Goodbye to Pandora

 Today, I said goodbye to my beautiful cat of 13 years, Pandora (Kitty Kitty to her friends).

I'd always had cats, but John swore when we got married we wouldn't have any, because he did not like them.

Six months later he got me a cat for Christmas because of course he did.

She was a teeny-tiny little thing, found on the mean streets of Philly by some college students. But she didn't get along at all with their other cats, so they put her on Craigslist and passed her on to us.

She was terrified at first. She spent her first week hiding behind the washing machine; all we saw of her was a pair of yellow eyes. Another time I couldn't find her anywhere and thought she'd escaped, when we found her behind an open dresser drawer.

But after a while she warmed up and turned into a very affectionate, one-person cat. She loved me and only me. She demanded to sit on my lap or, if I had my laptop on my lap, would get on the back of the couch and purr against my shoulder. Every single day, if I was home, she was snuggling with me.

She did not like it when we had kids. The nerve. Marko once tried to play with her and she scratched his face. She wasn't having it. She especially hated the dog, when we brought him home. Honestly I'm not sure what we expected. Gilbert always respected her space, having been smaller than her when we got him, but she never relaxed around him.

She had a spot to nap out of his reach, on my desk, and she kept me company every day, despite all the other chaos that was going on.

Then we moved, and she decided the only part of the house she liked was the basement. I tried and tried to convince her otherwise: no dice. But when Gilbert had been shut up for the night, she would come upstairs for a little snuggle sesh on the couch.

Tummy rubs were even allowed, under the right circumstances.

Curled up, she was so tiny.

She was a picture of elegance, as only a black cat can be.

But don't let her elegance fool you: she was as derpy as the next cat. Sometimes she would try to leap onto something, fail, and walk off casually hoping nobody saw that. (We did.)

As she got older, she started warming up to the kids a little bit. She didn't come to them, but if I was already petting her, they could join in.

We got Tiger, and she hated Tiger. Tiger tried to be friendly but no dice. Kitty Kitty would attack her without warning. Sometimes I think Kitty Kitty did not know how to speak cat. She didn't do the normal warnings cats do, and she failed to recognize Tiger's signs of friendliness. Maybe she was kitty-autistic. Or maybe she'd just had some bad experiences with other cats before she came to us.

Anyway, there were a few precious moments in her life when both cats would tolerate each other in order to get close to me, and I always took a picture.

When we moved, she decided the basement here was not adequate, and she claimed my room for herself too. She always wanted me to be on the bed with her. Sometimes she would wander the upstairs hall crying until I came and sat with her. Sometimes she would just hide in the back of my closet instead. But anytime I came to sit or lie on my bed, she would join me.

Have I mentioned her toe beans? Look at those toe beans.

Well, she got old. She had a few concerning symptoms, we took her to the vet, and it turned out her whole belly was full of cancer. There was nothing anybody could really do. It was strange to hear that when she seemed pretty close to fine, just a little on the skinny side and more snuggly than she used to be.

But within a week after that she had a rapid decline. It was really hard to see it happen to her. The hardest part being that she no longer wanted to cuddle. She only wanted to hide under my bed or pace around the house crying. It's been a hard week with her like this. I've woken up at night to carry her to the litterbox, I've syringed water into  her mouth. Not because I thought there was hope, but because I wanted to make it easy for her as long as I could. She deserved everything.

I said goodbye to her today. I had told myself a lot of things about it. That she was a cat, that this is not too bad of a lifespan for a cat, she had a good run. Or that nobody would miss her but me, because at least she was a one person cat. Or that having cats that grow old, and then you get another cat, is the circle of life.

But when it came down to it, I cried so hard. She's been my friend for such a long time, longer than I've known any of my children. She was so tiny and soft. She loved me with her whole heart, a heart that was not open to very many people. I wish we'd had more time, even though I know no amount a cat could have would ever have been enough.

Telling the kids was really hard too. I thought they wouldn't care, but they do. She's been a distant, hostile part of their whole lives. And in the moments when she let them approach and scritch her ears, they felt so special.

We will eventually not be sad anymore. At some point we will get another cat, hopefully one that Tiger gets along with. Loving cats hurts because you know the whole time it won't be forever, and then it's not and you're somehow still surprised. But I'm not going to stop doing it. They are beautiful creatures whose time with us is always worth the pain of loss.

But today, I'm crying because when the kids go to bed tonight, she's not going to pop up to cuddle with me. I wish she could.