Lazarus Days
The Conclusion of "Summer Vacation"
The morning of Tuesday, July 29th was sunny and muggy. Our cat, Eloise, had wandered outside at around 9am while I was working on a small repair project with the door open. My daughter and I had been at my family’s shared summer house in the central Adirondacks for four days. The last time I saw Eloise she was lazily sniffing around the wildflowers at the front of the house.
I noticed she was missing around lunchtime. I wasn’t very concerned; she was most likely sitting under some ferns and would show up at dinnertime. Nonetheless, I asked my daughter to start looking for her.
From that point, things escalated rapidly. My daughter called my wife, who was still home in Bethesda. She was terrified, and I was starting to get worried. I nonetheless decided to press ahead with a plan to pick up my father from his assisted living community about an hour away so he could enjoy the house for a couple of nights. I told myself that Eloise would have returned by the time I returned with him. By the time I got back to the house at dinnertime, she was still missing.
Now I panicked. I printed 20 signs with her information and my contact number—both the home phone in the Adirondacks and my mobile which would work anywhere. I also included my email. “Eloise,” the sign said. “Responds to Weezie. Brown tabby. Sixteen years old. Very friendly.” The color photo showed her splayed across a map of the High Peaks on our kitchen table in Maryland from a few weeks before. My kids and I had been planning a backpacking trip (which we would now not be taking) for this vacation when it was taken.
The terrain around the house is extremely rough. It is mostly a thick Balsam Fir forest, meaning it is dark and the understory is dense, covered with dead logs and sharp sticks. Glacial boulders are strewn randomly, ideal dens for bobcats, whose scat is all over the place. In searching for her on the first day, I found a fox den behind the garage, under our old aluminum canoe.
On that first night, I regretted that I had brought my father into the middle of this disaster. I spent most of the night searching for her, and I ended up feeding him leftovers.
I tried harder to make him feel welcome Wednesday, even though I was now consumed with dread. The main event was the weekly picnic of property owners down at the beach. I made a pesto salad and managed to act fairly normal with the community, knowing it was very important to him. I told everyone there about Eloise, and was heartened that people had seen the signs. At least, I thought, people will know whose cat it is when she shows up. If she shows up. I took him back to his place Thursday morning. She was still missing.
I lost hope quickly. In my head, I was adjusting the probability that she would be found alive. I had it at 75% when I went to bed Tuesday. By Wednesday night it was down to 50%. After the rainstorm came and the temperatures plunged Thursday night, I figured it was in the single digits.
Each morning I looked anxiously out the window at her litterbox and carrier, which we had placed outside, having read that cats can smell familiar things from up to a mile away. I would check the WiFi cameras as soon as I woke, which routinely showed pictures of deer and squirrels, but no cat.
When my wife arrived with my son on Friday, she searched again, retracing my steps and covering even more ground. We had never spent so much time in the woods around the house. We both got to know every tree and stump and rock for hundreds of yards in every direction. We walked the roads again and again, calling out for her. Nothing.
By the time a week had elapsed, we knew she was gone forever. We were almost certain that it had been an animal that got her—probably a bobcat, but maybe a fox. Broad-Winged Hawks, I had researched, could only lift a pound or two, so they weren’t to blame. I kept suspecting the ravens, whose throaty croaks were heard all over the hill. In all of my searching, I never saw a sign of her—alive or dead. My wife and daughter left on the following Friday, ten days after she disappeared, and my son and I left the day after. Before leaving, I took down the rain-soaked signs that I had put on telephone poles, but left the signs inside at the Lodge, Post Office, and down at the beach.
Back in Bethesda, things were painful for us. Eloise had been with us since before our son was born. She had been “the only sister I ever had” to my daughter. She was, in fact, an amazing animal—intelligent, kind, funny, empathetic, and beautiful. The hole that she left in the family was brutal.
Her reminders were everywhere; litterboxes, scratching posts, shed hair, mangled carpet, cat beds, Chewie food deliveries, her carrying case with its red ribbon that said “Eloise Carpenter.” Most significantly, we no longer had our morning wakeup. Her greeting at 5:45 every morning of raucous meowing had been annoying, but God, did I miss it. Now, we slept unimpeded, but woke at 6:30 or 7:00 with a feeling of dread as we realized why we still slept. Every morning it got more and more real.
I never asked my wife when she would start getting rid of stuff. There was no rush. She canceled the Chewie delivery after another batch of cans came, and when asked for the reason, she typed “she’s fucking dead.”
She ended up doing the major cleanout last Friday, after Weezie had been gone for about three and a half weeks. The carrier went into storage in the attic, along with the litterboxes and food bowls. She kept what remained of her food in the pantry drawer, as another cat owner might want it. Another cat (or even a dog) for us was out of the question for a long time. We were in mourning.
Her thyroid medicine, which was expensive and hard to get, remained in the drawer too, but we threw away the little latex finger condoms we used to rub it into her ear.
