My special cat Axl
My special cat Axl, our beautiful cat Axl is dead, at the age of thirteen. This article is dedicated to his memory and to all the animals we love so much, to all the pets that are family, pets supporting and helping us especially in hard times like outbreak period we’re living right now.
I’ve always had cats in my life, since I was a child. I’ve had so many cats and I loved them all, suffering when they were ill and crying when they died. But Axl was a unique cat. A true special creature.
We called him Axl because he was so beautiful, vibrant and hopping as young Axl Rose (Guns ‘n Roses frontman). But Axl beauty was also and especially inner. He had a luminous aura, and now that he’s gone, I think of him as a pure light, a pure energy cat.
Axl was some sort of saint cat, with strong perceiving and telepathically communicating abilities. Every time I thought: “Axl, where are you?” he appeared, coming towards me, few seconds later. Stroking him made you feel much better, so healthy for anxiety and strain: a talent most of the cats have, but Axl was a real painkiller. Sometimes I felt he made you feel better just putting your pain on himself, as a sacred, sacrifical creature. He probably knew that “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a sensitive consciousness and a deep heart” as Dostoevsky said in “Crime and Punishment” and Axl had a true deep heart, in a way that we humans could never understand.
He had a composite language, made by many different kinds of meow, depending on what he wanted to say: meow of greeting, meow of fun, meow of pain, meow of complaint, meow of gaming, meow of call for cuddles. Like all felines, he loved to stay awake at night and when we went sleeping, he and his best cat-friend Angelina took all their toys off the basket and started playing. What Axl absolutely hated was going by car. If we had to take him somewhere, he knew it and disappeared, like a little ghost, before we could go and pick up pet carrier on tiptoe.
The first night, when we moved in, Axl didn’t stop to meow, doing a very loud complaint cry. But then, after ten days, he discovered the garden: we didn’t have a garden in the home we left and Axl loved it at first sight. How much he liked to hide inside Viburnum hedge and claw-sharpening on Callistemon trunk! What he loved more were flying creatures; he spent lot of time following very carefully the flight of bees, butterflies, wasps and flies. And he watched, in an almost meditative state, all the birds flying above him: flocks of noisy and very fast green parrots; big crows with their loudest cry; tiny, quick and silent sparrows.
In the 2019 summer I dreamed Axl and he was totally covered by blood; I knew right away my cat had been hit by a dread disease, even if we couldn’t see the signs yet. Few months later he started feeling sick, and became skinny. The vet detected an inoperable lung cancer, and after some days of hospitalization, few days before Christmas Axl came back home. Thanks to cortisone pills he started eating again, and he looked happy; every night, at the same time, I had to push a pill in his throat, but he knew his health depended on that bitter pill, and every night at the same time he jumped on the table waiting for his med.
After three months, in the middle of outbreak and lockdown, signs of his disease came back. Gradually, then suddenly. His last night was heartbreaking. Every breath he hardly took made me feel like being stabbed, and it’s so strange Axl was suffering by serious respiratory failure just like a part of Covid-19 patients.
In the morning, I took him to the vet, and doctor told me there was no way to heal my cat, no way to make him feel better and the only right thing to do was euthanasia. Axl was peaceful. He was ready. I could see it from his eyes, I could feel it through his mind. We spent together the last five minutes of his life and for the last time I could squeeze his long ears and his white little paws, always snow-white, so very clean even if dying.
“There is, o brothers, a state of being where there is neither earth nor water, neither fire nor air, there is no infinity of space or infinity of consciousness. There is no nullity, no perception or non-perception, neither this world nor another world nor both, neither the sun nor the moon. Here, monks, I say that there is neither going nor staying, there is neither growth nor decrease. It is not fixed, it is not mobile, it has no support. It is the end of suffering” Buddha
