Tigerlily

Tigerlily in October 2021 at age 16, riding shotgun, as always.

This one came to me a few nights ago. In a dream of course. She’ll have been gone three years in November.

”I’m coming with you,” was the first thing she said to me when we met on my first day as a cat room volunteer at PAWS. She reached through the kennel bars and hooked a white paw on my t-shirt, drawing me to her. I already had two cats I loved, but as I watched this beautiful, feisty, intelligent creature remain at the shelter week after week, I grew more and more attached to her. Her file was flagged as “no kids in home/experienced cat owners only,” and that was a strike against her. She was mostly gentle but unpredictable and very opinionated, sometimes growling or scratching to underline the point, but usually with fair warning. I looked forward to seeing her every Sunday and made a point of spending time with her in one of the visitor rooms to give her room to play or sometimes to cuddle. One time, she wasn’t in the cat room when I arrived, and my heart sank at the thought of her being adopted by someone else. It turned out that she had a kitty cold and was in isolation. I went in to see her, and recognizing me, she jumped into my arms when I opened her kennel door. Soon after that, I convinced my then-husband that she needed to join our family.

She came home with me to Greenlake, she came to work with me at Microsoft when she felt like it, a preference she expressed by jumping in the car and not getting out of it. “Fine,” I’d say. I’d grab a zip lock bag of litter, some toys, a cat bed, and a blanket, and off we’d go, her howling the whole way across 520, but I’d remind her that she’d insisted. I’d install her in my private window office (remember when we had those in tech?) and sneak her turkey and cheese cubes from the cafeteria salad bar. Often as not, I’d return from a meeting to find people in my office playing with her or otherwise a note from someone telling me they’d “borrowed” her and taken her to theirs.

She came to Thanksgiving at friends’ (uninvited but welcome), for walks around our new neighborhood in Ballard, and, when she was very old, she flew with me across the country to live with my mother at my childhood home for a summer, which she found to her satisfaction as there were many comfortable places to sleep and hide and a whole new set of admirers.

She came with me back to Seattle, where we resumed our routine, me on Zoom call after Zoom call, her just outside on the front stoop on her cat bed, the door propped open between us. She turned 16. She’d been ill for some time with several common geriatric cat ailments but was responding to treatment well and enjoyed greeting her many fans out on pandemic walks from her bed on the front stoop. From my desk, I’d overhear people calling her name and having whole conversations with her. I loved that she had such a community. And I loved being her person.

She lost more weight. I put another blanket on her nest outside. She got thinner and thinner until one day, she could hardly hold her head up to drink from her water bowl. She spent hours on the heating pad on her favorite chair. She still let me brush her face softly with a clean, dry toothbrush but it seemed more like a comfort to me than to her. The kindest thing to do was to send her on ahead and one Friday evening in November, she left softly, purring on my chest until the end. I believe she sent me Frederic and Linus, who I met days after she died.

In my dream, I came across her in a kennel at a shelter like the one where I first met her. She looked up at me, as old and frail as she looks in this photograph, but no older.

“I’m coming with you,” she told me with a slow blink.

“Where have you been all this time?!” I asked her, surprised. She purred as I cradled her and said, “Let’s get you home.”

It took me a few minutes after I woke to remember that gone is where she’s been. She came back to comfort me as I was suffering. It worked.