Praying To Saint Feezl, My Dead Cat

A few years ago, an adopted cat that was supposed to be fixed had five kittens. We found them under the front deck, and my mom dismantled the deck and held the boards up for me, while I collected them in a box with a towel.
"There's like, five!" I exclaimed.
"Shut up!" my mom said.
"They just keep coming," I said, very happily, placing each of them carefully in their new bed.
"Shut up!"
But that didn't change anything; there were still five.

My dad wanted to call them Hitcher, Pointer, Flipper, Ringer, and Pinky. He counted off his fingers as he explained the names to me, and the names matched his fingers perfectly. I thought that that was very clever.
One of the kittens died a few days after being born. We now had only four. Eventually, my mom suggested that each of us (my parents, my funny little brother Cody, and I) name one cat. I named mine Elmo (who had huge ears, so I started calling her Earmo); Cody's cat was Smoky; my mother's was Dewey (whom I lately call Slappy Cat, because if I pet him and try to walk away, he runs after me and slaps me).

And my father was determined to name one Flipper, after the rude finger:

My mom thought that Flipper was not a nice name for a sweet little kitten, so she started calling her Izzy (not that it really bothered my dad). One day my dad looked over and saw her on my lap. "Fuzzy's being your friend," he remarked.
So because of his mistake, she became Fuzzy. I liked to call her sister and her Smellmo and Fleazy. "Fuzzy" and "Fleazy" eventually evolved into Feezy, then Feezl (pronounced Fee-zul, emphasis on the first syllable), and sometimes Nozzle or Furzal.
Her brother Smoky became a pain in the butt, so we started calling him Stinky. So the pair of them became Feezl and Stinkl.

I bonded with Feezl more than with the other cats. She seemed more intuitive than them, for some reason, and she was a caring kitty.
When I served her tuna, I told her, "Feezl, eat your fishl!" I also told her to eat her meatzl, her cheezl, and her fowlzl. When I wanted to get her off my lap, I told her, "Pleazl, Feezl, I have to peezl!" When I told my mom that she had peezled in our garden, Mom asked, "Are you sure she didn't poozl?"
When she stole my peacock feathers, she was a thiefzl. When she bit the heads off of them, she was a little white rat. She once came in the window and released a live mouse in my room at two in the morning, trying to teach the kitten (Simon) and me how to hunt--that's how amazing she was.
When she slipped through the fence, I said that she squeezl. When she leaped, I told my mom that she could flyzl. I named my Deviantart page (FeezlFuzzl, where I write homoerotic, Christian comic strip fan fiction) after one of her names.

I often sang an old hymn to her, "There's flies on you, and there's flies on me, but there ain't no flies on Feezus!"
"Oh, Feezus," I would say, cuddling with her, "I just love you so much. This is why you are so amazing."
I got to calling her Feezus on a regular basis, and one night, my mom and I were watching tv while I was playing with her, when Feezus made one of the biggest leaps/backflips that I had ever seen.
"Whoa!" my mom cried.
"Feezus Mice!" I shouted.
My mom started laughing, delighted at my new name for our kitty.
After that, I also added, "Hail, Feezer!" to my greetings for her, too.
She once played with a dried onion that had dropped to the floor, and had really bad breath when she cuddled with me afterwards.
"You know I love you," my mom told her once, when she lay on her chest, "but you are the love of AJ's life." My mom says that Feezl simply looked at her and slow-blinked, as if she was saying, "I know."

She comforted me when her sister Elmo fell off the roof and died in my arms. She comforted me when her "little brother," a younger cat that we had raised as a kitten, ran away and was never seen again.

Simon, kitten.

Simon, adult.

She was especially "needy" also, when my rabbits died.

Wally

Wilbur

Wilbur's brother, Clarence

She knew what I needed, and she was there for me, always.


And then she ran away herself. I thought that surely she must be dead, because she would have come home, if she could have. She always was adventurous, as well.
 A few months later, another cat, Sebastian, disappeared. He was barely more than a kitten himself, only a few months old. I had known that I would lose some of my nine new kittens eventually, but I didn't think it would be this soon--just like I hadn't thought it would be this soon, with Feezl.
Sebastian had been gone for six days when I went to copy something for school one night, and accidentally came across a picture of Feezl. "Oh, Feezl," I prayed quietly (though I can't bring myself to pray to God, most of the time, because he seems too far away), "Please come home if you can. I need you. Please, just come home."
My mom then wanted to watch "our show," which at the time was Parks and Recreation. In the particular episode we watched that night, the main character, Leslie Knope, saw an "impersonator" of Li'l Sebastian, the miniature horse that she had been obsessed with (and who had died in an earlier episode), and took it as a sign that she should marry her boyfriend, after all.
The next morning, my mom woke me up, carrying...our Little Sebastian. He was back!
"Is that him?" I asked, in the limited light from the hallway, hoping against hope that it wasn't his twin brother Sasha, who was also yellow but who wasn't missing.
It wasn't Sasha. "Dad found him, just sitting on the deck. He was hungry," she said.
I took it that Feezl had perhaps heard my prayer, and had been unable to return herself, because she wasn't in this plane anymore (physical plane, not airplane). So she had sent Sebastian home, instead. She had even known that we would watch that very episode.
So now I have a sort of personal patron saint, in the form of my late cat Feezl. She does what she can for me, in her own limited power, and even after her likely death, she apparently still watches out for me and takes care of me. I still sometimes hope that she is alive and will return, as I hope for her "little brother," Simon, but I don't think it's likely for either of them. (We later found another orange cat, but it wasn't Simon, because that would mean that his balls grew back.)
But at least I feel more connected to her, since Sebastian has returned.
I guess this makes me a sort of Catholic, except I pronounce it as "Cat-holic" (which, on two levels, would explain my many furry children).
I hope there's an afterlife, and that I'll get to see her again, someday. Not seeing loved ones has to be the saddest thing about death.

For more stories about amazing kitties and other great creatures, see: 

"The Kitten, Or Why I Don't Believe In Animal Euthanasia," 

 "The Kitten, Part Two: He Wanted To Live," 

And my "Animals & Euthanasia" page here or at the top of this site.


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