This is not about Second Life.
I want to tell you people about the most wonderful cat I ever met, who showed me a way of love I had never experienced before.
When I moved into my apartment in spring 1999, there was a cat ladder in the patio, and already at my first visit there was a somehow fascinating cat with a mixture of shyness and curiosity moving half way down and watching me. I said hi, what do you think about me moving in here? She didn’t reply. I took the apartment and she watched everything me and my friends did there. After a while she wanted to come in. She walked through all rooms, looked into every corner, sniffed everything there was to sniff, but she wouldn’t let me touch her. I just sat patiently and waited. After two weeks she followed me to the basement to my washing machine. While I was doing the laundry she pressed her body against my leg, for the first time. I pet her and she purred. That was the beginning of an amazing friendship.
Hexe visited every day. She never wanted something to eat, she wanted to be in relationship with me. I never saw a cat with such a diversity of mimics and ways to express herself. She knew and understood everything. There’s not many animals I can talk to and really feel heard, but Hexe understood what I was saying. When she was in my apartment, even when sleeping, I never forgot her presence, I always FELT she was there and I felt I had company and wasn’t alone. I never felt that with the two other cats. When I prepared food she used to look at me with these curious eyes. So I walked up to her and held my fingers in front of her nose so she knew what I was cooking. That was exactly what she wanted to know. Most of the times she’d go back to sleep then, except for potatoe chips or some sort of bacon. These were the meals when she got up and wanted to have something.
When she was asleep she hated me to suddenly wake her up and tell her to leave the apartment because I had to go somewhere. So whenever I had a date and she went to sleep, I told her the time when I would leave the house and said it would be a good idea for her to wake up around 10 minutes before so she’d have enough time to wake up. Guess what. She did exactly that. Many times. She willingly did things when I announced them early enough, but she hated surprises or to be rushed.
When I was sad she never left. She would just lay there, purr and let me cry into her fur. When I was beside myself she would do something that would make me angry. She was very creative in finding ways to get me to express my emotions. When she succeeded and I yelled at her in an enormous rage, she would just sit there with eyes wide open, as if she said: there you go, let it out. I can stand it, I’m not scared and I won’t run. When I was done and felt better, she would stand up and walk to the door as her job was done.
Hexe loved Reiki (which is a way of hands-on healing). When I layed my hands on her body I felt the most beautiful, warm, sweet heart love I ever felt. She would go into deep relaxation and her purr would turn into something like snoring. I sometimes had visions where she and I travelled to places of the past, I remember once we were in Egypt and she showed me the pyramids. Very often, during the years, when I wasn’t feeling good and held Hexe against my heart, everything inside me would just melt. All blockages, everything, such a sweet feeling of love and all is good.
Our intense relationship didn’t last very long, as my neighbour lady who was the “owner” of Hexe didn’t see her cat anymore. Within 3 months or so we got two more cats. A male red one came and wanted to move in, and my neighbour got another 8 weeks old female kitten, so there’d be enough cats for everyone. Hexe never liked the two other cats, she wanted to be the queen and single cat. The two others got along well with each other, but not with Hexe. The kitten used to scream in front of my door when Hexe was in and she was out. So I let her in. She would continue to scream for attention and do all she could to try and get into the center of attraction. In the beginning Hexe tortured my rug to let her anger out, then she jumped on my lap and buried her ears under my arm so she wouldn’t have to hear that kitten anymore. I was angry too, but what should I do – let Hexe in and the screaming kitten out? This little cat had a hell of patience meowing for hours.
After a while things settled down. Hexe and the kitten took their turns of being “single cat” in my apartment. Hexe was the one who liked to do things the way she felt them in that very moment, whereas the other one was very much into control and making sure to be number one in all possible places. As soon as Hexe didn’t feel like showing up in my apartment for two days, the other had moved in. When Hexe felt like returning, she had to invest tons of energy to tell the other who is the boss. These fights could last 2-3 days and I had to clean up quite some pee during these periods. Afterwards, my apartment “belonged” to Hexe again and the other one spent most of her time upstairs with the neighbours.
