KATA Founder Vicki Found Dead

Vicki is gone.   Found dead Monday evening in her home.

Doris and Vicki of KATA

She had called me Friday from Marcola.  She said she was feeling ill and that they had 10 or 12 reservations this last Monday at whs, and offered them to me.  Said she felt terrible about not using them but had not even remembered making the appointment.

She'd called her best friend Friday morning, asking if she could go with a volunteer with a sick kitten to the vet, that she felt sick.  Her friend told her the volunteer could manage it alone.  But Vicki went anyhow.  She was on her way back from Springfield, picking up kittens who had not gotten homes, from the Springfield Petco, when she called me and told me she felt sick and about the appointments.

Later she went to a Points for Profit dinner, and started vomiting, complained of feeling cold.  One of her volunteers offered to take her to the doctor but she refused.   She went home and was not heard from again.  Worried, her best friend and co founder of KATA (Kitty Angel Team Adoption) went to her home to check on her and found her, knees still bent, like she'd been bent over to clean a litter box, dead.

I found out last night.  The news hit me hard.  I felt immediately vulnerable to death, myself.   Did she die of stress, a heart attack?   That was my thought.  She was always over worked and stressed from getting a zillion calls from people wanting her to take their cats right now.

She called me two weeks ago about a woman somewhere in Sweet Home who had threatened a cat if Vicki didn't come get her right at that moment.  She had turned the woman down.   The woman had been brutally abusive to her on the phone, which is not uncommon at all.  We call it emotional blackmail.  People will threaten to kill a cat or kittens in horrible manner to try to get someone with a kind heart to come take it.  It's so horrible to endure this and yet it happens all the time.   Yet Vicki felt guilt, about not taking in the poor cat, and its ultimate fate.

We were not close, really. We didn't do things together or chat about personal things.  I'd known her over two decades.  We trapped together, had all sorts of trapping adventures, endured horrors witnessing way too  much suffering, cried together over the phone, stormed and raged over the way people treat animals.  She called me when she had to vent over enduring too much.

We sometimes fought.  She yelled at me on many occasions and never would include me in her nonprofit, which hurt, time and time again, over the years.   But that was her choice.  I wanted so badly to be included with other people, have a sisterhood of some kind.   In the end, I formed my own nonprofit and am still the loner.  We forgave each other our indiscretions of word, time and time again over the years.

I asked her if she'd ever retire.  She was so burned out.  She hesitated and I thought she was going to tell me "yes", she would retire at some point.  Then she said with inward determined set to her appearance, that she would die helping cats.

I suppose I will too, Vicki.  It's not a bad way to go, the way you went, a sudden thing.  Your fight is over.  The loss to the cats of this county is large.   KATA took in the cats and kittens our big well funded private shelter won't take in, without being paid to do so.  And on a moment's notice, especially if they were in trouble.

Will KATA survive the loss of its heart beat?  She and Doris, the co founder, have been best friends for years upon years.  Doris is in her mid 70's.  Even last summer, when a property owner suddenly evicted a homeless camp, way out in the middle of nowhere, along the river, it was Doris and Vicki, the two old ladies, who retrapped over 40 cats they'd only gotten fixed a few months earlier.    I went and helped with the stragglers, because that's my thing.

 It was beautiful out along the river.  The mounds of human trash they left behind will be overtaken by nature and hidden one day.  The cats still there darted in and out between the piles of human wreckage and waste, frantic for food.

We had to park behind a gate.  Vicki tucked a KATA card under her windshield wiper, hoping to avoid any trouble with locals. none of whom would help or cared about those poor cats.  We three old cat trappers gathered our gear and hiked the quarter mile in past the gate and trapped the last three cats.

So long Vicki.  Bless your beautiful soul.

Onward to Infinity!