I never wanted a cat. I’m a dog person.
Thirteen years ago, a feral cat had a litter of kittens under our house. She had a litter every spring. That particular spring, she chose our house. Then, for some reason, she left one kitten behind. The kitten was too small to jump over a cement perimeter. We could hear her crying through one of our heating vents.
Two days later, John and the yellow lab mix dog we had then, Lucky, crawled under the house. As soon as she heard them, the kitten quit crying for her mother and hid. After playing the waiting game for a long time, she started crying again, and they found her wedged in between a supporting beam of the house and part of the heating system. When John reached in to get her, she went berserk—hissing, growling, clawing.
No fool, Lucky bailed out right away. John yelled out to us, “Get the leather gloves.”
Just to make things more interesting, when I handed the gloves to him, I asked, “What if it’s a cougar cub?” He was not amused.
A few minutes later, John emerged from the crawl space with a fluffy black kitten. He said she’d finally given up when she figured out that if she didn’t, he was going to pull her head off. Inside, she looked up at him with big adoring eyes as if to say, “If I’d known it was you, I wouldn’t have put up such a fight.”
We fed her milk with an eye dropper. She couldn’t get enough. Of course, the kids begged, “Can we keep her? Can we keep her?” I told them I didn’t want a cat. We had a dog.
Later, we took her to the vet because her eyes looked bad. The receptionist asked what our kitten’s name was. I explained that she didn’t have a name because she wasn’t our kitten. We weren’t keeping her.
We asked the vet if she could tell if the kitten with no name had been weaned. The vet put some cat food on a dish down in front of the kitten and she climbed up onto the plate to gobble it up. That answered that question. She had an eye infection, so we got some medicine for that.
I asked everyone we knew if they wanted a kitten. I even announced it at the weekly Cub Scout meeting. Everyone agreed that she was adorable. Everyone held her and snuggled with her. Nobody wanted to keep her. The kids begged relentlessly. I stayed firm. No kitten.
Then one day I sat down at my sewing machine on the dining room table. I had just started learning to quilt. Suddenly, a little ball of black fluff was sitting on my lap, purring contentedly. She knew just whose heartstrings to play. My anti-cat resolve melted.
Her fur was so soft, we named her Velvet. She was sassy enough to kick Lucky off his favorite pillow, and smart enough to come and get you if she was hungry or her litter box wasn’t clean enough for her. Her tail was always twitching.
In the spring especially, she’d try to answer her feral call of the wild, making a stealthy dash for the door any time someone opened it. Most of the time, she would blend into the rhythm of our home, disappearing whenever a visitor came.
But once she took center stage. We were having a barbecue, and she kept watch so that when someone inadvertently left the screen door open, she made her escape.
We had a bird feeder about five yards away from the house. While everyone at the party chatted and ate, I spotted Velvet running crouched across the yard. Then in one incredibly athletic, graceful leap about five feet up in the air, she caught an unsuspecting bird and brought it down. Women screamed and children cried.
Velvet slinked back toward us with the bird in her mouth and ducked under the deck with her prize. I tried to comfort the kids, while a female guest lectured me about “letting our cat outside” and how cruel we were to have bird feeder and a cat.
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| Lucky and Velvet |
She knew not to sit on me (I shooed her off my lap when I figured out I was allergic to cats). But she’d sit with anyone else sitting on one particular chair in the family room. She’d let you pet her for awhile, and then nip you when she decided that she’d had enough. She took all the other pets in stride, and got along famously with T-Bone.
This past year, she started drinking water constantly, even drinking from T-Bone’s bowl when hers ran dry. He didn’t have a problem with that. Sometimes I’d find her sleeping with her head resting on her water bowl. She looked like a passed out drunk.
In October, the vet told me that she had diabetes. We could give Velvet daily insulin shots, but that wasn’t feasible. She said that Velvet would start to lose weight, get flat footed, and then it wouldn’t be long after that, that she would die. I hoped that she’d hold on until November, so that the kids would be able to say goodbye to her at Thanksgiving.
She lost weight, but she’d been overweight before diabetes, so she looked pretty good for awhile. She was always beautiful: sleek with big green eyes set in a perfectly shaped face, and a little lilt to her nose.
Keeping her water bowl filled and her litter clean got harder, but she came upstairs every morning to sing for some tuna, and to lounge in her favorite spots. She still kept me company whenever I was quilting. She approved every quilt I made after that fateful day when she first sat on my lap at the sewing machine.
When we left for Italy in May, I told Johnny what to do if she died. In June, I called the vet twice and made appointments to have her euthanized, but then I couldn’t go through with it. Although she was thin, she didn’t seem like she was in pain. She was still making it up and down the stairs, slowly and carefully. Every time I had taken her to the vet before, she had been scared, but looked up to me with those wise green eyes trusting that I would take care of her. How could I “betray” that trust?
John and I went away for a weekend, and when we came back, Velvet had lost even more weight. Her body wasn’t able to absorb the nutrients from her food anymore. She was starving no matter how much she ate. She started missing the litter box. One night she climbed under my desk looking for a litter box that had never been there. It was time.
So on July 1st, more than eight months after we thought we’d lose her, we took her to the vet one last time. When I picked her up, she was so light. There was nothing to her. In the car, she talked along the way. At the vet’s she was calm. I stroked her nose, like I always had to soothe her, and the best cat ever, slipped away. Someone who didn’t want a cat had a catch in her throat, and tears flowing down her cheeks. Good-bye Velvet, you were well loved, especially by a certain dog person.
Laura Keolanui Stark can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.
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