We first met Muffin in April of 2006 at Purrfect Pals. All we knew is that she was found on the streets of Everett, Washington. She was about a year old. They called her a “medium hair” cat which was eventually shown to be an understatement. She was a beautiful kitty, very affectionate, well behaved (she only scratched on designated scratching posts, she didn’t get into things, etc). She didn’t get along too well with our other cat, Freya, but they reached a truce only interrupted by an occasional hiss (from Muffin) or a brief chase.
In July she started hiding under the bed and was very testy. Something was definitely wrong, so we took her to the vet. After some examination and X-rays we found she had two pins in her back leg (which had to be removed). Someone spent a lot of money to fix her broken leg. This deepened the mystery of her origins. She wasn’t just a stray, someone cared deeply for her. How did she end up on the street? Here’s my theory/story: an elderly woman bought a cute long-haired kitten. At some point she broke her leg and was treated (at no small cost, to be sure). The woman then passed away, and her children, while cleaning out her house, left Muffin outside. Perhaps intentionally, but Muffin was pretty scatterbrained so it is plausible she had wandered off and came back to find a locked and empty house. I am sure she innocently wandered up to any humans she could find, meowing at them for food and attenion. One of them dropped her off at the Everett shelter. From there she was picked up by Purrfect Pals, and the rest is history.
When my daughter was born, Muffin was not immediately aware of the change in the household, but she did like the new “cat bed” in the house. But it didn’t take long for Muffin to become absolutely bonded with my daughter. Any time she would cry, Muffin would run around our feet, as if to say “My gsvirl is in distress! Do Something!” They were inseparable, all Muffin wanted was to be with her girl. During the last summer, between high school and college, they spent a lot of time together, Muffin often sleeping on top of her or right against her. Muffin would spend much of her days sleeping on my daughter’s bed right where she had been sleeping a few hours earlier. After she left for college Muffin rarely slept on her bed, partly because of her artritis, but probably also since the clean bedding no longer had the scent she was seeking.
Did I mention she was kind of scatterbrained? She often didn’t understand three dimensions. Several times she unwittingly walked right past the chair Freya was sitting on, who would bat at her tail. When you called her name, she would look left and right, but not up. This made taking photos of her very hard: she would look everywhere but at the camera. After many attempts we got a good enough shot to use for her to appear in the Purrfect Pals calendar as Miss July (the first photo, above).
She also had a habit of going into the bathroom where the litter boxes are, and then when she was done, push on the door until she closed it, and then scratch and meow until I let her out. After several rounds of this I found a small board and put it in the way so she couldn’t close the door. Now the same thing happens: push, scratch, meow, and then, after little bit of this, she peers around the corner of the still ajar door, with a surprised look.
She was definitely not a medium hair cat! That hair was long! In her younger years this made hairballs a frequent and sizable occurence. Sometimes in inconvenient places. Towards the end of her life she had a hard time grooming herself so I would have to brush her in a futile attempt to keep the mats at bay. A couple times we had her shaved for the summer. I am not sure she ever forgave us for this.
So after Freya passed, Muffin’s arthritis continued a slow progression, but the monthly arthritis treatments definitely helped. On Monday it occured to me that she was due for her next shot and I must have forgotten to schedule it. The vet said I could bring her in later that day. At the appointed time I gathered her up into her carrier, as I had done so many times before. No sign of anything amiss. But as soon as the vet tech got her out of the carrier, she noticed Muffin’s breathing was labored, so after an X-ray and deeper examination, it was found she was in the advanced stages of congestive heart failure. She passed away a few hours later.
She was the sweetest little cat. It’s hard to think of anything she did wrong (yowling in the middle of the night is the worst thing I can think of). She loved her girl to the moon and back again. Now one girl is gone forever and the other is away at college. It’s going to be a lot of emptiness and quiet to get used to.
Most of my childhood was on a farm. I experienced death all the time. When I was about 8, I was closing up the hen house for the night and found her, a small hen, sitting on the floor, rather than on the roosts like the rest, her head twisting in a gentle, spastic way. Though I was young, I could see she was in a bad way. I took her into the barn where my father was shoveling out the manure. I sat down on a bale of hay and held her. She could not move in any sensible way, she could not stand, and her head would slowly twist to the left, and then spring back to normal, and repeat. That got slower and slower until finally she slumped over, her wide-open eye staring vacantly towards the rafters. She didn’t even have a name, she was just one of the brown hens. I found a shoe box and my father helped me dig a hole by an old apple tree where we buried her. I don’t think there were any tears or grief, just a bit of sadness; just another day on the farm.
