The Cloe Cure

"Why do I feel this way?" my daughter blurted out one day. "There's nothing really wrong with my life!" I knew that depression often hounded young people, but it had been hard to accept that my bright pretty teen was that unhappy. Corrie had been such a contented child. As an infant, a game of peek-a-boo would elicit baby belly laughs. When she was a toddler, she stopped to hug every elderly lady at the mall. "Hug?" she would frequently ask me throughout the day, her small arms open to receive. As a young child, she was outgoing and friendly but I began to notice a tendency toward worry and as she approached her teens, she became more and more cheerless.

Her dad, John, and I weren't too worried. After all, most teenagers occasionally feel morose and hopeless and we were confident that we could help her through those instances. But, as time went by, Corrie's depression worsened. The day she questioned me about her dark moods, there was a vague suggestion of despair in her voice that started me thinking. My daughter slept whenever there was a lull in the activity of her day, dragged herself to school and back and rarely smiled. Daily headaches and a poor appetite also plagued her. Corrie had always been an above-average student in the past but now her marks were dropping steadily.

This was not something that a parent could reason away or kiss better so I took my daughter to the doctor's office. Corrie was diagnosed as suffering from a chemical imbalance, explained as a lack of serotonin, the brains mood-lifting neurotransmitter. The doctor prescribed an anti-depressant and I prayed.

In the meantime, Corrie was approaching her seventeenth birthday. She wasn't excited by the prospect and couldn't even find enough enthusiasm to decide what she wanted us to give her. John and I knew she had wanted a cat for years, but we had always said that one pet in the house was enough and we already had Toby. However, the ten-year-old dog was a good-natured mutt and John and I had hopes that a kitten would lift Corrie's spirits, if only slightly. At her birthday dinner in April, we gave Corrie a card with a picture of a kitten on it and the "gift" she opened was a cat toy and a ceramic food dish decorated with playful cat-related drawings. I don't think Corrie was quite sure we meant it. She smiled faintly and asked, "You're giving me a cat?"

Even so, Corrie was eager to begin the search for her perfect companion and she knew exactly what she was looking for. Corrie's Aunt Janet had a tortoiseshell cat and Corrie had always admired Mieka's black, cream and caramel coloring. Toby had come from the local animal shelter and I again wanted to give a neglected animal a home but the kittens at the shelter were still too young to leave their mother, so I took Corrie to a local pet shop. I had no doubt that God had taken a hand in the matter when we got to the store. There in the window, romping and wrestling with her black and gray companions, was Corrie's heart's desire. The seven-week-old kitten was barely a handful of torti fur and, as Corrie held the docile little animal against her shoulder and smiled down into the large golden eyes topped by cream-colored "eyebrows", there was no doubt in my mind that this search would be short-lived. Soon Corrie was seated in the car cradling a cardboard box emitting tiny questioning mews.

On the way home, Corrie began to think about a name for her kitten but it would be two days before finally settling on "Cloe" from the baby name book I had picked her own name from. She had rejected her father's suggestion of "Marbles" as too cutesy, insisting that it had to be a "real" name.
Cloe purred as she walked about exploring her new home and we took that as an encouraging sign. You would often see her darting out from under a tablecloth; limbs splayed out like a flying squirrel to tackle the unsuspecting dog as he napped on the floor nearby. Immediately following such an antic, I would hear my daughter laughing with delight. What a great sound. Someone once said that it's impossible not to smile in the presence of one or more kittens. They were right. Everything about Cloe enchanted Corrie, from the awkward little kitten walk to the way she wiggled her backside just before she pounced on a "victim". It comforted Corrie to have Cloe curl up next to her on the bed at night. One evening, the kitten jumped up on the bed and started purring and mewing until Corrie couldn't resist sitting up in bed to pet her. Before she knew what had happened, Cloe had taken possession of the pillow and Corrie giggled as she realized that her kitten had tricked her. Cloe was sociable and easygoing, often adopting the dog's habit of following us from room to room or sauntering over to the door to greet whoever had just come in.

God gave John and I the miracle we were seeking in the form of a tiny multi-colored ball of fur. Corrie no longer moaned, "I'm so depressed!" Instead, it was a joyful, "Mom, I love this kitty so much!" She slept less during the day, ate better, suffered fewer headaches and her marks started to improve.

More than a year later, just the mention of her pet's name still puts a contented grin on our daughter's face. Corrie calls Cloe her "fuzzy angel" and it seems an apt description. Angels, after all, come to help heal our spirits and Cloe has become a significant part of the remedy her mistress needs. Sometimes there's no medicine like the unconditional love of a trusting animal, no balm to the soul like the satisfied purr and silky coat of a little torti cat resting against your shoulder.

- The End -