by Jessica Mcguire

Created on: October 09, 2010

The Lost Ones

In the beginning, there were six kittens in the litter.  Their mother was still just a kitten herself, only ten months old, and it was her first litter.  She did not have a home, just people who fed her occasionally and considered her their cat.  When the kittens were about two weeks old, the small family was moved under some stairs when the human family moved out, abandoning the mother and her kittens. 

One of the babies vanished, rumored to have been killed by a neighborhood dog.  A few days later, the mother cat took advantage of a broken window and moved the kittens into my apartment.  One of them had a head injury, a result of unsupervised children playing with the kittens.  I couldn't bring myself to force them all back outside.  They were three weeks old at the time.

Since there were so many of them, I gave the five kittens names.  I told myself that it was just so that I could yell at specific kittens when they were misbehaving.  I didn't want to admit that I was beginning to get attached to the little balls of fluff.  I already had two adult cats that had been with me for many years.  I couldn't afford to keep the kittens and their mother. 

The injured kitten was named Hana, which is Japanese for “flower”.  A friend named another kitten Sugar.  A third kitten was named Tim, because he was so timid.  The fourth kitten was named Georgia, after Curious George, because she was always getting into things.  The last kitten was named Lali, which was an acronym for look-a-like, because she was almost identical to Sugar. 

A couple of weeks went by with the kittens staying with me, and I realized that Hana’s head injury had caused her development to be retarded. I was concerned that she might never catch up to her siblings, so I took her to a veterinarian.  He believed that she had a congenital birth defect, rather than a head injury.  I could not convince him otherwise and he warned me that she probably wouldn't survive.

The vet’s prediction of Hana’s fate turned out to be accurate, but only because he didn't do his job very well.  I had never had such small kittens before and was unaware that they needed to be treated for roundworms.  Hana died peacefully in her sleep, killed by the parasites when she was about six weeks old.  I was absolutely devastated. 

Hana was an extremely sweet kitten

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