Great Pain

I'm suffering today.

Not physical pain.  I'm just crying and so sad.

 I got up this morning and did some chores and drank some coffee, then I went online to check my email.   I see a post from a KATA person.

It includes photos of the KATA volunteers and other cat rescue people and family of Vicki together.  It's at her memorial service.  And I never even knew about it or was told by anyone.

When I asked one of them why they didn't tell me, they said it was online, and that I should have known that way and that they are busy.

WTF?  What kind of age is this where nobody even lets others know about the funeral of a friend and expects they'll somehow run across it on facebook.

It hurt so bad.

I would have let everyone know, personally, but that is me.   I'm old and I think about people and who should know and not be left out.

It just makes me feel unloved and yes, left out.

I'll get over it and I intend to make my heart harder, colder, wiser to the ways of humans.  Or something. Yeah right, like I'll ever learn or change. I think it was so cruel, but then I think, they don't care about you, get over it.  I will get over it.

Last week, in the midst of that trailer park hell, I so badly wished Vicki was alive to call and vent over it in tears and curses, which is all we did in the end.  I never saw her much these last years in person.  They'd turned to adoption and I was always all over her about how they needed to fix the mothers of the kittens they were taking in or the problem would just continue.

I was happy when she called over the Cascadia homeless camp.  The campers had been evicted and left all their cats behind, forty or so, as people do around these parts.  No one would help, not even to feed them and they'd caught most of them again but couldn't get the last ones, could I help.   Of course, I said, and drove up there excited, thrilled actually, to be out trapping with Vicki and Doris like the old days.  Yeah we got em.  She implored me for help finding them placements and I helped with that too.

For twenty years, I without fail, helped her out when she needed it most.   I was trying so hard a few years ago to clean up a Sweet Home trailer park, that is just the craps.  People move in there with cats and don't fix their cats and leave them when they move.  I was trying to get about 15 fixed around one trailer, most tame, and noticed a cat with a tumor dangling off its chin.   One tenant claimed KATA had promised to take that cat in, so I called Vicki who went off the charts ranting over that trailer park when I called.   I finally shut her off.

She said KATA had dozens of kittens too, and could I work my magic and find them a place, so I did, but it was up in the Portland area. She wanted me to take them up too.  At first I agreed to it.  But I was resentful for her to even ask I do it, the day after I took a dozen from the trailer park up to be fixed.  I would be exhausted but I wanted to be the hero for her.

I took ten or twelve of those trailer park cats to the FCCO, to be fixed and while I was trying to sleep in a parking lot in my car during the day up there, I was called by a tenant that they had the tumor cat in their trailer.  I called Vicki and asked her to pick up the cat.  And again was screamed at by her, that she was too busy and how she wasn't going into that awful trailer park again, all that.   I promised to get her the next morning when I returned the trailer park cats, that it would only be overnight.   So she did it.

I was dog tired, drop dead tired, the next morning when I took the cats back up to Sweet Home, and called her up to bring over Smoothie, the tumor cat.  She came over mad with the cat in the carrier because I also told her I was too exhausted to drive her kittens to Portland that day.  She stood there yelling at me,  as I fumbled and fumbled, trying to transfer Smoothie to one of my own carriers, from hers, unable to do so I was so exhausted, unable to even open a carrier, and finally she said, you can't do anything, you're too worn out.   At that moment she softened.  I knew she was yelling at me because she was too exhausted too.  "Go home," she said, "and rest."  "You too," I said.

Smoothie;s tumor was removed and she got an excellent home.  The kittens got to Portland.  A year later, a mad relative torched that trailer, at the Sweet Home trailer park, and all those cats I got fixed were left behind when the clan of dysfunctional assholes moved.  Same old.

Years before, she and I had gone into that same fucking trailer park, to that same trailer, where a massive woman then lived, basically in a chair, surrounded in piles upon piles of her own reeking filth, a bitch too she was, who couldn't keep a state paid caregiver because she was so abusive to them.  The trailer was full of unfixed uncared for cats too.

I guess I told about the trailer park because mostly Vicki asked me to do things for her.  For a long long time I wanted to be a part of her nonprofit but I was never let in. This hurt greatly over the years and decades.  To not even be told about her memorial is kind of par for the course.  When I complained about it to a long time old lady friend, who has known my tribulations, she broke out laughing.  I stared at her, indignant, and she said "You really expected something else?"

Sure I struggle with her loss,  as she about the only person who sometimes answered her phone when I called her and called me  sometimes to ask me to do something or to vent. I don't have any friends or family members who call me.  None.  Nada.    I struggle with her loss because of a very very long history knowing her.

I'll get over not being told about her service.  See ya around Vicki, probably sooner rather than later.

Earth to earth.  Dust to dust.  Goodbye Vicki Lindley.