tag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209Freckles & DoubtWith my mastery of narrative structure I should be ruling the cosmos by now.Freckles & Doubt2024-03-22T15:10:49Ztag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:997546running out of things to hold2024-03-22T13:11:37Z2024-03-22T15:10:49Zpublic0<a href="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/file/27158.jpg"><img src="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/file/200x200/27158.jpg" alt="" title="" /></a><br /><br /><big>Pandora (2004-2024)</big><br /><br />All the best cats just happen to you - the universe bestows them, not so much randomly as inevitably. I inherited Pandora <a href="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/923705.html">in 2015</a>, courtesy of Phleep&Jo, who could only take two of their four cats when they emigrated to Scotland. Their loss was immeasurably my gain; my relatively new landlord having cheerfully agreed to up the permitted cat count in my house from one to two, I moved Pandora in with Hobbit. A year and a half later, when I <a href="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/943359.html">lost Hobbit</a>, I moved Jyn in with Pandora, only to <a href="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/992473.html">lose Jyn</a> a year or two later. While she was a feisty old thing who insisted on respect (see: massive growling sessions at the vet, including her last moments on the euthanasia table), Pandy was basically also a sweetheart; she settled down relatively quickly into more or less affectionate relationships with both other cats. When she died, Pandy was pushing twenty years old, having been with me for nearly 10: a venerable grande dame who had survived both my other two cats and Jo's other three, possibly by sheer force of personality. <br /><br /><a href="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/file/26990.jpg"><img src="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/file/200x200/26990.jpg" alt="" title="" /></a> <a href="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/file/27525.jpg"><img src="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/file/200x200/27525.jpg" alt="" title="" /></a><br /><br />Pandora was named already when I acquired her, and it suited her too well for me to want to change it. It was a good name for riffing: when I talked to her, which was continuously, she was Pandorable, Pandable, Pandorica, Pandemonium, Pandlebar Moustache. She was a smallish cat, round and solid with round eyes that tended to look a bit astonished, and her black fur actually an overlay on a very faint silver tabby you could see in sunlight. She had particularly thick fur, although it wasn't especially long, and her undercoat was very dense and fine, and shed itself in wild, enthusiastic drifts in spring, leaving kitten-sized furballs under the bed. Petting her in the shedding season created a small choking cloud, and I suspect she took a certain vindictive satisfaction in being a fur-bomb in the vet's room. <br /><br />She was a Personality: vocal, demanding, highly opinionated, but affectionate and needing constant contact. If I was at my desk, gaming on my PC, or during the lockdown work-at-home days, she'd sleep on the chair in my study (on her heating pad in winter, because she was arthritic and I indulged her ridiculously), and I have more than once had to apologise for her vocal contributions to Teams meetings. She was always underfoot in the kitchen. Always. Unlike Jyn, she loved laps, and her last few months, with me more or less perpetually collapsed in an armchair, had her continually fighting the controller or keyboard for space. She always slept with me at night, curled up tight against me, and usually making a sort of hammock out of the mosquito net by sleeping against it - she's probably the most tactile cat I've ever owned. She made her demands extremely known, either by yelling (standing in front of the water bowl and mewing because it wasn't fresh enough for her exacting tastes) or head-butting me (wanting me to move over in bed so she could climb under the duvet and nest). <br /><br /><a href="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/file/27158.jpg"><img src="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/file/200x200/27158.jpg" alt="" title="" /></a> <a href="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/file/13605.jpg"><img src="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/file/200x200/13605.jpg" alt="" title="" /></a><br /><br />She was, unlike Jyn, an extremely healthy cat, and when I dug out her vetbook and worked out how old she was a couple of years ago, the vet refused to believe she was actually 18, he said she was in nearly perfect condition. She lived cheerfully for most of the last decade with a large fatty growth on her front leg, which was a lipoma, benign, until the last year or so, when its development into a slow-growing mast cell tumour seemed to make no difference to her overall health or comfort. It was also only in the last year or two that she started to become arthritic, which we managed very successfully with the prescription kibble, and a bit senile, having sudden vocal panics where she forgot where I was, or she was, or where the food or litterbox were. (I have to ascribe to the senility her acquired tendency to attempt to drink the tea out of my mug, which she was