Eulogy for Starstuff

Sometime around March of 2016, my mom asked me a fairly straightforward, if sudden question: “do you want a cat?” My granddad was getting a little too sick to take care of his calico, a grumpy lady named Lola who spent a lot of time in hiding and had pretty profoundly marked Granddad’s house with urine scent. Mom said she’d had a hard life, and that Granddad had taken Lola out of a very bad situation before that, but that this cat would probably never be fully socialized and “good.” It was a rough proposition, but she was still a cute cat and I didn’t own any pets at the time, so I said, “yeah, sure.”

“I’m not calling her Lola, though.”

Nova entered my life on March 13th, 2016, freshly shorn and very confused. She had a weird alto meow, kept to herself for the most part the first few days, and had a tendency to sit extremely close to the wall and…just kinda stare at it.

Over the next three and a half years, we started to get along better: she went from spending every night under my bed to sleeping at the far end of my bed, and then eventually nestling into my side. When I crawled into bed, her little questioning “is it bedtime?” prrt would soon follow as she hopped up onto the bed and ruffled up her section of the sheets. My parents would regularly say, “y’know, if she’s too much, we can take her off your hands and make sure she’s taken care of.” I would always refuse: she was my cat, damn it, and I was gonna take care of her until I couldn’t.

Sometime earlier this year, she started acting a little differently. She’d lost a bit of weight since her last vet check-in - a couple pounds, which is a lot for a cat - and you could kind of feel her spine a little bit more than you used to. She wasn’t quite taking care of herself as well as she had been. I thought that maybe it had been the introduction of a new cat to the household - my parents’ cat, Gus, made his way from their old house to my last apartment around March of this year - but it still felt…weird.

I moved back to Green Bay from Appleton in July, and when I did, Nova (and Gus) spent a few weeks at a boarder, and Nova was shaved in the process again. When we went to pick her up, she looked frail. Uncomfortably frail. She was shivering a lot even when she felt warm, and was picking up weird new habits: she was burrowing under blankets to sleep there, and wouldn’t keep much food down.

We took her back to the vet, and they said it was one of two things: inflamed bowels, or an intestinal cancer. They recommended a few weeks of a steroid, to see if it would clear up the bowels. We took the medicine, and I spent three weeks, twice a day, wrangling my grumpy, falling-to-pieces Nova into a blanket to try and feed her pink goo that she just loathed. The noises she made were kind of funny, but it was a band-aid on a broken leg. She didn’t seem to be getting better.

She made her final visit to the vet this past Saturday, and found that the second thing was our reality. Nova had cancer. My baby was dying, and all the pink goo in the world wasn’t going to fix it. I couldn’t take care of what was wrong with her.

We said goodbye. I held her in my hands as she left us, her head cradling the curve of my thigh one last time before she was wrapped in a blanket and taken away.

It hurt to realize her time here is done. It hurts to know she’s gone. It will hurt for some time, until the world I’m in now feels comfortable enough.

Grief is a weird thing when you aren’t sure how to expect it. I’ve had people die in my life. The aforementioned granddad, which led to me having Nova in my life in the first place, passed on a few years back, and my grandma and aunt on my dad’s side both went within the last year and a half or so. It was strange, and halting at the time, but there is a profound difference between grieving for someone you knew of and spent some time with, who lived hundreds of miles away, and grieving for the loss of a constant presence in your life, each and every day, for years on end. It sounds callous and self-centered to say that, but I sort of…understood that the people in my life that weren’t there anymore weren’t there.

It’s different coming home and not hearing that “prrt” of acknowledgment, or seeing a scrunched up section of blanket on the bed and realizing it’s just because you forgot to make your bed, and there’s not a cat under it, that there’s never going to be a cat under it again.

Even acknowledging that Nova was a terrible cat, it is still this blisteringly bizarre, sincerely staggering thing to miss her the way I do. She peed on my bed, a lot! She hated other cats, most sources of affection, me most of the time!

And yet, she always found ways to wriggle her way into my heart. Like, look at that face. She always found ways to let her warmer side shine through the cold exterior she portrayed. She was a wounded cat, but she still tried to love. I saw some of myself in her. We were both kind of broken, but we kept trying to get better. Sometimes, we learned. Other times, we kept making the same mistakes. Life kept going on regardless for the both of us.

Until it didn’t for her.

Nova was by my side for every major relationship I’ve had so far. She was in every apartment I’ve chosen for myself. She went from a sudden addition to my life to an indelible piece of my heart, and now she is gone from me. She has passed to somewhere else, perhaps to be with my Granddad again, and I can only hope she knows what she is doing, that she can learn from her time with me. I have certainly learned from her.

I miss my Nova terribly. I likely will for a very long time.

She was a good kitty, in the end.

bye, baby.