In mid 2003 I had just moved in with my fiance, and both of her cats had died recently, so when the downstairs neighbor said she had a friend with an unintentional litter of kittens, we went to visit. Many of them were skittish, but one came right up to us, friendly and fearless. She was the one. She was a beatiful black and white, mostly snow white and black on top, with a large sawtooth border. We took her home and briefly discussed names, but quickly settled on “Freya”. A fitting name. Little did we know that she would rule our lives for the next 21 years. She was wild, energetic, and there was no doubt as to who was in charge in the house.
It would take me far too long to write about our entire life together, but I’ll give a few snippets. Write them down before the mists of time blur the memories beyond recall.
My step son would always take her to bed with him; he would scoop her up and attempt to hold her, but she would wriggle and claw at him until he got into his room and closed the door, after which she should sleep next to him. After he grew up, this kind of stopped, but she would still sleep next to him while he watched football; in fact, that’s how she spent her final afternoon.
She was wildly energetic, often tearing through the house at top speed ending with a climb up a doorway. She was often able to get to the very top, and she would look around as if trying to figure out a way to get higher. One day she even mistook my step-son for a doorway and climbed him. Everyplace we have lived has had several doorways scratched up. As she was aging I would always report this to the vet as an indication of her continued vigor. One morning right before a trip to the vet, she climbed a doorway right near my desk. I had no idea at the time, but that was one of the last times she would ever do that. After that she would run up to a doorway, and just get her front paws up and then stare upward longingly. Eventually, it was just a stare, and that was months ago.
She was not a cuddly lap cat. I don’t think I heard her purr until she got much older. But she loved to curl up next to her humans more so as she got older. As long as it was on her terms. She would sleep pushed right up against my wife, but if I ever slept on my back, she loved to lay on top of my legs. After I took a shower in the morning, I would sit on the bed for a bit in my robe, and she would rush over, barely waiting for me to get in position before she trying to climb on top of me.
As she got older she really started to appreciate laptops, or, as I think she thought of them as “lumpy butt warmers”. My wife would often come back from a break to find her sitting on her laptop and an enormous string of nonsense letters in a freshly composed email. My wife got the habit of putting a notebook and stapler over her keyboard to prevent this. A habit which is now just a constant reminder of what has been lost.
One funny habit she had was that she would drop her cat toys (usually little plastic fur covered mice) into her drinking water, and we would find her water a bright purple or pink from the cheap dye leaking out. Before we moved to our current house we stayed at my in-laws for a few days, who had a mouse problem. One morning my wife got a shock when found an actual mouse, dead, in Freya’s water bowl. We are not sure if this instinct was to ensure they were dead, or to clean them. It is fortunate, for all the small animals near our house, that she was an indoor cat, I am sure she would have left a trail of death and destruction in her wake.
But the last few years were hard. She collected a number of maladies, one of which was a spinal issue which hindered her ability to walk, so she had a limp and one leg would thump when she walked. But even so, she would still chase her sister around (which was more fun for her than her sister), and she would still try to jump around in ways that was risky to impossible given her age. Her lack of flexibility eventually left her unable to groom herself. A few days ago her eating diminished to almost nothing and no amount of coaxing or bribing her with churu on her food would work. I knew this was a bad sign.
Whenever we would find her sleeping she would jump up to greet us, but on Monday when she tried to do this, her back legs would no longer cooperate, she spun in circles trying to get moving. We had a difficult night, and she did something she would never do: she wet the bed, undoubtedly because she could no longer move. We knew it was time. She spent her last day sleeping next to her sister, which is something they had never done for all the years they spent together. I think they both knew. At the end of the day on Tuesday, she passed peacefully in the arms of those who loved her. She was finally free of pain, but ours was just starting.
As I said at the outset, growing up on a farm inures you to a lot of death. But none of that helped me deal with the hole in my heart right now. I spent more that a third of my life with Freya. Everyplace I look I expect to see her, and physical reminders are everywhere. At mealtime I still put out two plates, and get all her special food and medications out in preparation, only to put most of it back, never to be used again. Every day I find another physical reminder of her, and collect them together. This morning I found the piece of tulle she loved to play with. Maybe someday I’ll be able to look at all that without sobbing.
