Marmalade the Cat died 29 December 2011, at the age of 18 ½. She'd been in decline over the past year, but until spring 2011 had largely been so healthy and spry that visitors found it remarkable that we claimed such a great age for her.
She'd been in my care since September 1993, coming into my possession at the age of approximately 10 weeks, after having been found by the side of the road near woods not far from an office in Norwood, Massachusetts — nowhere near any human habitation. The only explanation for her being where she was when she was, was that she had been the victim of a drive-by pet abandonment. I have in the past carried on at considerable length about such practices.
She was affectionate and mean. She was smart as a whip and dumb as a post. She was a cross-dresser, a female orange tabby (¼ as common as male orange tabbies). She was a DSH with a Siamese meow, a motorboat purr, and an immense vocabulary of trills and curses. She was a handsome critter and knew it, to the extent that she knew what she could get away with by looking cute. For the vast bulk of her life she was an only cat, and she liked it that way.
She insisted on being an indoor/outdoor cat in all weathers. In her younger days she loved playing in the snow, chasing snowflakes. When it rained, she would beg us to open the door, then would see that it was raining and change her mind about going out, only to forget five minutes later and beg again. Only in the last year or two did she curtail her outdoor winter adventures. The day before her death she went outside one last time.
She was an indifferent hunter. I once saw her chowing down on a little yellow songbird in our side yard in Cambridge before we moved to Amherst. She occasionally caught mice — once proudly bringing a live one into our Amherst apartment — but retired several years before her death (to our dismay, as we had an infestation our last year there). The Amherst yard brought her the delight of chipmunks; she would leave the decapitated corpses around the front door, to be scavenged by other predators.
She always fancied herself a far better fighter than she was. I cannot count the occasions on which Brian or I would hear her hiss, and had to run outside to rescue her from taking on some larger neighborhood cat. Twice she had to be kept indoors due to wounds received in such brawls.
Perhaps this is why friends of ours awarded her the title of High Priestess of the God of Mindless Violence; or maybe it was simply her youthful penchant for climbing curtains, clawing window screens, and trying to bite people who petted her longer than she liked. She was so ornery our vet in Northampton had us give her a tranquilizer pill before bringing her in for a visit.<
A neighbor's cat here in Cambridge, the friendliest and most unflappable cat in the world, was once to our great surprise provoked by her relentless hisses to hiss back. In August 2011, she tangled with her first skunk; three weeks later, she clearly hadn't learned her lesson, as she got sprayed full in the face.
Other than injuries sustained in various arguably self-inflicted misadventures, she had almost no health problems until early 2011. Oh, she'd lost a tooth here, a claw there. As the years wore on, she had the occasional "seizure" that in all likelihood was merely a leg cramp. She started negotiating stairs one step at a time rather than running up and down.
But it's only in her last year that she started losing weight, stopped jumping on the bed, seriously started losing her hearing. She was on pills for chronic hepatitis. Her eating habits became almost impossibly picky. She even stopped visiting some of her outdoor perches that she used for surveying her immediate territory. In the last couple of months, climbing a full flight of stairs became almost impossible for her, even one step at a time. We arranged furniture so she could climb onto her favorite couch, as she could no longer jump. She was, by her own actions, confined almost entirely to the first floor of the 3-story house at Chalk Street.
Christmas Day she wanted turkey scraps from the table and almost nothing else. The same for the next couple of days. Wednesday the same, though she couldn't keep it down.
Thursday she woke us at 6 AM, having come all the way upstairs. She was very sick. Over the course of the day she showed fitful signs of recovery, only to weaken further. In the afternoon, on Brian's prompting, I called the vet and took her in.
Her vital signs were so poor I called Brian to join me at the vet's office. Her eyes no longer tracked our presence. I petted her head as the vet gently slipped her the fatal injection.
Goodbye, Marmalade. Mummy loves her pretty girl.