I had some longer absences in the beginning of the 2000s, which Hexe never really forgave me. Once when I returned from being away for 4 months she looked at me in a way I could never forget. As if her eyes said: YOU? I thought you were dead. It took her a long time to show up in my apartment again, and in some of these instances she did the worst thing she could imagine to do: she pooed in front of my refrigerator.
We continued to have these ups and downs over the years, but Hexe was still a major relationship in my life. She would always jump up my sink in the bathroom, hang in the sink and drink flowing water. When I stayed with her and watched her drinking, she purred. She had a very refined system of drinking, moving her head up and down, sneezing, drinking from the middle or from the sink. It was like a meditation watching her. She also liked photo shoots. Sometimes I asked her “photo shoot?” and she started choosing a place and posing. she did the funniest poses and mimics for me and felt like a star each time the camera clicked.
Hexe never took anything for granted. She was thankful for everything she got, for every beautiful moment in her life, for every piece of potatoe chips. I learned a lot from her…
Sometimes she fell from my lap. I always wondered if she’s just too relaxed to care, if it’s deliberate or if she has some kind of physical trouble. With Hexe you never knew. Today I think she’s been handicapped from the beginning. We don’t know anything about her first 4 years. She always had trouble with her hind legs and started at a quite early age to not be able to jump very high anymore. Over the last 5 years or so, her condition became worse. She stopped seeing me in my apartment around 3 years ago. She felt unsafe outside. She also became deaf around that time. I visited her every now and then in my neighbour’s apartment but it was kindof like she made her choice as she already did in the beginning – she wanted to be with my neighbour. In summer 2010 my neighbours went on vacation and I had all three cats to care for. The two others lived with me in my apartment, Hexe was alone upstairs (she enjoyed that). In the beginning she would just walk around, back and forth, she was really uncomfortable and anxious, until I asked her if she remembered our beginnings and Reiki and our love. I started to cry. That was when she suddenly stopped walking and looked at me. She remembered. She jumped on the sofa and went to sleep, I had never seen her that relaxed for a long time. These two weeks when I went upstairs to be with Hexe twice a day was our last longer period together. Her condition got worse over time. She had almost no teeth left and a weak heart. Each time I went to Vienna I prepared for not meeting her again when I come back.
Last winter while I was in Vienna I suddenly saw Hexe’s face in front of me in a panic telling me to do something. I called my neighbour for some other reason and then told her about this vision. My neighbour said they were at the vet that very day and he wanted to do surgery but was a bit scared her heart would be too weak for the anesthesia. And then Hexe started to yell and scream and do all she could to NOT get that surgery. I told my neighbour that I thought she shouldn’t do it and she also felt like not doing it. I feel she would have died that day and she knew it and wasn’t prepared, it was too early. She didn’t get the surgery and lived for one more year.
Around 6 weeks ago, before I travelled to Vienna, I held Hexe for one last time. She was very thin and anxious. My neighbour already had trouble in her marriage because of Hexe who would pee wherever she went. Her husband had run out of patience. When she guided me to the door she had tears in her eyes and said: I don’t know what to do, I can’t just put her to sleep!
In a way I knew I would never see her again but I didn’t want to know.
Today my neighbour called. She asked if I got the mail she sent me around a month ago and I didn’t because she got the ending of my address wrong. She asked about something else and then said: Hexe is no longer here. After I told her the correct address she sent me the mail again.
In the night of December 28 Hexe had an epileptic seizure which usually lasts a few minutes but she got stuck in it for more than half an hour. They drove to the emergency vet at night, she got meds and the vet said her heart is so weak that her brain suffers. She could have gotten such a seizure again and again, for hours, and that’s enormous pain. So they put her to sleep, my neighbour kept petting her, Hexe had her eyes wide open but was not really present anymore. She was around 16 years old.
The other day, I didn’t know she had already passed away, I dreamed of Hexe. She was travelling through different worlds, the way we did together more than 10 years ago, and she was happy.
Still… I’m incredibly sad.
And I want to know people about her.
She was one amazing cat.
Hexe = Witch.
The perfect name for her.
I don’t have any pictures of her here, but I’ll add some later.
Thanks for reading.
This picture shows him the first time coming out of his stump.
