Our Girl

A little over twelve years ago, my now-wife Christy and I moved into our first apartment together. After living together in the same room of a cramped three-bedroom apartment (shared with two other friends), we found a cheap place a few blocks down, run by a drunken slumlord who siphoned electricity off our unit to power construction equipment two doors down. We didn't know our neighbors in the building — they fought all the time, so we kept our distance — and only knew a family to the right of us and a drug-addled amateur photographer on the opposite side.

In late September, the photographer (who we did not trust and were not on terrific terms with) asked us to cat sit for him. When we politely declined, he shrugged and said "Well, if the cat dies, then it dies." To which we said, "Fine, we will take care of your cat."

As he was leaving for the week, we learned that he lived in a basement apartment with no windows, a million nested doors — foyer after foyer — and thus no real easy way for the cat to escape. He also kept the lights off at all hours, so the small one-year-old cat existed in total darkness. He called her Luna, and claimed to have gotten her from "places." We took care of her for that week, taking turns opening cans of tuna, scooping litter, and trying to disable whatever mechanism kept turning the lights off. When the photographer got back from his trip — which I believe was to some LARP festival — we gave him his keys back and went about our lives.

A few days later, we found Luna rooting around in the garbage enclave in front of our building. It was an unseasonably cold October, and it was impossible for her to escape (given all the doors), so we brought her back to her owner, who took her without a word. Then we found her by the garbage the following day, only to return her to her owner once again. This happened three more times before we realized that the burnout of an owner was intentionally "rewilding" his cat (as he later told us), to which point I took her into our home. Christy, not wanting a cat in our home, called her "Sandwich" (so as to create a name so absurd, she would not get attached), while I was to find shelters around the city that would take her in, do her no harm, and find her a proper home.

I made one call to a full shelter out in Bay Ridge and made no further attempts after that. After spending time with Luna in that horrible basement, a year removed from losing my father to pancreatic cancer and surviving a lesser cancer of my own, I grew incredibly attached to her and didn't wish to let her go. I bought cat food from the bodega — better than whatever she ate in our neighbor's basement — and a primitive litter tray, keeping it in our already-cramped bathroom. ("Just for now," I told Christy.)

As we were to go visit my grandparents in Westchester, we had a friend take care of her for the weekend, who told us after we got back that the cat's name was no longer Luna, but Stella Gibson, after the Gillian Anderson character from The Fall. Christy reluctantly came around to the idea of having a cat, kept Sandwich as a middle name, and saw the cat stalk around the apartment, which is how she got her full and final name: Stella Sandwich Gibson: Cat Detective. When our neighbor finally went looking for her, we told him the city took her and put her down. (He once did end up accidentally seeing Stella before we moved out, only to say "That looks similar to my old cat, but it's totally different.")

What's in a Name?

As any deranged cat owner knows, your pet's name is never just their name. Case in point: we only sometimes called Stella Stella. When we spoke about her, we often defaulted to "the cat" (as in "the cat is rather soft today" or "did the cat actually eat today?"). She also went through a million nicknames, each one a bastardization/permutation of the last, including (but certainly not limited to):

• Stirrups
• Stell
• Stell's Bells
• The Bitty Kitty/Baby Cat
• Bits (or Bitty Bits and Pieces)
• Bim Bim
• Butters
• Lady Baby/Baby Lady

Free of influence from other crazed cat owners and coming to all of this independently, this is just a smattering of what we decided on our own in our cramped, under-heated 600 square foot apartment and every equally awful place we lived for the next seven years. Then there were the popular songs of which we changed the lyrics to be about the cat, which is apparently normal for pet owners but also likely in the DSM somewhere.

The Good Years

Stella lived with us in four different homes, including the house we purchased in 2021. Three of them were cramped railroad apartments in Sunset Park, low in cost, highly in need of repair, and wholly overstuffed with our belongings. The first two were run by slumlords who never kept the heat on (even after threatening to withhold rent or call the city on the owners), which caused the three of us to huddle together in the winter to stay warm. The last one was halfway-decent, but an airborne allergen of unknown origin triggered asthma in Stella. (This required the most adorable medical apparatus I've ever seen.) Around this time, she also began to jump on the tops of the doors to rooms, balancing on them precariously, and meowing for help to get down. She made full use of all the space we had, even though it was not much.

I always hoped that, in Stella's lifetime, we were able to give her much more space than she was used to, allowing her to run around at her leisure, see more than just the same "hallway" every day, and have some space to herself (as we always had a lot of stuff crammed into our apartment). At the end of 2021, we found and purchased a house in central Brooklyn — 3,400 square feet, several bedrooms, three floors, and plenty of places for a cat to relax. (We also bought the home with the intent of having family move in, which never happened.)

As we starting moving to the house, I ran into our ex-neighbor and Stella's ex-owner who, after some careful prodding, told me that he "rescued" Luna/Stella off of our street before we took her in, and she likely lived as a stray for at least a year. Shortly after that, I also ran into a male cat that looked exactly like Stella — possibly her brother (as Stella is a rare-ish breed of cat), which also jived with the ex-owner's story.

