Jyn (2017-2021)

[freckles_and_doubt]

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.

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.

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 Rogue One at the time I acquired her. Something about Jyn Erso's story, abandoned by family, taken in by strangers, but spitting and feisty despite it, seemed appropriate. I should have remembered the tragic death very young.

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.

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.

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.

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.