“You could just look into her eyes and tell that she knew what was going on.”
Trooper the cat has loved one woman more than anyone else in the world — 96-year-old Sarah Whaley.
In 2014, Alexis Hackney and her family found Trooper while flipping a house — they heard her meowing from the basement and went to investigate.
“She was in the wall, and my mom and sister had to get a sledgehammer, and bust out the sheetrock and get her,” Hackney told The Dodo. “She was about 2 weeks old. Her eyes were barely open.”
Since they were unable to locate Trooper’s mother, they brought the helpless kitten to the house they shared with Hackney’s grandmother Whaley in Tallahassee, Florida.
Actually, for 18 years, my grandmother resided with us, according to Hackney. When we were young, she came down here to watch me and my sisters. She merely sort of lingered. She was without a doubt an important member of our family. She was the mother figure.
Whaley not only loved her grandchildren but also the family’s pets. She also grew particularly close to Trooper.
When my grandma bottle-fed her, she would sit and chat with her while praising how adorable and kind the child was, according to Hackney. Trooper is the type of cat who only has one owner, and that owner was unquestionably my grandmother.
Whaley and Trooper’s affection for each other was obvious to all, but the family didn’t fully understand their bond until Whaley developed serious health issues.
Around Christmas [last year], “my grandmother started going more downhill, and we started noticing her [Trooper] being there all the time,” Hackney recalled.
Trooper brought gifts from throughout the home, but she primarily slept in the bed with Whaley.
“She was never the kind to pick up toys and move them around the house or anything, but when my grandma couldn’t move around as much anymore, she would bring stuff to her — whatever she’d find on the floor, like socks or a straw,” Hackney recalled. “She increased the amount of material she was carrying as she started to get sicker and sicker and sicker. She would simply take his socks out of his room, carry them downstairs, and lay them on the floor.
She was clearly unhappy and you could see by the look in her eyes that she was aware of what was happening.
Whaley occasionally experienced panic attacks, and Trooper would dash to her side and reassure her.
“Trooper would run in there and hop on the bed, and she’d just start petting her and feeling her, and she’d calm down,” recalled Hackney. “I think that having Trooper there was definitely calming for my grandmother when she started getting to the point where she couldn’t communicate anymore,” says the author.
Furthermore, nothing appeared to frighten Trooper away from Whaley’s bedside.
“Whenever my grandmother was going through the process of passing away, she became very disoriented,” said Hackney. She would inadvertently hit or squeeze Trooper too hard since she knew she could always count on her to be there. Trooper never retaliated. She would simply hop out of bed, wait for my grandmother to settle down, and then jump back in. That would have been the end of it if we had done that. She liked my grandma, and she never, ever bit her or scratched her, otherwise we would have been a bloody mess.
“She loved my grandma so much, and you could tell by the way she would look at her when she was sick,” Hackney continued. It simply broke.
Trooper was unable to cope with Whaley’s death in March, just a few days before her 97th birthday.
She didn’t want to be near my grandma’s body, according to Hackney. “I had taken her in there to demonstrate to her that Grandma wouldn’t be returning… I wanted her to comprehend that our granny is no longer there because if they don’t know, they’ll look for them. However, she escaped and hid beneath my parents’ bed. She stopped eating after they took my grandma’s body. She doesn’t speak much, but the cat was constantly crying as she walked around the house.
Though she continues to enter Whaley’s room and leave socks and other items there, Trooper is doing significantly better now, according to Hackney.
She clearly misses Grandma, according to what Hackney stated.
On a private Facebook group called Cool Cats Group, Hackney recently posted the account of her grandmother’s relationship with Trooper, and the post quickly gained popularity.
“I think that cats have a very bad reputation when it comes to people not thinking that they actually love us,” remarked Hackney. “Since people don’t understand that cats may not be like dogs, but they surely do have emotion, do have feelings, and they love us very much, I really wanted to express that I had seen Trooper being so devoted and faithful to my grandmother. They simply aren’t as adept at demonstrating to us as dogs are. But they undoubtedly adore us.