frequently catastrophically prone to in the last few months of her life). But what got her in the end was her kidneys, shrivelled to tiny sizes. In the last few months she was hardly eating, no longer round but thin, feeling small and fragile and bird-boned when I cuddled her, and the toxin levels in her body simply overwhelming the special diet. <br /><br /><a href="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/file/29144.jpg"><img src="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/file/200x200/29144.jpg" alt="" title="" /></a><br /><br />I had not realised how close and intense my relationship with Pandy had become, although in retrospect given COVID and lockdown and my increasing ill health over the last year, it was inevitable. She and I were alone in the house together for days and months at a time over the last few years, revolving contentedly around each other in a comfortable companionship where we knew and had accommodated each other's quirks. Our space-sharing routine had all the rough edges worn smooth. While I am so glad I could give her that closeness in her declining years, it's been very hard on me to suddenly lose it. Although I had been expecting to lose her sometime in the next year or so, her deterioration was very sudden; I had an unexamined expectation that my next six months or so at home working through long COVID would be in her slightly cranky company, and it was a brutal realisation that it wouldn't. <br /><br />I also didn't expect to lose her on the day I brought her in for the vet to check her over, I thought she was being picky over food rather than continuously nauseated, so I wasn't braced for his recommendation to call it, and had allowed too many lasts - last sleep on my bed, last cuddle in my lap, last time licking Laxapet off my finger - to go unmarked. It consequently feels as though she's been ripped out of my life, leaving a jagged-edged wound. I had to clear all of her stuff - beds, bowls, brushes, toys - away into a cupboard almost as soon as I got back from the vet, because finding them in the house was making me cry. It still is. <br /><br />She was a dear companion, and a Personality, and a loved and joyful strand in my life, and my missing her is a hole in my chest. I can, and probably will, fill the bleak emptiness and silence of my house with another cat, but I miss Pandora for her complete and characteristic cat-self, and with love and thanks, always will.<br /><br /><a href="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/file/28507.jpg"><img src="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/file/200x200/28507.jpg" alt="" title="" /></a><br /><br />(Subject line quote is The Amazing Devil, because they really do excessive emotion so well).<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=997546" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:992473Jyn (2017-2021)2021-11-23T11:28:29Z2021-11-23T11:30:37Zpublic3<img width="400" src="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/file/21638.jpg" /><br /><br />The last two years have been cruel, but for me, personally, it's been in a weirdly distant way - a sort of backdrop of global death, disruption and economic hardship to the far more mundane challenges and exhaustions of a radically rewritten lifestyle and day-to-day functioning. COVID's depredations have been remote: I haven't known anyone who's died or even been seriously ill from the virus, and even interactions with students expose me to illness and death and family crisis at extreme second hand, cushioned by the text medium. It's a slow-motion apocalypse at arm's length.<br /><br />So it's strange, and sad, and somehow a bit wrong, to be hit as hard as I have been by a loss that's, comparatively speaking, petty and small; it's just that, unlike COVID, it's right in my house. I had to have Jyn put down about ten days ago; she developed an abscess in her neck over the weekend, which blew up suddenly and seriously enough that I took her in to the emergency vet on Sunday to have it lanced. Something in the combination of infection, anaesthetic and painkillers put her into acute kidney failure; we had her on a drip for most of the following week at my amazing vet's, but to no avail, her toxin levels never came down, the kidneys were clearly too damaged to be viable. Kidneys, apparently, don't heal. We had no option but to let her go. <br /><br /><img align="left" hspace="10" width="200" src="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/file/22256.jpg" />I should damned well have learned by now the power of naming pets, on the Todal being evil and Golux being confused principle; I named Jyn after Jyn Erso, given that I'd just seen <b>Rogue One</b> at the time I acquired her. Something about Jyn Erso's story, <a href="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/948760.html">abandoned by family</a>, taken in by strangers, but spitting and feisty despite it, seemed appropriate. I should have remembered the tragic death very young. <br /><br />She was, I have been saying to everyone all week, an incredibly sweet little cat - affectionate, playful, full of character, only occasionally evil. Her defining characteristic was her Klingon forehead, that very heavy fur over her eyes which gave her a perpetual frown that was somewhat at odds with the sweetness of her character. She would climb onto my desk while I was working and headbutt me repeatedly