Thank you to all who posted your condolences after my previous post about Varda's passing. Fortunately Stephan and I have an easy schedule this week so we've had the luxury of time to remember her. Some memories of Varda including a few pictures are behind the cut.Varda1993-2007Varda came into my life in 1993 when she was about two months old, rescued from an animal shelter in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I thought that Athena, my two-year-old cat, needed a companion. Because I had named Athena for a goddess, I wanted to follow the same trend with the second cat. Varda, named for Tolkien's Vala, called Elbereth by the elves, never really lived up to her name. While Athena knew (and still knows) that she was a goddess, Varda was more of a loveable airhead, whose instinct was always to run first, think later.When I brought Varda home, Athena was mad enough to kill me, or her. I had to keep the new kitten in a spare bedroom at night and when no one was around to supervise her. I felt bad that she wasn't able to sleep in bed and be cuddled as much as Athena had as a kitten, but knew that the best way to get Athena to accept her was not to push the older cat out of her accustomed place in favor of the new one. The first few times I let the two cats play together I had to inspect Varda to make sure she was undamaged, then throw her back in. The two cats never became best buddies, but learned to accept each other. One of my favorite photos of the two of them from that time is of Athena, on the bed, wearing a tremendous scowl. Varda is sprawled across her back, with a wide-eyed, innocent expression. But now Athena had a playmate, and stopped some of her obnoxious behaviors like knocking pictures off the wall to get attention, because she could always play with Varda instead.
Most of the time, the two cats got along pretty well together, but they had one famous spat that lasted several days, right about the time Stephan and I got married and had a house full of company. The best we can guess is that Varda finally asserted herself and Athena felt dethroned. Varda liked to make up from a quarrel by licking Athena's head and ears, which Athena would tolerate with a scowl and possibly hit Varda if she got tired of it.While Athena has always been a "people person," Varda was shy with strangers right from the start. Visitors to our house might remember her as only a face peeking around the living room doorway, though if they stayed long enough or were particularly good with cats, they could usually win her over. When Stephan stayed at my apartment for the first time, I had to warn him that Athena would accept him right away, but not to expect too much from Varda. Later that night, Varda curled up on his chest and went to sleep.As a young cat, Varda was quite athletic and could leap and make elaborate turns in the air in pursuit of a cat toy. She could jump straight up in the air as high as the top of the refrigerator. In later years, she was still interested in the cat toys, but she would bob her head and watch the toy and make you do all the work. She liked to survey the kitchen from the top of the refrigerator, or on top of the microwave. Her other favorite activities included lying in any sunny spot, particularly on the dining room rug or window seat.
Varda never liked to be held and cuddled much, but she loved to jump onto one of the barstools in the kitchen and demand to be petted. You could pick her up and hold her, but what she really liked was to stand on your shoulders. I could hold out an arm and she would walk along it as if she was a panther on a tree branch. Sometimes, I would get tired of this before she would, and stoop down to allow her to climb down my back and jump to the floor. As often as not, Varda decided that this new posture was an invitation to lie down on my back and make herself comfortable. When she slept in bed with us, she would sometimes end up draped over a leg in some Daliesque position that didn't look comfortable. Because she was so small, I might not notice she was lying on my leg until I rolled over and felt a small body go flying. She had the softest little purr, and used it sparingly enough that it was always a treat to hear.Eventually, she became trusting enough that I could hold her "upside down" with her back against my arms and she would relax that way. However, one had to be careful when holding Varda. If she decided she was being restrained and wanted to be put down, her decision was retroactive as of a few seconds before. Meaning that if you didn't read her mind and put her down before she decided this, you might get a claw aiming for your face. I used to say that Varda was 90% sweetness, 10% chaos.Another of Varda's endearing behaviors was her "flops." She would meow and expect you to follow her onto the rug in the hallway, where her legs would give way and she would "flop" over onto her side. Then you were supposed to pet her as she squirmed around on the rug. She could also be a quiet lap kitty and an excellent reading companion.
Varda's kidneys began to fail earlier this year. We switched to special food, but Varda, always the picky one, eventually refused to eat it. We started giving her fluids under the skin a few times a week, and in the last few weeks went to every day. She had gone from being eight pounds at her largest to just over five. The fluids used to perk her up and we could tell that this treatment really made her feel better. But her "bad numbers" from the blood tests just kept going up. She made a good recovery from a tooth infection, but a few days after that, her decline started in earnest. Saturday, November 17, was the last day that she really ate well. She was beginning to look like Nounou, Stephan's old teddy bear, a creature whose stuffing had lost most of its fluff, giving him a gaunt, misshapen look, the fur ragged and dull, eyes glassy and not seeming to see much. She couldn't keep warm enough, and spent most of her time directly on the heat vent in the kitchen, or up against the bottom of the refrigerator, where the warm air comes out.On Sunday, she barely ate, though she did eat some fish I cooked for her. I put the electric blanket on the bed, wanting to give her an opportunity for warmth at night when we keep the heat pretty low, and she did stay in bed with us most of the night. The next morning, the spot where she had been was damp, so we washed all the bedclothes and decided, regrettably, that having the electric blanket on for her was no longer an option.On Monday, she wouldn't eat at all, and was wobbly on her legs. She lost control of her bladder more often, and I had to carry her downstairs to her litter box. We gave her the usual fluid treatment, hoping it would make her feel better, but knowing that she was approaching the end. She would sometimes howl and we would come running, to find that she had made a mess on the floor (to her great embarrassment) or was unable to climb up onto the couch. Stephan and I didn't expect her to live through the night.I told Athena that if she had any last words of wisdom for Varda, she better give them now. I put Athena down beside Varda, who stood up from her crouch on the vent to lick Athena on the top of the head one last time.It's not easy to make a decision to end a life even when it looks like there is nothing left of the life but suffering. I couldn't ask Varda what she wanted, and honestly don't know if ending her suffering wasn't more to end my pain at watching her suffer. Stephan and I didn't expect her to make it through the night, relieving us of having to make that decision. When I got up on Tuesday, I went downstairs to look for her, fully expecting her to be dead. She was not in her usual places in the kitchen, so I thought she must have crawled into a corner to die. The first place I looked was a sometime hiding place of hers, in a drawer beneath the couch where we keep a blanket. She can crawl into it from behind the couch. I opened the drawer and Varda lifted her sleepy head to look at me.I put her on my lap and petted her for a while, knowing what Stephan and I had agreed had to happen that day. We took her to the Vet's for one last trip, and she went very peacefully.Varda was not always easy to understand, and I think some of her behavior had a logic all its own that was incomprehensible to us. For instance, if I yelled at her for clawing on the table, her response appeared to be, "gosh, that human gets crazy sometimes and yells for no apparent reason" rather than connecting my yelling with her behavior. But we loved her all the same, and the household now has a gaping hole that was once filled with a furry presence. She gave us many years of fun, amusement, and exasperation.The Vet and technician were wonderful and put her in a little cardboard casket, wrapped in a towel with a flower. We placed this on the table with candles for a brief vigil, then dug her a grave in the back yard, between the hydrangea bushes. She is now buried there with a pretty quartz and mica rock for a headstone. I can't guess what Varda might have wanted, which was true most of the time even when she was alive, but I feel good that we've done what we could to honor her memory. She was a joy and a puzzlement, and she will not be forgotten. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and we will raise a glass in thanks for her life.