When I asked about you at the MSPCA shelter, they told me you were between one and three years old. They told me a family had recently adopted you and then brought you back after three weeks, because you hadn’t gotten along with the other cat in residence at their house and had marked your territory on a preteen’s pillow. The rest of the information they knew was all there on the form. The two names they knew had been assigned to you, neither of which seemed to fit. The fact that they had knocked you out and opened you up for spay surgery, only to find that the job had been done at some point in the past. Advice from the family who’d surrendered you. “Let her come to you,” someone had written in careful handwriting.
Something about your face reminded me of Kaija Saariaho, a Finnish composer whose work I enjoy. Kaija was a good cat name, I thought.
You looked at me through the cage door with those marble-green eyes, and I could have sworn I heard you ask when we were going home.
Ten years and eight months. Wherever I went, home was wherever you were. You hated moving and I hated putting you through the process, but you always found your corners in all those apartments with terrible landlords and revolving roommates, then the towering brick co-op house in Malden, then our subterranean hideaway in Waltham as a family of three.
Not everyone had the patience or time to understand you. Everyone who met you immediately remarked on how beautiful you were, but some learned just as quickly that you were in charge of the terms of interaction. Never one to hide under the bed unless you knew a trip in the cat carrier was imminent, you weren’t afraid to respond to perceived infringements on your personal space with a hiss or a paw slap. To prevent surprises, I started introducing you as a Soviet Russia cat. “She pets you,” I would say.
But when you chose someone, their lives were sweeter and fluffier for it, and they knew it. One of my first roommates was initially skeptical about my getting a cat. Several months later, all of her co-workers thought you were her pet; after all, they had seen so many photos and homemade memes featuring you lying in the sun, observing out the window, curled up in that rocking chair. When she looked for her next apartment, she stipulated that it had to be cat-friendly. Shortly after she moved into her new digs, so did a regal black rescue cat.
I saw you choose your people. I tried to follow your example and choose my closest with similar discernment, if fewer claws. You chose a few more of my roommates, and you chose a few other friends who spent enough time around you. By the time we got to the Malden house, you had decided you were a lap cat – it had taken a few years. You chose two of our housemates there. I almost teared up when I walked out of my room to see you curled up in their laps in the comfy chair by the window.
And I saw you choose the man who would turn our family of two into three. Our relationship was only a few months old; our in-person relationship had begun even more recently as COVID vaccines became available. Yet there you were, only the second or third time meeting him, perched on his lap like you owned it.
Eventually you decided you liked his lap better than mine, though you still liked mine – especially if I was cross-legged in my office chair and you wanted to test the structural integrity of one side of the pretzel. You loved pranks too – stealing salmon off my bagels, covering the clothes on my hangers with white fur when you jumped to the top of the closet, licking my plate when there was any detectable trace of cream cheese, blocking the screen while we were playing games, testing the laws of gravity.
Sleeping, eating, affection, treats, toys, furniture, your favorite corners, trips to the vet – you knew what you wanted and didn’t want, and there was little we could do to influence you one way or another. You gained a reputation as a spicy personality at the vet’s office, and no medication we tried seemed to have the calming effect they’d expected. (Your CON score must have been off the charts.) When we tried habituating you to eating kidney prescription food, you’d always refuse it after sampling it a few times – usually you stopped eating it as soon as we ordered a full case of the stuff – but then you let us give you subcutaneous fluids with surprisingly little protesting. The Churus probably helped.
They told me you were between one and three when we met, and I decided you were three because I’d have rather guessed too old than too young. As it turned out, your energy and your beauty had deceived everyone. Your estimated birth date got revised twice; first you skipped from nine to eleven when the vet noticed your eyes clouding, then two and a half years later, you went from thirteen(?) to fifteen(?) when another clocked the arthritis combined with kidney disease. Like any true diva, you never revealed your age.
And you never stopped jumping onto the kitchen counter, the sofa, the office chair, anywhere you could reach. Our last morning together, you leapt to the coffee table and dipped your paw into my water glass while I was out of the room, even though your fountain was running and at ground level. The crime must have made the water taste sweeter.
I miss you, beautiful and brave Kaija. You’ll always be my first cat. I love you forever.
