I don’t post personal diaries all that often, but my late mother’s favorite cat — the former stray who wandered in one day — and all the people who worked so hard to save her, deserve acknowledgment. This is a story that at long last, after a year and a half, has a happy ending, but if the thought of cats suffering is difficult for you, you may just want to skip to the end.
I shared the background of this story in August 2021, so I won’t rehash all of that again, but in brief my mother passed away in April 2021, leaving my schizophrenic sister (whom we once again call Shirley) living in my mother’s house by herself, along with eight cats. Shirley had gotten evicted (again!) for trashing her apartment and not paying rent, so with nowhere to go, she showed up unannounced in a moving van at my mother’s house in western Pennsylvania about three years ago. Her old landlord had paid for the van just to finally get rid of her. My mother already had a few cats — Silvi, Dutch, Tiger, and Mimi — but Shirley brought Dexter and Vlad as well. Then, after my mother died, Shirley inexplicably decided to grab two more cats from people on the internet. She named them Apollo (a couple years old) and Bacchus (a little kitten). Eight cats.
I was there the day my mom died, and I was at the house, which was in remarkably good shape. But two months after my mom passed, I visited my sister in the house again, driving down there from Boston, and it was already going downhill fast. Poop and puke on the carpet and even the couches, and no attempt to clean it up. Nasty smell everywhere, covered up by some charcoal product. This was June 2021. I really hoped, for the cats’ sake at least, that Shirley could get it together.
Vlad died in that squalor not long after. Then Dutch and Tiger went “missing”. Lost in the house? Ran away? (That’s what I would have done.) Who knows?
Then in late September 2021, it was becoming evident to me and my cousin (whom we will call Magda), from conversations on the phone with Shirley — that Shirley’s health was deteriorating. Magda recommended we do a “302” — that is, a wellness check in which the authorities might decide that involuntary care would be administered — on Shirley. I was unsure about this whole thing, but Magda eventually pulled the trigger in early October 2021. The police and ambulance came (as did Magda, who lives 30 minutes away) and whisked diabetic (and frankly, near-death) Shirley off to the hospital. For how long, no one knew.
Shirley would wind up in a rehab facility — or really more like a nursing home (where she still is today) — within a week or so. But what would happen to the house, and all those cats?
So Magda and her brother — let’s call him Drew — started going over to the house to feed the cats and check on things. They warned me that things were really bad. I drove down from Boston in mid-October to see what was going on and to try and help out. I couldn’t visit Shirley because of COVID, but I took her some basics like a hairbrush and some books.
And then I went over to the house. Flies everywhere, and stench. Shirley, with a straight face, blamed the flies (“pestilence!”) on the “Masonic Satanic Jews” who had founded the neighborhood back in 18-whatever. She knows that because she “saw records”, you understand. Flies couldn’t be teeming there because of the open bags of garbage, open food lying around, or cat poop caking nearly everything. No no, it must have been the Satanists.
It was hard to even breathe in the house, as the policeman had commented to Magda on “302” Night.
I could go on a while, but I will stop now. Just so y’all understand what I am talking about and what I came out of the house feeling like. By the time Apollo’s picture was taken, Drew had set traps to try and catch the cats, and you see one there in the frame with Apollo.
Apollo was the only cat who would come out into the open. He’d come up to you, but if you tried to touch him, he would hiss and claw at you. We did figure out that Silvi was in the upstairs office (the room with the ‘abject squalor’ desk above), hiding under a chair. Drew would leave food for the cats every day, but he wouldn’t ever see any of the other ones come out. Just Apollo.
I went over to the house again the day after I took Apollo’s picture and found Silvi under that chair. I upended it to get her out, and I had the office door as nearly shut as I could get it, with all the other crap lying around in that room. I cornered Silvi on a windowsill and foolishly tried to pick her up with no gloves. She dug as hard as she could into my arm with her teeth and claws until I had to put her down. She squeezed her way out the door and I never saw her again, dripping blood as I left. I had to leave town the next day, defeated.
Drew and I then decided he should let Apollo outside, where at least he could breathe. Apollo and Drew would begin to develop a rapport, Apollo no doubt recognizing that Drew had saved him from probable death. Apollo was happy to hang out on the covered porch and roam around a bit, and Drew brought him food every day and petted him. As it got colder, Drew (who lived at his sister Magda’s) decided that Apollo was not such a bad cat after all and decided to take him in. I am happy to say that their relationship continues to this day. Apollo will lick butter off the counter if you leave it out, but Magda and Drew love him.
Unfortunately in the couple of months after this, Dexter and Mimi would eventually be found dead. Dexter was found by Drew, and Mimi was found by a contractor examining basement mold. I have a photo of that, too, but I don’t think you need to see it. That contractor, by the way, declared the house a “biohazard” and could not resume work.
That left Bacchus and Silvi. Drew continued to leave out traps and eventually had to withhold even water to get those cats to go into them, but he eventually succeeded. We got the traps from a guy who gets paid to do this sort of thing, but after he saw the house, in the end he wound up not charging us, I suppose out of pity.
Bacchus was caught within a few days, then Silvi a few days after that. They were taken to an abandoned house that a relative (who himself is at a nursing home now) used to live in. Drew would drive over there a half an hour each way every day to feed them and check on them. It wasn’t great, but at least they were fed, clean, and had company. Silvi and Bacchus would sleep on the bed together and had found at least a little camaraderie.
But they couldn’t stay there forever. So leading up to Memorial Day 2022 we finally made our move. Another relative who had met the cats would take Bacchus home, and I would drive down to get Silvi with my daughter, and we would take Silvi in to live with us. We’d just have to hope that our cat, Jackson, would be OK with having a new housemate.
