Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
Oct. 27th, 2007 03:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quarrelI lost a loved one last week. My dear cat passed away at the impressive age of twenty-one sometime last Saturday night.
I moved in with two people back in college – my girlfriend and her just-ex-boyfriend, if you can believe that. It was originally her idea to get a pet. Neither of us guys had free time on the day she set aside to go to the Humane Society, so she did the picking-out and the picking-up. It was her name choice we settled on as well: Sylvie. I don't remember what inspired her. I think she just liked it.
Sylvie was a young female, barely an adult. A gray domestic longhair with a strong Maine Coon-ish appearance but without the typical size. Maine Coons are big. Sylvie never weighed more than seven pounds. It was apparent almost immediately that she hadn't been treated well by her original owners. She took a few days to realize what her food bowl was for, and instead begged around the table at every meal like table scraps was all she ever ate. Whenever someone came home, she'd slip into a hole in the sofa bottom and hide inside it. After a little bit, she'd pause to check whether everyone she knew was already in the house and would only hide if we were all accounted for.
Now Rachel (the girlfriend) liked Sylvie, but sleeping with a cat in her room gave her terrible sinus issues, so she kept her door shut. Sylvie would end up in bed with either me or William (the ex). Eventually we got another cat, a scrawny orange tabby named Mayhem. Mayhem was a barn kitten. They got along as well as cats ever do. They'd nip and fuss for pecking order. It would change from month to month (though on any given night, either one might be chasing the other as they dashed down the stairs). But Sylvie was the friendlier and smarter of the two. She was the first on top of new furniture, the first to figure out how to open cabinets, the first to jump inside the refrigerator if you weren't watching. If you dangled a stringy cat toy on a stick, she'd go after the stick. If you danced a laser pointer around the carpet, she'd ignore the red dot and bat at the thing in your hand.
The two of them staked out different bedrooms for themselves. It should be obvious which one Sylvie picked.
Eventually I graduated and moved to the West Coast. I left Sylvie there – she wasn't particularly “mine”. Apparently, though, I was hers. Rachel told me she spent hours lying in the middle of my empty bedroom until they rented the room to someone else. I visited once or twice a year, for Christmas and college get-togethers, and on one of those visits Sylvie snuck a pair of my socks from my suitcase. She hid them deep under Rachel's bed, where she often secured her toys. They were the only toy she always put back when she was done playing.
On my second Christmas visit, Rachel dropped a surprise in my lap. Sylvie had been driving her increasingly up a wall. She was misbehaving, she was messing on the carpet, she was too much to handle and nothing was changing that. We borrowed a flexible carrier from a neighbor, I called the airlines and paid an extra fifty bucks, and I brought her to California with me on the return flight. She didn't enjoy the trip, but she didn't make a fuss. Pittsburgh to Los Angeles with one meow.
It was hardly her first trip. She's since followed me on one move across town (an hour and a half “across town” – the L.A. area is huge) and three road trips between Southern California and Seattle. Just before my third and last trip up, a couple work buddies commented on how thin she looked. Now, Sylvie was already well into her later years, but she'd always been small, and her coat was thick, and I was too close to her to notice gradual changes easily. It wasn't until another friend got a mature, full-sized cat that I could feel the difference first-hand. I got her to a vet – something I suppose I should have been doing more often – and they diagnosed her with an overactive thyroid, which is common in older pets. She was down to four pounds, which drove home hard just how much time was taking its toll. I got her on a prescription and she put half a pound back on. She got back a lot of energy that she lost during the move as well. That was good for a couple more years, though I had to increase the dosage from time to time. And then her potassium got a little low, and her kidneys showed some weakness, and the vet visits and troublesome behaviors grew more frequent. She couldn't easily jump onto the bed from the floor any more, and she went from not grooming herself (she stopped that two years ago) to not even licking food off her nose most of the time. I'd already resolved to give her a last week or two and put her to sleep at home, but she died unexpectedly after bouncing back strongly from a cured bladder infection.
I'm going to miss her. I've missed her already. Some days, I wonder why I don't miss her more and I worry I'll forget too much. I had her so long that a lot of it's a blur already. That's mainly why I'm writing this now. She was with me my entire adult life. That's hard to wrap my head around even if I don't consider that I'm four months from 40. Other than my parents, there isn't a single living thing I've spent more time with.
I'm going to have her ashes in an urn, somewhere high overlooking a room with a lot of traffic. Cats like high places, and she liked people.
Goodbye, Sylvie. I hope you're still happy. You were the best cat in the world.
I moved in with two people back in college – my girlfriend and her just-ex-boyfriend, if you can believe that. It was originally her idea to get a pet. Neither of us guys had free time on the day she set aside to go to the Humane Society, so she did the picking-out and the picking-up. It was her name choice we settled on as well: Sylvie. I don't remember what inspired her. I think she just liked it.
Sylvie was a young female, barely an adult. A gray domestic longhair with a strong Maine Coon-ish appearance but without the typical size. Maine Coons are big. Sylvie never weighed more than seven pounds. It was apparent almost immediately that she hadn't been treated well by her original owners. She took a few days to realize what her food bowl was for, and instead begged around the table at every meal like table scraps was all she ever ate. Whenever someone came home, she'd slip into a hole in the sofa bottom and hide inside it. After a little bit, she'd pause to check whether everyone she knew was already in the house and would only hide if we were all accounted for.
Now Rachel (the girlfriend) liked Sylvie, but sleeping with a cat in her room gave her terrible sinus issues, so she kept her door shut. Sylvie would end up in bed with either me or William (the ex). Eventually we got another cat, a scrawny orange tabby named Mayhem. Mayhem was a barn kitten. They got along as well as cats ever do. They'd nip and fuss for pecking order. It would change from month to month (though on any given night, either one might be chasing the other as they dashed down the stairs). But Sylvie was the friendlier and smarter of the two. She was the first on top of new furniture, the first to figure out how to open cabinets, the first to jump inside the refrigerator if you weren't watching. If you dangled a stringy cat toy on a stick, she'd go after the stick. If you danced a laser pointer around the carpet, she'd ignore the red dot and bat at the thing in your hand.
The two of them staked out different bedrooms for themselves. It should be obvious which one Sylvie picked.
Eventually I graduated and moved to the West Coast. I left Sylvie there – she wasn't particularly “mine”. Apparently, though, I was hers. Rachel told me she spent hours lying in the middle of my empty bedroom until they rented the room to someone else. I visited once or twice a year, for Christmas and college get-togethers, and on one of those visits Sylvie snuck a pair of my socks from my suitcase. She hid them deep under Rachel's bed, where she often secured her toys. They were the only toy she always put back when she was done playing.
On my second Christmas visit, Rachel dropped a surprise in my lap. Sylvie had been driving her increasingly up a wall. She was misbehaving, she was messing on the carpet, she was too much to handle and nothing was changing that. We borrowed a flexible carrier from a neighbor, I called the airlines and paid an extra fifty bucks, and I brought her to California with me on the return flight. She didn't enjoy the trip, but she didn't make a fuss. Pittsburgh to Los Angeles with one meow.
It was hardly her first trip. She's since followed me on one move across town (an hour and a half “across town” – the L.A. area is huge) and three road trips between Southern California and Seattle. Just before my third and last trip up, a couple work buddies commented on how thin she looked. Now, Sylvie was already well into her later years, but she'd always been small, and her coat was thick, and I was too close to her to notice gradual changes easily. It wasn't until another friend got a mature, full-sized cat that I could feel the difference first-hand. I got her to a vet – something I suppose I should have been doing more often – and they diagnosed her with an overactive thyroid, which is common in older pets. She was down to four pounds, which drove home hard just how much time was taking its toll. I got her on a prescription and she put half a pound back on. She got back a lot of energy that she lost during the move as well. That was good for a couple more years, though I had to increase the dosage from time to time. And then her potassium got a little low, and her kidneys showed some weakness, and the vet visits and troublesome behaviors grew more frequent. She couldn't easily jump onto the bed from the floor any more, and she went from not grooming herself (she stopped that two years ago) to not even licking food off her nose most of the time. I'd already resolved to give her a last week or two and put her to sleep at home, but she died unexpectedly after bouncing back strongly from a cured bladder infection.
I'm going to miss her. I've missed her already. Some days, I wonder why I don't miss her more and I worry I'll forget too much. I had her so long that a lot of it's a blur already. That's mainly why I'm writing this now. She was with me my entire adult life. That's hard to wrap my head around even if I don't consider that I'm four months from 40. Other than my parents, there isn't a single living thing I've spent more time with.
I'm going to have her ashes in an urn, somewhere high overlooking a room with a lot of traffic. Cats like high places, and she liked people.
Goodbye, Sylvie. I hope you're still happy. You were the best cat in the world.
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That's a shame.
Date: 2007-10-28 02:20 am (UTC). png
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Date: 2007-10-28 02:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-28 05:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-28 06:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-31 07:20 pm (UTC)