Stella took to our house immediately. As we settled in around February, she found every warm spot in the house and immediately slept on them for hours at a time. She regularly ran marathons up and down the staircases, jumped on every counter, and even somehow found herself on our back porch (which is only accessible by one rusted metal door). We gave her all the space to run around, and having been stuck inside with her for the last two years (due to an overabundance of caution around COVID), my wife and I felt closer to her than anyone. We were inseparable as a family.

The Most Expensive Cat

In early 2023, after I went back into an office a few times a week and we felt more comfortable going out into the world, Stella began to vomit rather violently. When we took her to a local vet hospital, they informed us she had a kidney stone (an often fatal condition in cats), progressive kidney disease, and suggested we put her down. When asked for a second option, they suggested we take her to the Animal Medical Center on E 62nd Street. We arrived and learned that the vets there pioneered a procedure that would replace part of her kidney and save her life, albeit for an exorbitant price. Fortunately, we had purchased pet insurance several years prior due to Stella's chronic constipation, which required several costly hospital visits and was still not covered by insurance due to it being a preexisting condition. Thus, the entire procedure — all $18,000 of it — just cost us her insurance premium ($19 at the time) and the $38 that wasn't covered.

(Over her lifetime, her kidney-related treatments would total over $100,000. Around $1000 of that came out of pocket, and insurance covered the rest. I cannot stress how instrumental pet insurance was to keeping Stella alive over the last few years.)

Stella came back home two weeks later with a heap of new medications and dietary requirements. Over the next three years, these medications doubled and changed, as did her diet. We spent these years in her presence at all times; at least one of us was present in the home to take care of her due to her constant inappetence, illness, and so on, save for a couple of days when my wife and I attended my sister's wedding. She was too delicate to leave in the care of someone else, with too many nuanced issues that would take too long to explain to even the most experienced cat sitter. Simply put, between COVID and the three years of illness, Stella became our life for the better part of a decade.

This was never something we found to be a burden. As we are not parents of human children (yet), Stella was family. She was not a pet, but the true third member of our household. Did it present to other people a question as to why my wife and I seldom left the house on weekends and opted to stay at home with our cat over the last six or so years? Probably, but it was clear that her lifespan would be shortened because of her disease and, as we loved her dearly, we would spend as much time as humanly possible with her — even if it meant eschewing most other activities outside of work and sleep. This meant spending all the time, which I do not regret, though I do regret the time spent distracted by books, devices, and such that could have otherwise been spent with our girl.

Twelve Years

From the outside, I can recognize how this reads a little like "crazed pet parent," if not bordering on obsessive. I fully own that. As I had not had a pet since I was a child, and its loss weighed heavy on me in my formative years, I went above and beyond for Sella, who served as a constant source of companionship during the roughest parts of these years. She was there for one of the lowest points of my life. She was just there, and glad to be there, too, always accepting and providing of comfort and unconditional love because she truly was the best cat.

I'm still processing the fact that she passed two weeks from today and having a hard time trying to fill my time without the cat I spent hours of my day with for the last twelve years. Our house feels empty. The last few years of our lives revolved around making sure she lived, and though she was advanced in her disease and we exhausted all treatment and medicine options, I still feel that I failed her a bit. I've dealt with immense personal loss in my life from illness many times before, all which often happened very quickly. I'm unfortunately a little too used to it by this point. Yet this is the first time that anyone so close to me died so gradually.

I've spent the better part of these two weeks trying to write this and convey what a grey cat we stole from our neighbor 12 years ago meant to my wife and I. I still feel that I've done those twelve years a massive disservice. A crucial part of my life is gone, and I'm only beginning to notice the lack of clacks on the hardwood around the house, or the random toy missing from the middle of every room, or the occasional loaf of bread inexplicably obliterated in the middle of the night.

The one thing I can take comfort in is that, in her last moments, she curled up into a ball on her favorite shirt of mine in her favorite spot, stretched out, and laid down. The three of us spent those last moments together, and for that — and for the last twelve years — I will be forever grateful.

Apologies for the morose tone of this. I wanted to share a couple of things before parting.

First, the following resources were crucial in keeping Stella alive for these last few years:

Tanya's Comprehensive Guide to Feline Chronic Kidney Disease — The most comprehensive resource for feline CKD, which walked us through every step of the disease and how to manage it. Boone Ashworth mentioned it on a podcast after losing his cat to CKD, and I am forever in his debt for making me aware of its existence

FIGO Pet Insurance — For $20 a month (and a little more near the end of her life), all of Stella's medical expenses were taken care of nearly in total, including a couple of revolutionary procedures that saved her life.

Brooklyn Roots — The best (non-emergency) vet in the entire city, and one that checked in on us quite frequently during Stella's ups and downs.

The Animal Medical Center — Where Stella's lifesaving surgery took place. They more or less invented treatments to keep CKD cats alive, and took the best care of our girl. They sent us this card over the weekend, too.

After Stella passed, Christy had the idea of building a makeshift shelter for the local strays to wait out the horrible weather we're still experiencing. Which is how we built this monstrosity out of a storage bin, some old blankets, duct tape, and a bunch of mylar:

For the last couple of weeks, we've seen signs here and there of the local cats using it, though never the local cats. This made us concerned about if they had survived the freezing weather. Until yesterday, when I spotted one familiar leaving our porch (where we keep the container) while another neighborhood mainstay lookws on from the heap in our neighbor's yard.

It seems the cats are doing okay, and keeping a close eye on things, too.

-Scott