The first time I held her she fell asleep in my arms and I was utterly charmed. The last time I held her she fell asleep in my arms again. But this time what I felt was a sadness that matched or even eclipsed the joy of that first meeting.
In April of 1996 I called a breeder and told her that I was looking for a pair of pet quality Siamese kittens. The breeder said that she had one pet quality kitten and that she had another kitten that she had intended to raise as a show cat but she already had a full plate of show cats so she would consider selling me the pair. The breeder was a little protective of her privacy so my first introduction to the kittens was in the parking lot of a restaurant. I sat in the back seat of her car and she passed the kittens to me one at a time and watched while I held and petted each one. The male was a solid little fellow who purred and climbed on me but the dainty little female let me pet her for a while and then settled down for a nap right there in my arms. That was when the breeder decided that I was an acceptable owner for her kittens.
I named the pair Inca and Maya. They were from two different litters born two weeks apart but with the same sire. Inca was the quieter of the two (though quiet is a relative term when speaking about Siamese), stockier than Maya and more reserved but with a room filling purr when he really got going. Maya was the more exuberant one who would greet me when I came home from work by dashing up to me while yelling that top of her lungs. She grew into the classic Siamese shape, almost Disney-esque, with a delicate triangular face, lithe body and a whip of a tail that seemed to be almost as long as the rest of her. She would gallop through the house, her little paws making a thunder that you wouldn't associate with such a small cat.
(Maya on the left, showing that perfect triangular face and the light fawn colored body of a classic seal-point long after Inca had started to grow darker.)
One of the things that Maya most wanted to do in her new home was to jump up on the kitchen counter but she was too little to jump directly onto it. She eventually figured out that she could jump on the seat of the sofa in the living room and from there to the back of the sofa and then over the half wall between the living room and the kitchen onto the counter. The circular floor plan of the house allowed her to start running in the kitchen then turn down the hall and again past the front door then gallop through the living room and up the sofa onto the counter. It was best described as a mad dash followed by two graceful bounds. Even after she grew big enough to jump straight up to the counter she enjoyed going the long way around. One day about a year later I rearranged the living room furniture without thinking and not long afterward I heard the "thumpa-thumpa" of Maya running and then the brief silence that marked her first leap to the sofa, but this time followed by a thud as she launched herself headlong into the wall because the sofa was no longer there. It was then that I decided that I really didn't like the new look and moved the furniture back to the original locations.
The pair of them developed an interesting dynamic: Inca would yield to Maya at the food bowl and wait until she had her fill of fresh kibble before he ate. But cat toys were his and he would thump Maya if she dared to play with a cat toy before he was bored with it. Occasionally I would hear a noise in a dark room late at night I'd find Maya there furtively playing with a cat toy lest Inca discover that she was breaking the rules.
When they were six years old Inca and Maya moved with me from Seattle to New Orleans and as far as they were concerned they had moved to paradise. Unlike Seattle, New Orleans was warm and it was sunny most of the time. They spent many a long hour sunning themselves in the courtyard window of my apartment.
But what they enjoyed most of all about New Orleans was the fact that it had the most marvelous self-propelling cat toys - cockroaches! They were so much better than the spiders that they got to hunt in Seattle, cockroaches were faster, they didn't curl up into a little ball when you whacked them with a paw and they lasted longer. Once one got away from the two hunters and dashed under the closet door to safety. Inca and Maya waited patiently outside that door just hoping that their toy would come back.
Unfortunately that idyllic existence in New Orleans came to an abrupt end when Hurricane Katrina hit. The lazy endless summer gave way to hours long car trips as they bounced from New Orleans to Baton Rouge to Houston and then Dallas and then back to Houston and they traded sunny window ledges for cramped bedrooms in the homes of their various hosts and many weekend stays boarded at the vet while I went back to New Orleans to retrieve belongings and arrange for a move back to Seattle. But even in that hectic and stressful period there were rare moments of peace as shown by this picture I call "The Siamese Synchronized Sleeping Team".
