Heidi and the Rainbow Bridge

Our cat, Heidi, was an unrelenting warrior dressed in a cat’s body. A Richmond SPCA rescue, Heidi was a stray found wandering the streets. My daughter adopted her because she had this affectionate head butting when she greeted you. How sweet. When she came home, what I met was a scrawny little creature that I thought maybe I could love with time. After all, she was my daughter’s cat. But she had a special affection for me and would curl up under my chair every day while I worked.

She had come to us with preexisting medical conditions, which the SPCA had treated, but every now and then some pesky ailment had us running to the vet. No worries, Heidi surmounted her illnesses every time and came out stronger than ever. Then we noticed that her appetite waned, and she was losing weight. We tried different cat food labels, everything, but she still didn’t respond. A vet visit discovered that Heidi was severely anemic and needed an emergency hospitalization where she would spend several days in intensive care, getting multiple blood transfusions, follow-up blood tests, et cetera, to the tune of over $5,000. Because we could not afford her care, the vet advised us to put her down that very day and warned us that if we took her home, she would likely bleed out that very weekend, and that we should prepare for a bloody mess and to be sure to have plenty of towels handy.

Because we loved Heidi so much and could not bear to say goodbye so soon, we decided to take her home, do a GoFundMe and pray. I suggested that the vet give us something life-affirming while we prepared to take her home and face the inevitable. Because one of her many complicating conditions was a bladder infection, the junior vet gave us an antibiotic, food paste and a syringe and wished us luck. Trooper that she was, we force fed her that food paste every ten minutes during the entire weekend, nursed and cuddled her and propped her up in the window where she spent the weekend.

Heidi survived that weekend and proved the junior vet wrong. At a follow-up visit with the senior vet, a blood test showed that her true diagnosis was a blood infection which could be cured with a special round of medications that cost a measly $500. Five hundred dollars as opposed to $5,000, we were elated. She quickly gained weight and thrived and was back to her old self, until some months after that, she disappeared under the bed and when coaxed out, she was severely sick, contracted liver failure and died. The senior vet concluded that she had eaten something bad under the bed and quickly went downhill. How tragic that she should die at 3 years of age after suffering multiple ailments. With heavy hearts, we said our goodbyes and vowed that no cat would ever be able to replace such a stout warrior. She taught us several lessons: that even when the going seems impossible, there is still a way out if we have faith.

Heidi died over a year ago, but just recently I found myself crossing the pedestrian bridge at Belle Isle Park in Richmond, when Google had diverted me on a sunny spring day recently. I don’t know exactly how high the bridge is, but it is quite a long walk across and it stands high above the rapids below. I had underestimated the length of this bridge and so began to walk, reassuring myself that it would be over quickly. NOT. I almost had a panic attack as I walked, on tip toe, trying very hard not to watch the rushing rapids beat against the rocks as I almost succumbed to the ever-present call of the deep.

When I reached the other side, I only realized then that there was nowhere to go but to turn around and walk across the bridge again. Terrified, I considered calling 911 to rescue me and stopped an older woman who had just crossed and admittedly had taken a Xanax to get over the ordeal. It turned out that even Emergency Services could not access the park and that there was no alternative but for me to cross it again. With empathy, the older woman’s daughter offered to cross me over the bridge herself, with her small dog, and she thought maybe it would be easier to carry me on her back while she wore my backpack on her front. I decided against that because I would then be level with the bridge’s siderails and could fall into the water easier.

When we had almost crossed, I was so grateful that I asked the anonymous woman her name. Her name was HEIDI. Immediately it occurred to me that our cat, Heidi, had helped me cross that bridge, just as we had helped HER over the Rainbow Bridge. I mentioned the coincidence to the young woman, and she laughed sullenly and said, “There you go, Heidi’s looking out!” She had recently lost her cat, too, and the small dog that was accompanying us was her cat’s replacement.

Our connections with our pets and people close to us don’t have to end with death. A trip across the pedestrian bridge at Belle Isle taught me just that.