This is something I wrote for class. Enjoy!
I never really believed in guardian angels or any of that garbage until Chester came into my life. That little ball of fluff and I went to hell and back together, and I owe him my life. This isn’t your typical love story, and it doesn’t have a happy ending. Life isn’t always rainbows and butterflies. Sometimes it just plain sucks, but that’s what makes it life. Anyway, it all started the summer before seventh grade, seven years ago.
My mom was actually the one who found Chester. He was hiding with the rest of his litter in our bushes. Chester stood out because he was orange (hence the name Chester) among a sea of brown, and he wasn’t afraid of my mom. My sister and I spent the first few weeks after discovering the kittens trying to find wherever the mother hid them. (She tried to hide them again a couple of times a week.) Eventually the mother decided to keep them in the same place, a broken culvert across the street. We then decided to try to get them to play with us. It was a difficult task at first because they were afraid of us. We soon learned ways to lure them to us such as offering them food and dangling weeds over the entrance to the culvert and grabbing them when they pawed at it.
It only took a little over a month to train Chester to come to our voice. My dad was upset about the whole thing, especially naming them, because he knew they could easily be hit by a car because we lived next to a high school, and he didn’t want us to become too attached to them. He talked to people he knew on farms to try to get them to take the kittens to a safer place.
Because we lived so close to the school, I was allowed to go home for lunch every day. I always called Chester and let him hang out on our inside porch while I ate. One day, however, he wasn’t there. After school I learned that one of the people my dad had talked to had come and taken Chester without asking. My sister and I were devastated. We cried until my dad called and got him back, which to us meant he liked Chester, too. Our thoughts were reinforced when he let Chester live in our house during the winter.
I spent all my time outside of school playing with Chester. He was there through it all, the laughter and tears. Chester was there through the worst parts of my depression, laying still as I cried into his fur. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t talk to me, his presence was all I needed. Chester was a constant in my life when everything was changing as I transitioned to high school in a new town. I thought he’d be there forever.
As it happens in life, college came. I moved 150 miles away to go to school. I was home every other weekend, but my mom said it was evident that Chester was heartbroken. She would send me pictures of him sitting outside my door for days after I went back to college. Chester started to get sick, too. We thought it was just a cold and that he’d get over it soon. I mean, he was only seven. That’s young for a cat. My mom’s cat was thirteen and doing fine.
The morning of Thanksgiving we knew something was wrong. He was hiding in my room and wasn’t letting anyone touch him. It was then that the reality of how sick he was truly hit us. He wasn’t breathing properly. It became apparent that he wasn’t getting enough oxygen. My dad started making calls to try and get a vet to see him, as we watched Chester’s condition fail. Twenty minutes later, Chester was dead.
It’s funny how you have to lose something to realize how much you depended on it. I didn’t have my little counselor with me anymore. I began to think about how much he had meant to me. Chester had been there through the worst parts of my life. It wasn’t fair that he was gone just as things started to get better. Those two sentences were on constant loop in my head for the remainder of the day. It dawned on me that Chester was like a living guardian angel, there when I needed him most, protecting me from the dangers of my mind. I understood that he was gone because I didn’t need him anymore. I understood now that he was watching over me now, guarding me from heaven. I was going to be okay.
No comments:
Post a Comment