in the chest when she wanted attention (she did it whenever I visited her at the vet), and she was always at the door to greet me when I arrived home. Her walk was a sort of flouncy mini-swagger, often accompanied by her characteristic chirrups and trills; at times she'd rocket in from the courtyard giving vent to her astonishingly baritone growl, although not for any concrete reason I could ever discover, I think it was part of the game. She loved playing with rolling toys, especially, for some reason, rolled up foil from chocolates - Codsworth has found several of them under the furniture in this last week, and then I cry. <br /><br /><img width="250" align="right" hspace="10" src="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/file/23209.jpg" />In a weird sort of way Jyn's early death, while awful, was also on some level not surprising; she was never quite right. She had that terrible recurring tendency to abscesses, probably about one a year, which were weird and mysterious because I never caught her fighting, and for a large number of them there wasn't actually a discernible bite mark. She had the black spots on her nose which were starting to be cancerous, and I was bracing myself for the nosectomy dilemma all over again. She was never very good at jumping; she had a curious insecurity about walking, even, on any ground that was cluttered or yielding; she'd never sit on laps. The standard garden wall, which Hobbit and various other trespassers scale quite handily, kept her securely in the back courtyard as long as there wasn't anything for her to jump up in stages. She never actually learned to go out of the open windows - something about the narrow sill and minor dexterity needed to negotiate the opening, defeated her. Even Pandora, fat and lazy and elderly as she is, quite cheerfully manages these windows. Jyn somehow... did not compute. I think she may have had very minor brain damage of some sort, or a muscular development problem. Or both. I thought of her as having a somewhat buggy operating system, with several intrinsic Cat modules missing or incomplete.<br /><br />It's been difficult, since losing her, to keep myself from blaming either myself (I should have caught the abscess earlier) or the emergency vet (he gave her stronger painkillers than my usual Splendid Vet does, and didn't put a drain in the wound, and I'm a bit miffed that he drained the neck abscess but didn't appear to notice the second one in her mouth). But my vet says it's just bad luck, a perfect storm of circumstances stressing the kidneys. <br /><br />I am missing her terribly, and I think Pandora, despite her general grumption, is as well, she's been spending a lot of time yelling at me over the last week. They were quite good friends, they'd lie on my bed and wash each other, at least until Pandy got bored and tried to nip her, so I'm not surprised Pandy's a bit lonely now. I am too. And sorry, and sad.<br /><br /><img width="400" src="https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/file/22383.jpg" /><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=992473" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-01-02:2705209:958135darkness the right hand of light2018-01-24T07:31:27Z2018-01-25T10:22:52Zpublic2Generally I actually like getting older, I'm an improved version of the younger me in many ways, but I hate getting older when all my icons inexorably die. We've just <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/obituaries/ursula-k-le-guin-acclaimed-for-her-fantasy-fiction-is-dead-at-88.html">lost</a> Ursula le Guin. When I grow up even older and have improved even further to the point where I can overcome all the multitudes of blockages which are preventing me from actually writing fiction in any real, public sense, she's the writer I want to be. She is the archetypal proponent of "thought experiment" science fiction, her work upheld by a steel backbone of intellectual enquiry and rigorous world-building. <br /><br />I can't overestimate the effect <b>Left Hand of Darkness</b> and <b>Lathe of Heaven</b> had on me in undergrad, the way they colonised my thinking and pried open my assumptions with crowbars. I also identify very strongly with the elements of restraint, dispassion, almost calm which characterise her writing, and which I hope on good days characterise mine; in a lot of ways the snowscapes of <b>Left Hand</b> exemplify the aspects of her work which feel cold until you realise the seething life and driving passions under the surface. And Earthsea, of course, is formative for the genre as much as for many of its readers. I owned the first three Earthsea novels as a child, I vaguely remember acquiring them, expensively and new, from a surprisingly enlightened Zimbabwean bookshop when I was a young teenager, in those skinny volumes with the slightly stylised art-deoish covers, and the man half changed into a hawk. I read them with a sort of fascinated inadequacy, realising how much was going on under the surface, returning again and again to them to try and work out what it was. <br /><br />I cried when the Tumblr posts came over my feed. However natural and graceful an exit this was on a fully lived life, however much the work of her hands will endure, she is a great loss.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=freckles_and_doubt&ditemid=958135" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments