My cat is dead, and the world continues to move on, and this seems somehow unfair.
On January 16th, 2008, my previous cat, Graystoke, died. On January 17th, I went to the local shelter and picked up a cat. They had two cats at the time, one with claws and one without; I took the one with claws, sight unseen. They had her listed under the name “Molly” and said she was probably 1-2 years old, and already spayed. She went into heat within about two weeks, which gives you some idea why the vet who ran our local shelter got told a few years back that he was retiring or they were going to shut him down.
For the first few days I had her, I carried her around, a lot. She was inclined to tolerate this. I don’t actually know why; cats are mysterious. Cats generally don’t care for being carried around like plush toys, but she was fine with it. I would hold her up to Jesse and say “I has a kitty.” I referred to her, quite reasonably, as a fuzzy monster. At one point, I informed Jesse, very seriously, that I had mistakenly thought she was a fuzzy monster, but in fact, she was the rarer and much more dangerous “fuzzinated monstercator”. It made sense to me at the time.
At one point during the early carrying-around phase, Jesse commented on how cute it was that Molly and I sniffed noses so much. I covered her ears and said “I haven’t had the heart to tell her, but her nose doesn’t smell like anything.”
Molly was a very strange beast, and part of what motivated me to make a post about this is just that I just want to get some of my thoughts about her down.
(Updates 2024-10-25: Forgot a couple of cute stories.)
Probably a cat
Molly was very clearly a cat, but she was not great at it. Jesse used to refer to her as a “smallrus”. During the first couple of weeks we had her, she tried snuggling with people under blankets one or two times, but thereafter she would not, under any circumstances, remain under a blanket next to a human, or in general lie immediately next to a human. My best guess is one of us rolled over on her in our sleep.
Molly loved and chased every string, cable, cord, or in general long-thin-thing. She tolerated some cats and feuded with others, but in general she would only feud with the most recently-new cat; she hated Devy until we got another cat. She made an exception for Misty, with whom she was deeply in lesbians for many years; they would curl up together and lick each other’s faces.
As a young cat, she turned exclusively by (approximately) pirouetting. She would rear up on her back paws, turn, and land facing the direction she wanted to face in. This lasted for a couple of years until one day she spun her head into my knee, and I never saw her doing it again, although there was still a bit of a hop in her turns.
She was… strange. My best model of her behavior is that she appeared to be mildly afraid of the dark. She would typically not remain in a room too dark for a human to comfortably navigate. She’d go sit in a window facing a street light or something. I got a night light for my bedroom, and she started sleeping on the bed at night.
Molly did not approve of laser pointers. At all. She didn’t hunt them, she didn’t chase them. I think she may have pawed at one exactly once. In fact, her disapproval went past that; if another cat chased a laser pointer near her, she would let them play for maybe thirty seconds before getting, up, walking over, and swatting them. With regards to the little red bug, my cat was an Internet Atheist. (No offense intented to the many atheists I know through the internet, but I don’t have a good distinguishing term.)
Molly liked being carried, or so I thought for many years. A year or so back, I once had occasion to see someone else pick her up, and it was like they were picking up a cat; she squirmed, she tried to maintain control of her posture, and so on. But for me, until the very end, she was content to be picked up and carried like a plush toy. She would hug me, but generally without claws, and simply wait to find out where we were going.
Once, when I was suffering mild sleep paralysis from some illness, I ended up lying in bed unmoving for a while without actually losing consciousness, and got to find out what Molly did when I stopped moving. She would sit on top of me, purring loudly, and possibly bathing, for maybe fifteen minutes, then get up, walk over to her food dish, have a bite or two of food, then come back, sit on me, and start purring again. This repeated for hours. We described her goal in this endeavor as “wishing to become a spherical cat of uniform happiness”.
Molly liked to guard me. When we acquired a housekeeper who would come over in the mornings to prepare breakfast, Molly became hard to find; I found out why one day when I woke up early, and got to see what was happening. When the car entered the driveway, Molly stood up on her back legs, fully alert. When the car door opened, Molly growled softly. When the house door opened, Molly ran and hid under the bed. Nonetheless, she did like to guard me. When I was sleeping, she would set up camp in the door to my room and make sure that, if anything came, she would make a noise too quiet for me to hear and then run away. But if I’d had a cat’s hearing, this would have been a very effective warning.
Molly loved to make eye contact. Barb, upon meeting Molly, said that the other cats acted like cats, but Molly’s eye contact expressed “Hi, I am also a person, we are having a conversation.” She had a surreal tendency to respond to things she shouldn’t have been able to perceive; when Nick was trying to get recordings of her strange noises, he would start a program that could access his computer’s microphone, and she would suddenly stop and stare at him intently. We don’t know what she was reacting to.
The sounds. The sounds.
For most of her life, the standard form of any vet visit for Molly was that we would start with them asking whether those noises were normal. They were, for her.
Originally, Molly was pretty normal. In 2014, we got a new cat, Devy, and Molly and Devy did not get along at first. But once they started to get along, they became competitive. They would both sit near me, and they would purr. And Devy’s purr had a sort of crackle to it that made it easier to hear her purr. And Molly was not having this.
