Verbo died this past week. She was over eighteen years old, a good long lifespan for a cat. It still felt too soon.

Pretty Verbo

She was one of the three Missouri kitties that had moved with us to Texas in 1999. Applet died in 2012, and with him and Verbo gone, Velvet is the last Missouri cat standing at our house, and even she’s on her way out.

We adopted Verbo from a shelter in Rolla in 1998, largely because Applet, our first cat, seemed lonely when we were away at our college classes. We went to the shelter and were amazed to find a cage full of bouncing, long-haired kittens. Nearly all the little cats came running up to us, meowing their most forthcoming meows. One little gray and tan kitty scuttled to the back of the cage, trying her best to be invisible. We worried no one would pick the one who ran away from attention, so we took her home with us.

Little ball of fluff

Applet hated her. For three days, he postured and hissed. Finally one day we came in to find him giving her a bath, and from then on, he was known as “mommy Applet,” and she was in the club. Even early on, she was a destructive force. Little ball of fluff that she was, there was no place that she couldn’t wedge herself into, no height she couldn’t achieve, no scrap of food she wasn’t willing to scavenge for. We found her atop 6-foot tall shelves, rooting around in the trash, demolishing rolls of toilet paper, chewing up strings, tags, photos, and books. Her cumulative property damage bill would be substantial.

Verbo and Applet

In Verbo’s mind, she was a cheetah. Not long after we had gotten her, we took the cats outside to play in the yard. Applet was always a stop-and-sniff-everything cat, so we weren’t too worried. Verbo, we came to find out, was a runner. We had barely set the cat down before she covered 30 yards, bounced sideways a bit, and then looked at us to see if we were going to chase her.

Sean loves to tell the story of how Verbo had gotten out of the house he lived in toward the end of his college career (the 808 house in Rolla was a renowned residence of the college DJ set, and has since been torn down). She waited on the sidewalk till Sean walked out and then sprinted around to the back of the house. He was barefoot, so he had to go back in to put shoes on. When he came back out, she was waiting for him on the sidewalk again, as serene as a spring breeze. As he moved toward her, she again bolted around the house. Sean thought he had her then since she was heading for a dead end. She waited till he got to her and then tore past him to get back to the front of the house, where she proceeded to run straight up a tree, seeming to maintain speed even as she went from horizontal to vertical. The shoes Sean had chosen were flip-flops, so he went inside yet again to change into real shoes so he could climb up and get her. When he returned, she had come down the tree and was yet again waiting for him on the sidewalk, clearly enjoying their game of chase. Sean, by this point, was through playing and lured her in with a can of wet cat food.

This cat could relax like no other

We were poor in college and couldn’t do anything so regal as board the cats, so we drug them home to visit our parents in Missouri and Alabama. Applet and Verbo were great road-tripping cats. Applet would often lay across Sean’s shoulders or sleep in my lap, and Verbo would sprawl out in a console or row of cup-holders. Once Velvet came along, traveling with the cats became harder. She would pant in fear till long shoestrings of drool would dangle out either side of her mouth.

Their lives in Texas were pretty ordinary, but Verbo, being the curious cat she was, still managed to get herself into trouble from time to time. For example, there was the time she got sealed into the wall. Thanks to some questionable new home construction practices, leaky plumbing destroyed some of the drywall in our first house. A hole had to be cut into the wall to allow for things to dry out, and apparently while the workers were away, Verbo nosed her way into that hole. When the workers returned, we’re assuming she panicked and ran further in. Not noticing the cat, the workers sealed up the drywall and went home for the day. Later that evening, we were searching high and low for the cat and were starting to worry that someone might have let her outside when we heard a quiet meow coming from the ceiling. Sean sawed out an opening and gently pulled Verbo out. While she beat a hasty path to her litter box, Sean left a very colorful message on the construction supervisor’s voicemail.

Verbo was a fairly vocal cat

Questionable construction aside, things were pretty great for those cats till we had kids. Once Maya and Ian came to town, they became second-class citizens in our house. Velvet and Pumpkin (our only Texas kitty) have learned to tolerate and even love the small and unintentionally rough hands that pat and rub them. Verbo, on the other hand, was always an avoider, and it was tough because she was easily Maya’s favorite. In the past few months, Maya had taken to trying to pick Verbo up and move her around and hug her. The cat was not impressed.

Sean wanted photos of Verbo going after sunflowers. It took zero coaxing on our part.

Verbo was the great food thief in our house. Everyone knew they couldn’t leave anything out, even for a minute. She has tried to steal frozen fish from a baking pan, she’s chewed through countless plastic bags to get to food, and she has made it to every conceivable surface in our kitchen in search of some tasty morsel. And she wasn’t just a great food thief, she was an amazing eater. Especially when she was younger, there was very little she wouldn’t happily consume. Sean was once sitting in a chair eating a doughnut, and Verbo was right there in his lap, biting into the doughnut from the other side, yanking for all she was worth. All meats were in her repertoire, of course, but also odd things like tomatoes, broccoli, and even jalapeños. The absolute strangest though were corn husks. If we brought fresh corn home, she’d be dancing at our feet fairly frothing in excitement. I’d shuck it straight into the trash can, and there she’d be, ready to get it back out and chew it up. She had a real fondness for greenery.

Verbo’s death caught us entirely off guard. She had been rock solid forever. We were pretty sure that she would outlive us. Velvet has been struggling with kidney insufficiency and intestinal lymphoma (among other things), and so most of our non-child-consumed energy had been focused on her. Cats are great masters at hiding their infirmities, and Verbo was probably more masterful than most.

Probably begging for food

To us, it seemed like Verbo’s illness came out of nowhere. A week before she died, she was still jumping up on furniture and stealing food from the kids’ plates. A day before, she was still dancing around under the table begging Sean for table scraps and nearly removing his finger when he offered her a few small cubes of steak. And then we noticed her stumble. Verbo, as a rule, did not stumble. She was the embodiment of feline grace and agility. We thought she had been losing weight, but picking her up, we were alarmed at just how light she had become, how all her lithe and wiry muscle seemed to have melted away. Sean took her to the emergency vet where she was found to be intensely anemic. She was given a blood transfusion over night. We knew it was over when we got her back home the next morning and watched her for a bit. We should have seen immediate improvement after the procedure, and instead, she was so much worse. After some examination from the vet, it was determined the likely culprit was intestinal disease of some kind. She was euthanized that same morning, but in the state she was in, she wouldn’t have gone on much longer.

Maya has taken it pretty well, thankfully. It’s hard to explain death to a three year old, and while we kept it simple, I’m certain she doesn’t quite understand. She tells us she’s sad and that she misses Verbo and asks often to see photos of her. Sean and I are still working through it. We still put things with tags or strings up high so she won’t chew them, we still keep a watchful eye on our food so she won’t steal it, and our eyes still fill with tears when we don’t see her tucked away somewhere, calmly watching us from a distance. She was the cat-est cat we’ve ever had, and we will miss her.