I am now the last Missourian left at our house. The week before last, we lost Velvet, the only remaining member of the trio of kitties that moved from Missouri to Texas with us after we graduated college. Since she was a stray, we don’t really know exactly how old she was, but we’re guessing in the neighborhood of 19.

Velvet

Sean rescued her in 1999, while I was actually already in Texas, having graduated and become gainfully employed. He lived in a basement apartment and the people in the upstairs apartment appeared to have moved and left her there. He didn’t think too much of it until it got cold; then he started to worry. I received all this information during our nightly phone calls. My memory is inexact at the best of times and downright terrible after 17 years, several jobs, and two kids, so treat this as a dramatization. The timeframe, though, is accurate.
Night 1: Hey, I think the people upstairs may have left one of their cats. She’s really sweet.
Night 2: It’s supposed to snow tonight. I’m worried about that cat.
Night 3: So, I took our new cat to the vet today for shots. She’s really mean to the other cats. We need to come up with a name for her.

Food, glorious food

When Sean took Velvet in, she weighed about 6 pounds and was a full-grown cat. They estimated her age at 1-3 years. As I heard it, she’d hunker down in one spot in the apartment and hiss and growl if any other cat got near her. And wow did she eat. She ate like there might never be food in front of her again. In other words, she ate like she had been abandoned. Neither of us were used to cats that didn’t regulate their diets fairly well, so she achieved a fair “bowling ball with legs” body shape before the vet kindly pointed out that we may switch her to lower calorie cat food. It changed nothing. There was even a point many years back when Velvet had a dental issue and had to have all but her tiny grooming teeth removed. Even then she didn’t lose weight. At her peak, she weighed 16 pounds. When she died, there was less than four pounds of her left.

We often called her Velvet Elvis, or Velvis for short, because her lip would get stuck on her gum and it would kind of look like she had the Elvis snarl going on. It also didn’t hurt that her physique would have looked at home in a sequined jumpsuit with some rhinestone sunglasses shading her eyes. Maya even regularly referred to her as Velvis, though she certainly didn’t understand the reference (we’ll work on that).

Velvet in the snow, probably unwillingly

Another facet of Velvet’s abandonment manifested in her unwillingness to be outdoors. We’d take the three cats outside to let them roam a bit. Applet and Verbo would happily sniff and poke around (or run up a tree). Not Velvet. She would immediately run back to the door and wait there till someone would let her in. We figure she thought the other cats were insane. C’mon guys, what if they don’t ever let you back in??!!

She was the sweetest lap kitty that ever lived. That’s all Velvet really wanted: to sit in your lap and be petted. We used to call her Hooks after the cop from the Police Academy movies who had the quiet little voice. She’d sit at your feet and whisper meow at you till you sat down and then she’d happily hop up and and settle into your lap. As rotund as she was, she made a great monorail cat, tucking her feet up beneath her girth, but her preferred way of sitting was more interesting. What she liked to do was have her butt in your lap and her face toward yours. Then she’d stre-e-e-e-etch out her front legs as far as they’d extend so that she looked like a giant furry raindrop. She sometimes would even knead your face a little with those extended paws.

Velvet snuggled up with my pregnant (with Maya) belly

Velvet also really loved string. She would wake from a dead sleep half-way across the house if she heard the whisper of string unspooling. I’ve never (and I mean never) seen that cat move fast except when she had string to chase.

Travel was a little difficult with Velvet. She was terrified of the car. The poor thing would pant when she was scared. In the car, she would pant to the point that she’d have giant shoestrings of drool dangling from either side of her mouth to the floor. Needless to say, after a point, we tried to let her stay home more often than not.

Velvet loved it when we had a baby; she could lay on all the baby stuff!

At the beginning of this year, Velvet began to have a lot of what I’ll delicately refer to as litter box trouble. We had been dealing with her kidney insufficiency for a number of years by then and had just been told she was likely to have intestinal lymphoma as well. Since she was on her last legs at this point, we decided that we’d put her in a cage and let her live out her days there. Sean found the giant-est dog enclosure he could at the pet store. It was large enough to have a litter box, a bed, and water with decent separation between them. After the first couple days, she decided she loved it, even getting a little pissed at us if we didn’t put her back in her cage quickly enough after meal times.

But cats are astonishingly resilient creatures. She puttered on like that for months and months. She spent nearly all of her time curled up in her bed sleeping. But she’d wake up for petting. She’d wander out of her cage to eat her meals. She’d even get pretty vocal if she thought we weren’t conforming to her preferred timeline for dinner.

Velvet curled up on the turtle Lolli had crocheted for Maya

She put up with Ian’s abuse like a champ, seeming to welcome it even. When she was caged, he’d stick his pudgy little arm through the bars and she’d rub her face on him, Ian giggling all the while. He still stands up on the couch looking over the back of it and pointing to where the cage used to be while yelling, “Belbet! Belbet!” And I sadly explain to him every time that Velvet died. She’s all gone. We don’t have her any more.

At the end, Velvet was carrying around a pretty heavy burden of diagnoses: hyperthyroidism, kidney insufficiency, intestinal lymphoma, and pancreatitis. Sean had taken her in for some fluids (for her kidneys) and an injection of Procrit (to help with her anemia) and was told that she was severely dehydrated. A day later, she wouldn’t move to eat or drink or use the litter box. We had her euthanized that same day. We’ve struggled since the beginning of the year with the question: was this the right time to put her down or was there still some quality to her life? The vet had advised us back then that if she stopped seeming like herself, it was probably time. That day it was obvious. Velvet had left the building.