Half a decade. Already.

Photo copyright Wings, 2019; all rights reserved.

Half a decade. Already.

That's how long it's been since we lost Lilith, our Kachina, our demon-goddess, our little warrior girl. On this date in 2014, at 4:16 PM, to be exact.

Kachina was Wings's nickname for her; all our animals get multiple names, just like people. Sometimes it's nothing more than Butthead, but I don't think we ever applied that one to her. She was damaged when she found me, way back in 2001, and our life together was spent trying, slowly and carefully, to unravel her PTSD, to free her from the demons that bedeviled her so. Someone intended her to be a fight dog, although she never wanted it; never wanted, in fact, anything other than food and water and shelter and love and the safety of being somewhere in the middle of a pack. But what was done to her made her permanently fear-aggressive, and once I took her on, I knew that I could never let her go, because it would mean her consignment to a death kennel.

And so we worked. All of us. It took her a while to warm up to Wings; he does have that Y chromosome, after all, and so did her chief abuser(s). But eventually, she bonded with him almost as much as she had already done with me, and, as always, her eventual acceptance of him made him ridiculously proud (nice little racket she had going there). Seriously, though, she was all innocence, which made her treatment all the more repulsive, and so we protected her fiercely.

She fell ill in June of 2011 — visibly so, anyway; given the size and speed with which the tumor in her abdomen manifested, it had likely been there for a while. We had just lost Dom (same month, and Grif and She-Wolf would also leave us in April of later years, and we will likely not get out of this month without yet another one now in Raven, and this is all why I hate this month so desperately, because it's all grief), and so we threw everything we had into saving her. It worked, for a while; we were able to give her almost three full years more. And when the tumor finally won, it didn't get to take her spirit or her peace; she simply went to sleep, and her sleep grew deeper and deeper, until, late that afternoon, it simply took over entirely.

She is where all the others are, and at the appointed time, I took her the same things I take them all: cedar, tobacco, a little water — all the things a kachina would need. For all her demons, she was certainly a warrior, and a little spirit girl besides, and we miss her every day.

We love you, Little Warrior Girl.



All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.