Why did I go on a rant about the male genitalia of the pachyderm and have you plant quite an obscene image in your head? Seriously, I don’t know. Maybe I just wanted to mess with you. To see if you’d ever come back to read me. This is no way to build a fan base (not that I’m trying). Do not follow in my footsteps (if you ARE trying). Do not talk about elephant balls. Especially on your face. Sigh. I really am THAT good at having people look at me funny. And here’s an emoticon =p to follow that sentence up so it appears to soften the harsh truthfulness of the statement and make the little girl in me stop crying.
ANYWAY, if you’ve been here before you might be wondering why there has been no updates on my precious aging kittyzens and true tales of P,B&J. I will not blame the elephant ball, I mean the germinating pimple now smeared in Oxy (and I wear this during the day out in public and people look at me like I just scraped white paint off the wall with my chin cause ya know, I was marking my territory yalls!). It has nothing to do with my face. That much is clear. Because where is my face on this blog? Can you find it anywhere? No you can’t? Exactly.
My hiatus has been the result of, well, my emotional state. My mind has been in shambles and is slow to sort itself out due to life-altering events. No, I did not have a breast augmentation neither did I get to marry Hayden Christensen (although I REALLY should, SO if YOU see him around tell him to CALL ME and also tell him I already booked the venue for next year ok!).
I don’t really want to make this blog venture towards more personal aspects of my life other than the cats but since future postings will somewhat be related to this, this deserves a fair mentioning in several paragraphs.
In early October, my father, Prof.Dr. Kamarudin Mat Salleh (of UKM) passed away after 2 years of battling renal cancer. And that is the first time I have written that in a sentence. I state his name because if ever someone tries to google his name and find this page as a result of that, I’ll let you know that he too liked cats and lived with A LOT of them for 11 years. Although he was nowhere near the level of devotion that my mom and I have for feline company but my father loved us enough to tolerate sharing his house with them. Gradually, he made space in his heart for each and every one of the cats and he couldn’t help himself from picking favourites. I can’t really blame him for that. He had mad love for Parsi. Of course he didn’t show it by tying Parsi to his hip but he made a lot of exceptions for Parsi. The grand example being: whenever Parsi poops in the house he would not scream his head off at Parsi’s disgusting behavior and lack of class. Instead, he’d just go Oh look, Parsi had an accident. Must be cause the door was closed and NOT because Parsi is a giant ass. He was also fond of Mama Ayeow. But who isn’t? And Mimi always had the privilege of sitting at the dining chair next to his to share pieces of his ikan bakar. A few years back when Honey was still around, he actually brought home pieces of string from his office for her to play with (she was obsessed with chasing strings).
The cats were also favorite subjects of my father’s photography. His DSL camera he left behind will in no doubt continue on in capturing images of them. He did a lot for the cats. He paid for their food without ever complaining about the cost and in the past, when I was still too young to drive and there weren’t nearly as many animal clinics in the area as there are today, he’d go to work late so that he could take me to UPM to get the sick animals treated. He supported me when I wanted to become a vet – although that will forever remain a dream unfulfilled. I could handle the science back then, it was the math that buried that dream. What can I say? My brain was not made to count without a calculator.
* For the life of me I wanted to insert a picture of one of the cats here taken by my father but I COULD NOT FIND the folders containing all those picture. I'm not even sure which computer it might be in. But if you're interested to do some clicking to see one (or two) you can do so here.
He may have been a little less tolerant with the animals that I brought home later on in life or the ones who came over uninvited and were keen on staying (like the suave and handsome Soya that my dad hated and actually chased away several times with the penyapu – of course he never actually hit him. Also there was WonderCat who had a brief stay here as well), but it was only a fair reaction since we already had so many under our not-so-spacious roof and plus, he was also sick and just didn’t have the energy to deal with the animal traffic in and out of the house.
I often have the tendency to downplay the magnitude of such affecting news and am likely to practice emotional aversion to crushing events like the great lost of a loved one to insulate my heavy friable heart. This is just how I operate. So I had to burrow in for awhile to assess the changes of my life now. The changes have been difficult and has made life ever more precarious. I cannot quite yet articulate the full extent of the experience. But I can say that I am blessed to have my family and my cats (also a substantial part of the family) along with my friends who’ve been here to make it less of a lonely ordeal. If I EVER had the tiniest of doubt about animal therapy (which I’ve never had), these tough times have steamrolled over them through and through. We were not alone in our bereavement. I can tell you in complete honesty, without any exaggerations, that all my cats especially the older ones felt the effects of my father’s death. When we brought my father home for his last moments, I had to dash the cats to be boarded at the pet shop to make space for the potential crowd soon to be gathered around the house. In such a situation, you really don’t have the time and mind to focus on anything else so the cats needed to be put in a safe place for awhile. We didn’t want them to freak from the sudden rush of people either. But because I was short of time and cages, I only managed to transport 7 of them to the pet shop in one trip and there was no time to make another. So Parsi, Sakura and Kiki had to be placed in the balcony. But we had earlier on decided that Parsi should remain at home because he was my father’s favourite and we thought my father would have wanted him to be there during the final hours.
My father arrived home at 12 pm via ambulance and past way at 7pm the same day. People poured in till early morning. It was only after the funeral did I get to properly attend to the 3 cats. The differences in behaviour were apparent. Kiki wouldn’t stop mewing. Calling out for something or someone. While Kiki is known to be vocal, but she has never continuously called out for long periods of time before. It was almost like she was howling as she paced up and down the stairs seemingly looking for something. I know that some people may want to say that we’re just personifying the animals as to have them feel closer to our human ways. We’re only making up these similarities to human characteristics so we can feel a more mutual connection and understanding between two utterly different species. One being superior and the other much more inferior in the presumed hierarchy of God's earth creatures. You can have your views but I believe animals can have feelings and have the ability to emote just as we do. They may not cry tears of sorrow, but can they feel sorrow? Can they grieve and be affected by lost? Hell yeah, I’ll put my stamp collection on that. (I don’t really have an exotic stamp collection but I know they’re worth a lot to stamp enthusiasts. Not that I’m saying stamp collectors would argue with me on whether animals have feelings or not.). Some things don’t require complicated explanations and scientific proof when you’ve seen it for yourself enough to believe past sceptical, one-sided ken.
And how did Parsi take it? You’d be surprised. At least we were. Pat has always, ALWAYS been a grouch. He would out-grouch Oscar in that trashcan of his and would eat Big Bird with no remorse if he ever went strolling down
One thing I have to say I regret doing was to not have left Mimi behind at the house as well. My mom is convinced that she would have liked to have been there at the time. Because even now, after over 2 months, she still seems to be at a lost. There’s a story to that but I’ll save it for a later date. We hadn’t plan to keep any of the cats (with the exception of Pat) home during the event anyway, but if we did, we would have surely allowed her to stay for she shared a special kind of connection with my dad that only the two of them really know the meaning of.
Death can drag you to patches of dark clearings that you never knew existed. That’s where I found myself. Although it isn’t all too apparent in person because moping around in gloom takes up more energy than you'd think, similar to how frowning uses up more muscles than smiling. But having the ones you love who are still here encircled around you to help you keep yourself upright, makes you more appreciative for those godsend individuals. At least whenever you need to fall down and lay still for awhile, in my case, I know there would be a wet nose to nudge me and a soft ball of fur to rest my head on to let me know that I am not alone.
