Seal was an extraordinarily sweet cat who somehow ended up at a shelter in Rhode Island when she was eight years old. The people there decided she was too old to adopt out, so she spent five years at their shelter. When she was thirteen, someone spotted her and brought her to Kitty Connection.
I met Seal while doing Care & Cleaning at Kitty Connection, and after hearing her story, I decided to make room and bring her home. At first, everything went wrong – I found out Seal’s back legs didn’t work quite right, and she spent the first few days hiding under my bed and peeing on my bathroom floor.
But I made some changes around the house – moved some litter boxes, rearranged some things – and Seal started to settle in. She almost never left my bedroom – she seemed most comfortable on the cat tree in there, or a small shelf space above my closet. Gradually, she started getting friendlier, and it turned out she had the loudest purr I’ve ever heard. She also drooled when she purred, which I thought was endearing. Most nights, she slept on the bed, right next to me, and I’d wake up to that loud purr in the morning.
We had about a year and a half of good times before Seal started coughing pretty regularly. She’d always been a little hoarse, but this was different. At first, the vet thought it was an infection, so we treated it with antibiotics – which seemed to work for a couple weeks, but then the cough came back, and with it, some difficulty breathing. I took her to another vet, who did some more tests and found she had growths in her lungs. There wasn’t much else they could do, so we said goodbye.
I think about Seal every single day, and there’s a picture of her by my door that I see when I leave in the morning. I wish we’d had more time together, Baby Seal, but I’m glad for every day we got.
–Hans Raab, Seal’s human.