Molly became the champion of purring.
When she started making this noise, we actually took her to the vet, because to a first approximation, it looked like respiratory distress. Cats usually do not open their mouths to breathe and purr, but Molly was opening her mouth, and making an unfamiliar noise. The vet had never heard a cat make this noise before, and couldn’t find anything wrong, but also couldn’t figure out what was happening. We got referred to the Rich People Vet, and that was a whole experience. They also weren’t sure what was happening, but could tell us that her larynx was put together wrong (one side of her vocal apparatus was much larger than the other) and it didn’t seem to be cancer or anything like that.
It’s hard to express how loud this noise could get, but to put it in perspective, this noise is why we started turning on subtitles for TV and movies even when the audio was in languages we understood. It was genuinely hard to understand dialogue if Molly was purring, even if she was in the next room.
And she liked purring. She might purr if petted. She might purr if you looked at her. She might start purring because she noticed you and thought you might pet her. She would then continue for possibly hours, usually purring herself to sleep. Sometimes she did not make the extra-loud purrs, but often she would switch to them. Even her regular purrs were loud enough to make it a bit hard to follow what was happening.
Somewhere around this time, she also apparently otherwise lost her voice; she simply couldn’t make normal meows, or possibly simply chose not to anymore. No one knows.
The noises do not end there. She would breathe, loudly. When she felt like it was bedtime she would come sit near me and just sort of sigh dramatically at me. Even her normal breathing often had a sort of vocalization-like quality to it, and it was, again, loud (for a cat). If she was sitting on the floor in a second-floor room, you could hear her in the room below. If I couldn’t find her, I could just walk around the house quietly listening and usually find her by the noises.
There’s an additional kind of noise she would make when eating or bathing. I may someday update this post with links to the noises. They’re… distinctive. If you’ve ever heard that the sounds of a Minecraft ghast are actually someone’s cat, and thought that sounded unbelievable, recordings of the noises Molly makes might convince you that it’s possible.
So far as we know none of this was distressing to her. She seemed to sort of enjoy her little noises.
Such a sweet beast
Molly was, with most people, extremely gentle. Even with veterinarians, she was disinclined to use force. If she felt you were being exceptionally rude and messing with her face, she might hesitantly lift a paw, and if you continued, gently try to push your hands away from her face. She did not use claws for this.
Being a slightly superstitious person, I used to worry; what if cats have a lifetime budget of happiness? What if she burns through it too fast? And these fears were somewhat confirmed when, around 2018, she started seeming clingy and unwell, and we took her to the vet and discovered that she had exceptionally high blood sugar. She was, in fact, in danger of dying young because she was too sweet.
We spent several months doing blood glucose curves for her, and giving her daily injections of insulin. We also switched her to some diabetic-friendly cat food, and started tapering down the insulin; eventually she went into full remission. We did occasional glucose curves again, but the diabetes never came back.
Tail swipes and games
Molly had the strongest tail of any cat I’ve ever known, and also liked having it pulled. I don’t really have any explanation for any part of this. Molly could knock moderately heavy objects over by thwapping them with her tail, and would do so on purpose. Her lack of negative response to things involving her tail actually had me concerned about nerve damage, but I did eventually establish that you could pinch her tail enough that she’d complain. But it was hard. On the other hand, if I just wrapped a hand around her tail and grabbed it, she would usually pull gently away from me. I think maybe it was a good stretchy sensation or something? She never objected to it and would indeed accept it as a “come back this way” guesture. Who knows.
Being sort of a monster, I always liked to play the game of petting a cat who was near the edge of a surface to see if I could induce them to roll off the edge of the surface. At one point, when she was maybe ten or so, I was trying this on Molly, and she suddenly became alert, looked at me, pulled herself away from the edge a couple of inches, then rolled over looking extremely smug and purring extra loud. I never again got her to fall off a surface by petting her, but when I tried she would usually detect this, pull herself away from the edge, and start purring more loudly.
Getting older
As she aged, Molly did slow down a bit. For the last year or two, she mostly left strings alone. She gradually went deaf, although for a few months she appeared to hear more in one ear than the other (as observed because she’d turn to the right in response to sounds regardless of where they were). Her vision might have declined some too. It was … very hard to tell what Molly did or didn’t perceive, because she did not react to things the way cats react to things.
Eventually, something went significantly wrong, maybe a stroke or something, and she could no longer walk well; she would lift her paws to unreasonable heights, and didn’t seem to recognize me anymore. We took her to the vet the next morning, and the vet confirmed that her eyes weren’t responding to light either. We did not take her back from the vet. I remember being amused, because once the call had been made and the vet tech had shown up with the syringe for her sedative, I was sobbing into the cat, and our helpy person, Barb, helpfully explained to the vet tech “he loves that cat”. I doubt they’d have figured out what was going on without that clarification.
Molly was with me a little over sixteen years. It was not nearly long enough.