The War Hero's Cat

The story I’m about to tell is not mine. But rather my husbands’ who is a proud and quiet man. I don’t mean quiet in the literal sense. He’s one of the few people I know who can wax lyrical at the drop of a hat and has an anecdote for every for every situation. I mean quiet about himself personally. To really know the man is rare, and it’s a gift. To know what makes him tick, his passions, desires, dislikes. He’s the kind of guy everyone and no one is friends with.

But read on and I let you in on some of his secrets. Take your favorite picture. Is it the Mona Lisa? The Starry Night? I want you to take that picture and smash it. Watch that beautiful image crumble and obliterate. Step on the ripped-up edges. Disintegrate the pieces.

Now, glue that picture back together.

How did you do? Can you still see the cracks? The imperfections that no matter what you do can never be taken away. They may be small, barely discernible with the naked eye. Or does it now have a giant gaping hole?

That beautiful broken picture is my husband. He is the glued together fragments of something that has been broken and destroyed. No longer that whole stunning image. My all American, large, strong, War Hero. My favorite broken soul. He has been torn apart and stitched back together, literally, and figuratively. My husband spent the better part of his adult life in the Army. The infrastructure that helped to shape and mold the man who would come to be the love of my life.

All of him, the broken pieces, the whole. For I too, am that fragmented glued together picture. And our missing pieces we found in each other. But this is not about us.

Its about him, and the cat that would come to be known as Ed.

My husband fought for our country and our freedom. And in return we gave him a half=life. His rap sheet would read like that of a collective rather than one of a singular man.

TBI.

PTSD.

Seizures.

Eroding. Esophagus.

Deaf in one ear, almost deaf in the other.

Shrapnel sitting on a facial nerve. One day that will cause him to lose control of an entire side of his face.

Need I go on?

I have spent my entire career working in the animal welfare business. Years ago, I was working as the lead shelter technician at a high-volume county shelter. These places are where sadness reigns and tragedy come at every turn. High-volume often means high euthanasia rates. And for me this was the case here. I will not climb aboard my soapbox and lecture about how much more we could be doing to help these facilities. For that is not the story here.

But it is one I will tell one day.

Anyway, my job as a shelter tech was to medicate, vaccinate, and take care of the overall welfare of the animals. The daily hospitality of the animals fell to other people. One of the days I was having a particularly rough time my husband decided to visit. It was the height of summer, kittens and puppies were in every available corner. Tough, heart breaking decisions were being made on some of the older, and to me - most precious, animals.

My massive hulking beast of a husband comes in bearing the sweet nectar of the gods. As we’re chatting and he’s headed back out to go to the VA to fight – once again – for some disability (A fight we are still amid - years later) he pauses. There sitting in a cage, head in its permanent cocked position, is a brown tabby cat. Expression of utter disgust on his face. Anywhere from 5 to 25 years old. One who was due to be euthanized thanks to a slew of medical problems. Topping the list of problems was a possible tumor in his nasal cavity and being completely deaf.

Their eyes meet, and the cat blinks and chirps at my husband. Husband, bias dog lover who never owned a cat, looks at me and says he’s keeping him.

That is how we came to own Ed.

The emerald eyed feline pranced right into our home and acted like he had been there all along. He was an oafy ball of fluff that stole hearts immediately. Maybe it was the fact his head could never be held straight. Or his gentle giant nature. But Ed soon wove himself into the fabric of our lives we forgot what it was like to be without him.

Soon we discovered Ed had something special about him we never saw coming. Often my husband’s PTSD would surprise him with nightmares. On these evenings, Ed who had taken up residence on the couch, would join us in bed. He had an almost aggressive way of affection. Head butts that would give you concussions. Purring that sounded like the revving of a motorcycle. Clumsy movements, and kneading with the strength of a UFC fighter, Ed would force himself between us. He would place himself in a way where he could knead my husbands back. The push pull force of his angry furry fists would break through the horror movie playing out in my husband’s brain. And it would help slowly grind him back to reality. Until he slowly woke up.

I would watch Ed closely. How did he know? The nightmares were rarely violent. A cute way of saying the sufferer moves his body in his sleep or causing one to speak a loud. You would never know the literal war raging behind my husband’s eyes as he slept. So how did Ed know? What feline senses pulled him to us in the middle of the night?

A few months after owning Ed, my husband had a seizure. We knew he was going to have one, there are outward signs. Shaking limbs, emotional swings, an overwhelming desire to sleep. My husband sensing one coming went to lay down in bed. I began my customary stress cleaning as he worked through it. There is literally nothing I can do but wait it out. But, to see someone you love suffer, knowing there is nothing you can do, is the worse kind of helplessness. So, I would clean. Or pace. Bake food no one would eat. Whatever I could do to keep busy until we came out on the other end of things.

They call the time after a seizure the postictal state. Can last anywhere from 5 minutes to 30 to hours. It’s a disorientating, cluster of confusion. Nausea, headache, exhaustion. Small price to pay to come out of a seizure, right?

Well, this night, Ed followed my husband to bed. After my frenzy of cleaning, pacing, and desperation to be distracted, I went into the bedroom. There was Ed, curled up on the center of my husband’s chest with his motor running. The boisterous purring echoing off the walls and vibrating down through my husband. It was the first time the postictal state lasted only minutes. As I stood there and watched the love of my life return to me, Ed’s possessive glare in my direction, I cried.

My husband called Ed his soul cat.

Ed was the cat who saved my husband. My husband is the man who saved Ed. The two shared a bond I will never be able to put into words, despite the best of efforts. The two found each other at a time they needed each other most. Who heard of a cat that could help ease you through the stages of a seizure? Dogs get all the credit here.

We only got a few short years with Ed. In a cruel twist of fate, one night Ed began having seizures of his own. But unlike what he could do for my husband, we were unable to help him. We couldn’t bring him out of them, and we had to let him go.

The pictures I have included will never do Ed any justice. He was the best thing to happen to us, even if we didn’t get very long with him. And a few months after we lost Ed a kitten came in from the same area Ed was found in. This kitten has an eye disorder, causing his eyelid to not be properly developed. We felt like Ed sent the kitten to us, and we took him home and named him Kevin.

I don't believe this story really fits into the guidelines of an adoption story. Ed and my husband adopted each other in a way. But I felt Ed's story needed to be told, so that maybe someone, somewhere will see an older beat up animal in a shelter and take a chance. You never know, you might just find your soul animal.