Freshman year of high school would be starting soon for our son, so we distracted ourselves by getting him ready, driving him to early cross-country practices, and badgering him to finish his math packet. He had gotten into fishing this summer in a big way, so we bought him a new bike and nervously watched his “find my Phone” icon on the map as he explored the Potomac river and its tributaries with his friends. We knew that freedom and independence were good, but we were both traumatized and had separation anxiety. It took a lot of willpower to let him go and not lock him in the house.
My daughter had her wisdom teeth out, so I made a batch of chicken soup. I put the wishbone on a dish by the window to dry out, not bothering to cover it with a bowl to keep the cat from eating it.
I went to a weekly community 5k, as usual, last Saturday morning, August 25th. I was timing the run, not running. This involves standing around and touching a button on your phone as each person crosses the line. At about 10:15AM, the last runner finished, and I submitted my results to the website and switched “Airplane Mode” off on my phone (having alerts come through while timing messes up the results.)
I saw several (518) area code missed calls, and then an AI-generated voicemail summary.
“Hello this is Samantha F____ from Garnet Hill Lodge we believe that we have located your cat Eloise if you could give us a call at the lodge please at 251-____ thank you…” (Was this transcription useful or not useful?)
Not possible. No, must be true. This is real.
I immediately called her back. They had her. I was struggling to form sentences. I was sobbing but trying to sound clear. Samantha was wonderful and clear and helpful and there was no doubt, they had seen the signs. They had found her inside a rental house that had been opened up for a wedding that weekend. Eloise was safe and they were feeding her. Everyone already loved her—she’s so friendly, she said. Yes, I know, I said.
“Keep her safe, we will be there, thank you, thank you.”
I called my wife. “WHAT???? WHAT????”
“No, it’s her, they sent a picture, it’s her.”
“GET HOME NOW!”
I biked home as fast as I could. We quickly formed a plan. I would fly up to Albany and rent a car. My brother, who lived an hour away from the Lodge, was enlisted. He would get her right away. I would stay overnight at his place and then drive home early Sunday.
Coming back from the dead, even figuratively, is beautiful. It is love in its purest form. Having had something taken from you forever and then receiving it back as a gift might be the definition of a miracle. I used that word—miracle—many times over the weekend. No one countered me. I understand that there are many rational explanations for what happened, but to us she was dead and now she is alive again.
When I saw her again Saturday night, I held her for a long time. She was skin and bones. Her spine, ribs, shoulders, and hips were all visible and palpable: I fed her like a newborn, having brought a bag of treats that I had packed in my carryon, knowing that each morsel would give her a slightly greater chance of survival. TSA had not confiscated the cans of food, either, which were remnants of the last Chewie delivery. I nervously watched her eat; her stomach had obviously shrunk, so she went back to the bowl many times over the course of a few hours, eventually eating almost an entire can.
I ended up playing cards for a couple of hours with my brother’s extended family once I knew she was safely fed and asleep. Experiencing miracles in real time makes everything else appear in technicolor, ultra-real, and special. I learned the game “knock”, and I lost a dollar before attempting to sleep.
Eloise ended up sleeping in my arms for the first time in either of our lives. She and I both needed it, even though I barely got a wink. She snored while I watched her breathe.
I rose at 6 to the cardinals’ and catbirds’ songs, hitting the road by 7:15 to cover the 430 miles back to Maryland and Eloise’s home. I kept her carrier in the passenger seat of the rental, with the zipper open, giving her updates every 15 minutes. “300 miles to go, 5 hours til home and mommy.”
And then it was over. 25 days after she disappeared, she was back in her home, smothered in love and endless food and attention. Amazingly, she didn’t really seem to have forgotten a thing.
She was a celebrity at the vet’s on Monday morning—the front desk women all but asked for an autograph. She had lost 25% of her body weight—“remarkable,” the doctor said. He called her a machine as he put her back in her carrier after she growled at him for probing her butt. She was dehydrated but otherwise in damn good shape. As I write this, she’s gained back a good bit of weight, has been thoroughly groomed of pine sap and fur snarls, and is back to 5:45 meow wakeups.
What the hell had happened? We ask ourselves this question over and over. Was she abducted by some well meaning human who thought she was a stray, and then forgotten? Had she been chased by an animal? Or did she simply get lost? How did she survive? We know she ended up in a house. How long had she been trapped inside? Days? Weeks? Her one new habit is sleeping next to the toilet during the day. Perhaps this was her hiding spot in the house where she had been found. Perhaps she had stayed alive drinking from the toilet.
The hardest thing is grappling with that interstitial period of three weeks when she was alive but we had given up hope and were trying to get on with our lives. We want to go back in time and scream at ourselves that she’s alive and just a mile away. Go back to her! But we can’t. We wish that we could have been there for her as she was going through her ordeal. Mostly though, we are just giddy, and thankful for the wonderful people at Garnet Hill Lodge who found and saved her.
We will most likely never know what happened. She was alive, and then she was gone, and then she was back and alive again. She is a miraculous cat. We love her more than ever.
Glad this story had a happy ending 🙂 Welcome back Eloise