the vet and run tests. I push pills down her throat, syringe antibiotics into her mouth as she squirms in my lap. I shove the memories of going through the same routine with Venus before she passed and in human fashion with Jack before he died, from playing a continual looped horror movie in my head. The heart room shutters as if an earthquake is about to erupt.

She is showing signs of her 16 years of age. Her eyesight, I have always questioned, thinking that part of her psycho nature was because she didn’t see well, is now diminishing further. The usual kidney slowing and irritable digestion are listed as possible causes. But for now, the Vet leans toward her having eaten something on her once in awhile trips out the front door. Another round of antibiotics is prescribed and I buy special cat food directly from the Vet. In her recovery, she burrows deep under the sheets and blankets on the bed as if hibernating away the discomfort.

One evening she is cuddled up on my lap under the throw I have covering my legs, while I watch a Netflix. Her body is a little circle of emanating heat. I want to toss off the blanket because I’m too hot but don’t wish to disturb her. I so cherish when she is close and I can help her heal without coming after her with a syringe full of drugs.

Suddenly she pops out, jumps off my lap, sits in porcelain cat stillness in the middle of the living room and looks up toward the ceiling. She emits a series of meows, mews, and tongue clicks as if in response to questions being asked. Her head moves left to right as if reading off a page floating in the air above. I whisper to her, “Chel, who are you talking to? Is Jack here?” I have a deep belief and comfort in knowing and having experienced those who have crossed over, still being present. Chel-Chel through her life always talked to walls and chatted up possible unseen beings that seemed to come and spend an afternoon with her. But this is different. I have not seen her so animated since her illness began. Her concentration on watching the ceiling is so fixed. And then as if the lesson is over, she jumps back onto my lap and settles in once again.

Her progress back to health seems to step up a notch. Did she receive a command from on high, saying, “It’s not your time yet. Michele still needs you.” Was this an answer to my silent rant of “What about me?” in the Vet’s office when Jack and Venus passed a year ago? Whatever happened that night, Chel-Chel is still with me. And with this realization, the entrance way to my heart room floods with the light of gratitude. I know our time together is lessoning. But for now, she chose to stay, and with tears rimming my eyes, I pick her up in a gentle embrace and whisper, “Thank you, thank-you, Mel.” Chel- Chel is now my Mel.