Cupcakes and Caffeine

Day 04 → Worst memory from childhood.

Again, I don’t know why I am going with this, but I am, so here goes. My worst childhood memory is the day my first cat died. Dusty was her name and she was a stray that one night found her way to my backdoor and was let in my parents. I was literally 6 months old and it was an extremely cold November night and my dad heard scratching at the backdoor, went to investigate and found a cold, shivering bag of bones waiting to come in. Needless to sya he let her in and fed her. The next day he took her to the vet who scanned her for a chip, she didn’t have one and basically told him he had two options: to take her home or leave her at the vets where she would be put down if her owner didn’t come for her. Seeing as she had obviously been outside for a very long time, and well my dad isn’t heartless he took her home.

Literally, Dusty was my best friend growing up. I loved her ridiculously. Being an only child I had no one to talk to most of the time so I’d talk to her, even if when I was really small I didn’t know how to treat a cat and would throw myself on her or pull her tail, I still loved her. Then when I was 7 (and I remember this day so vividly I’m almost crying now) I remember hearing my mum run up the stairs and into my parents bedroom and tell my dad something was wrong with Dusty, that she was moving. My dad rushed downstairs. I sat in bed crying not knowing what was going on, then moved to the top of the stairs and listened and for some reason decided to go down to investigate. I looked in the front room and Dusty was lying in the middle of the floor in a pool of blood, tongue hanging out of her mouth. I screamed and ran back upstairs and my mum came up to comfort me. I then watched as my dad carried her in his arms wrapped in a towel out to a waiting taxi, she was too limp and lifeless to put up any kind of struggle. Then my mum said I din’t have to go to school, but I said I wanted to.

Mum came to pick me up from school and I ran out to ask her what happened and she said Dusty had died and I started to cry. I had secretly hoped if I went to school she’d be there waiting for me when I got home, like she had every other school day of my life. I later found out she’d had kidney failure and then bitten her tongue, hence the blood.

That was literally the day I cried the most. The first time anything I loved died. A week later we had a new cat though, Buster from the Cat’s Protection League. I loved him too, but I never forgot Dusty.