About a year after we returned to Seattle, Inca succumbed to the chronic respiratory problems that had plagued him for his last few years. It took me about a year before I was ready to bring another cat into the house even though I was pretty sure that Maya was lonely as an only cat. One of my hesitations was that Inca and Maya had never responded well when they met another cat, regarding it as an intruder. I decided to get a pair of cats so that in case Maya rejected the newcomers they would at least have each other. And it went pretty much as I expected - even though Maya had a week to get acquainted with the two new guys by sniffing at each other on either side of the closed bedroom door the first time she actually saw Francis and Cory her reaction seemed to be "do you still have the receipt? Can you take them back and exchange them for catfood?"
Then after a couple of weeks of ignoring the new guys and hoping that they would go away an amazing thing happened. Maya was huddled by the heating vent in my office, trying to keep warm when the eight month old Cory gingerly stepped up and sat down next to Maya. Maybe it was just that Maya was cold and she realized that the other cats were warm and willing to curl up with her or she simply gave in to the inevitable but from that moment forward she accepted Francis and Cory as housemates. It wasn't long after that that you could find all three of them cuddled together whenever you looked around.
By then Maya was twelve and the role of exuberant kitten passed on to Cory while Maya settled for being the queen of the house and focused more and more on napping in warm spots. You could generally find her curled up in a tight ball with that elegant tail wrapped around her and as she got older she started to fall asleep sitting up.
As she got older Maya got a little deafer and a little louder, a little creakier and a little more focused on laps and naps. She started having intermittent health problems which necessitated plying her with more and more pills and frequent visits to the vet. About a month ago she went in for a checkup and the vet was delayed with another case so Maya had to wait for about 10 minutes in her carrier. Elderly Siamese do not wait - they are waited upon - and Maya made her displeasure known. When the vet arrived she said that whatever Maya's problem was, she could tell from the other side of the building that it wasn't her vocal cords.
Then a few days ago she started turn her nose up at food again. On Saturday morning when I was cleaning litter boxes I noticed the sign of diarrhea. Off she went to the vet once again and they kept her overnight and ran some blood tests as well as giving her fluids to rehydrate her. That evening they called to say that she had stopped having diarrhea but she wasn't passing any urine in spite of the fluids so her kidneys were likely having problems. On Sunday morning the blood tests pointed to her pancreas and the vet asked to X-ray her. That afternoon I stopped by the vet's office, figuring that Maya was scared and alone and hoping to be allowed to see her and perhaps hold her and comfort her a little. She looked so pitiful, still refusing to eat and obviously uncomfortable with the bandage on her paw holding the IV in place and I wasn't really sure that she recognized me as I held her trying to calm her and reassure her. A bit later the vet came to tell me the result of the X-ray. There was a mass and they couldn't be sure exactly what it was without surgery. At her age it was possible that she would expire on the table and even if she survived the surgery there would be a difficult recovery. He added that the pancreatitis was painful and they were having to give her pain meds every six hours to help her deal with it. Already knowing what the answer would be, I asked if it was time to put her down and he said yes.
I held her and stroked her and told her how much I loved her and how much joy she brought into my life. Unlike Inca who slipped away during the night at the critical care vet with no one to be with him, Maya had attendants - the vet and an assistant and my girlfriend and myself. The vet was a very kind Indian gentleman and he stroked Maya and told her he was sorry as he administered the injections. When it was over I took her home and wrapped her in a towel still warm from the dryer and buried her next to her brother Inca.
So farewell my sweet little kitten. There are no more pills, no more car trips, no more pain, just a long and well deserved nap next to your brother. You may have been small in stature but everything else about you was out-sized: your vocal cords, your exuberance, your appetite, the joy you brought to me and most of all the hole in my heart left by your passing.
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Regular readers of the Pootie diaries will recognize Maya, Francis and Cory as "The Vent Gang" from the pictures that I post of them huddled around their heating vent under the title "Daily Vent Update". Recently I've been working through the backlog of pictures taken this spring and it turns out that I have one unposted vent picture remaining. So this is the very last vent picture of the original Vent Gang. Naturally, Maya is closest to the vent.