running out of things to hold

[freckles_and_doubt]

Pandora (2004-2024)

All the best cats just happen to you - the universe bestows them, not so much randomly as inevitably. I inherited Pandora in 2015, 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 lost Hobbit, I moved Jyn in with Pandora, only to lose Jyn 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.



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.

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).



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.



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.

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.

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.



(Subject line quote is The Amazing Devil, because they really do excessive emotion so well).