She had been in my life since the day I was born. I would call her my aunt because I couldn’t exactly call a 60-year-old woman my friend when I was 10 years old. When I was younger she was the fun adult in my life who got my sister and I fun presents and lived in an apartment in San Francisco. She didn’t have any kids of her own, just three cats, and a love affair with life. She was important to me from day one. She taught me how to be patient and use manners when I was younger. She taught me how to be gentle with her cats because I would always run after them and hold them forever. As I got older she became more important to me. She moved to a house 5 minutes away from me when I was 10 and I would visit her with my mom all the time. Then there was a period where I didn’t see her as much because life just had other plans for me. When I started to not get along so well with my parents around 16, I would drive to her house almost every day to get a break from home. Being at her house was like my escape from the real world. There was junk food, TV, cats, and no parents to fight with. She and I would fight, but about different things. She became the person I shared everything with. My struggles with my parents, family, boys, girls, etc. She was like the mother I wish I had. She was strong, independent, brave, selfless, kind, and determined. She was everything I wanted to be and am working on becoming.
Then a couple months ago she got sick. She’d been sick all her life with lupus, but it was finally catching up to her. This woman had been through the ringer though. Throughout her life, she had suffered from not only lupus, but a million different surgeries, a kidney transplant, a brain aneurysm, and a cocaine addiction. And yet she still kept going. Many of the people that were close to her called her the cat with nine lives because she had been a cat person all her life. At one point in the time, I knew her, she had five cats. Yet, over the summer of 2016 she got food poisoning and never fully recovered from it, and four months ago she began her journey downhill. She lost a lot of weight, some eyesight, and her overall will to live. In January she started looking into an aid in dying medication that just recently became legal in California, with the prescription from a trained physician. It wasn’t real to me that this was all actually going to happen until about five days before it did. I visited her every day over spring break and I just had no idea how to say goodbye. She had been my constant support system for almost six years and I obviously wasn’t ready for her to leave me, but I had to accept that is was for the best. She was in so much pain every day and wished she had gone to bed and not woken up. But the worst part was that physically, she was deteriorating every day I saw her, but mentally, she was 100% there. I never believed she was ready to die until it actually happened. I knew the day she was taking her medication but I was back at school. My mom called me later that day and told me how fearless she was about the whole process. It was what she wanted and she did it in a peaceful and loving setting and that’s all I could ever want for her.
I promised her that I would never forget her and how much she has taught me about everything. When people ask me why she was such an important person in my life, my without a doubt answer has always been “because she is the strongest woman I know” and “because she was there for me and offered the guidance other people close to me couldn’t give me”. She was always there for me, and she is quite possibly the only person in my life that I have always felt love, acceptance, pride, and positivity from. Her name is Victoria Winslow, and she will never be forgotten. Rest in peace you crazy cat lady.