Trooper the cat has only ever had one woman he has truly loved: 96-year-old Elizabeth Whaley
When Alexis Hackney and her family were flipping a property, they came upon Trooper when they heard her meowing from the basement.
Hackney told The Dodo, “She was in the wall, and my mum and sister had to grab a sledgehammer and tear down the sheetrock to extract her. She was maybe two weeks old. Her eyes weren’t even fully open.
They couldn’t find Trooper’s mother, so they took the tiny kitten to their home in Tallahassee, Florida, which they shared with Whaley, Hackney’s grandmother.
“My grandmother actually lived with us for 18 years,” Hackney said. “She moved down here to babysit me and my sisters when we were little. She just kind of stayed. She was definitely a major part of our household. She was the matriarch.”
Not only did Whaley adore her grandchildren, but she also adored the family’s cats. And she formed a particularly close bond with 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 grandma.
Whaley and Trooper’s affection for each other was obvious to everybody, but the family didn’t fully understand their bond until Whaley developed serious health issues.
Around Christmas [the previous year], “my grandma started going more downhill, and we started noticing her Trooper being there all the time,” Hackney recalled.
Trooper mostly slept on the bed with Whaley, but she also brought her gifts from around the house.
“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 said.
“As she started getting sicker and sicker and sicker, she increased the amount of stuff that she was bringing. She’d go into my brother’s room and just grab his socks and haul them downstairs and lay them on the floor.”
“You could just look into her eyes and tell that she knew what was going on, and she was very upset about it,” Hackney added.
Whaley occasionally experienced panic attacks, and Trooper would go to her side and reassure her.
As soon as trooper entered the room and hopped up the bed, Hackney recalled, “Trooper would just start caressing her and touching her, and she’d settle down.” “I think that having Trooper around was extremely comforting for my grandma when she started coming to the stage 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,” Hackney said. “Trooper was always by her side — always there — and she would accidentally hit her or squeeze her too hard, and Trooper would never fight back.
She would just jump down, wait for my grandma to calm down, and she would jump right back into bed with her. If we had done that, it would have been all over. We would have been a bloody mess, but she loved my grandma, and she never, ever scratched her or bit her or anything.”
“She loved my grandma so much, and you could tell by the way she would look at her when she was sick,” Hackney added. “It just broke your heart to see all of this pain in her eyes.”
Trooper was unable to cope with Whaley’s death in March, only 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 seek for them.
However, she escaped and hid beneath my parents’ bed. She stopped eating when they took my grandma’s body. She doesn’t speak much, but the cat was constantly wailing as she walked about the home.
Though she continues to enter Whaley’s room and leave socks and other items there, Trooper is doing far better today, according to Hackney.