The Bacchus situation thankfully turned out all right, and continues to be so until this day. Bacchus has kids to play with that love her, and she’s growing up in a good home.
Just one cat left to go. My mom’s favorite, Silvi.
Much credit to Drew, who somehow (with some help from sedatives) captured Silvi once again and took her over to Magda’s son’s house, where she would stay until I could come pick her up. And my daughter and I did just that on the morning of Memorial Day.
We drove her the 600 miles back to Boston, and somewhere in Connecticut we let her out of her carrier a bit, and of course she decided to cloister herself right on the gas pedal. We sort of shooed her back again to the rear of the minivan, and she actually climbed back into the carrier herself.
When Silvi got to our house, she wanted very much to be friends with Jackson, but he was having no part of it at all. He hissed and ran away, even though Silvi was trying so hard to be nice to him. Poor Jackson wouldn’t come back into the house, not even to eat. This went on for a couple of days, and finally we decided that Silvi would have to be confined to the basement for a while. Maybe Jackson would eventually get used to the idea. Silvi didn’t exactly complain — I mean, at least it was clean and she got fed good food — but she mostly slept on a pile of winter jackets and just wasn’t very active. I felt bad for her.
I got some plug-in pheromone diffusers to try to make a friendlier environment for Jackson, but at best he would creep into the house for a minute and inhale some food, then rush right back outside. He was petrified every time he saw or even smelled her. It’s a good thing it was June and nice outside for the most part, but sometimes we were afraid he’d run away and never come back. Silvi was going to have to go. Again. This poor cat.
We started asking friends and coworkers if anyone wanted a cat. I asked around on Daily Kos a bit, too! No luck for awhile. But then my wife found an organization in Medford, Mass. called Kitty Connections, and maybe a week later, there was an interested lady from that same town — we will call her Ariel, 72 but spry — who made an appointment to come and visit us on June 26.
Silvi seemed OK enough in the basement, so Ariel and I thought maybe we could get her into a carrier. Ariel got her to play a little bit, but as soon as we tried to catch her, she hid in the cove under the stairway behind a small filing cabinet. We thought we had her cornered there, but just as we were about to grab her, she pulled a ridiculous Spiderman move and launched herself into an opening under the stairway I didn’t even know existed that led way up into the rafters. Ariel’s arm was bloodied in that last little exchange.
June 27, 4:13 P.M.:
ARIEL: Hi, just checking to see how you and Silvi are after yesterday’s (mis)adventure.
ME: I’m at work today, but my wife said earlier that Silvi hasn’t come out yet. I may try putting out some sardines or something later if she still hasn’t.
ARIEL: Poor baby.
Sheesh, we’d really done it, hadn’t we? Silvi wouldn’t come down, not even for sardines. They say a cat can go about four days or so without water, and then dehydration starts to become dangerous. I kept trying to put out new food, even fried chicken. Nada. I thought she was going to die up there.
But right on cue, the morning of July 1, Silvi crept down and ate and had some water. But she immediately scrambled back up into the rafters when she saw me. Later that day I went over to Kitty Connections to borrow a trap. When I came back, Silvi had come down again and was out, so I thought I would take the opportunity to block the path up to the rafters. That cat was going to try to take a run at me and get back into that opening, so I’m literally playing goaltender at this point. I managed to get a big board in front of the opening, so that frickin’ cat runs to the other corner of the basement, climbs up onto an old sink, and launches herself into another small opening in the ceiling tiles. I shined a flashlight up there and saw that there were nails sticking down in that space from things that had been nailed in above. Here we go again, and this time she’s going to impale herself.
I couldn’t even set the trap until July 4 because I had to drive my daughter out to summer camp and didn’t want Silvi to be caught in the trap for too long. My wife and son had gone off to visit her father on June 30, so now I was by myself.
So the food went into the trap, and we had another standoff. Two whole days of absolutely nothing.
Then, on July 7 at 9:32 A.M.:
ME: Ariel, Silvi is in the trap! Can I bring her over, or can you come here?
ME: She literally just went in 5 minutes ago
ARIEL: Yay! Is it easier for me to come there? I could leave in a few minutes
ME: It might be easier for you to come
ARIEL: OK. I will leave in 5-10 min
ARIEL: I’m very excited!
ME: Great! Silvi is out on the front steps with me
Jackson looks on curiously
Silvi doesn’t know it, but this is probably the best day of her life
On July 11, Ariel sent me the first picture of Silvi in her new place:
I mean, yeah, that’s about right. Silvi would come out only at night, otherwise hiding up there or under a bed. But she was eating, and pooping, and peeing. Progress.
By July 23, she was coming out a little more during the day. Looking a little thin, still.
Trust continued to build, and by August 14, Silvi started sitting on Ariel’s lap!
Now one thing Silvi absolutely still would not do was go into a carrier. No way, no how. So Ariel’s vet suggested slow-release gabapentin, a sedative, to help calm her down some more. That started right at the beginning of this month.
On Monday I just so happened to ask Ariel how Silvi was doing, and she told me my question was very well-timed, because she had just for the first time gotten Silvi into the carrier and to the vet. This cat weighed 7.25 pounds when she went to Ariel’s but is now 11.7 pounds! And she got a clean bill of health.
I present Silvi, at long last healthy, happy, and starting her new life:
A lot of people went through a whole lot of trouble for you, Silvi. But to see you healthy and happy, with someone who cares a great deal for you, we all think it was worth it. Here’s to the second half of your life. It’s going to be a whole lot better than your first, and you deserve it. You’re finally home now.