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crittercrossing · 5 months ago

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Rest in Peace, Violet

approx. March 6th, 2016 — July 20th, 2024

I don't think there are enough words for me to describe how much I love Violet. There is not enough time in the world for me to describe the relationship we had or how much our time together means to me. I know most people will never understand it. I've barely posted about Violet on this blog. She was present in my life mostly in the time that this blog was on hiatus, and I regret now that so little of our time together was documented here. I took thousands of photos of her in our time together, because she was by far the most photogenic cat I've ever met. I have countless stories to tell about the days I spent with her, the long process of winning her trust, and the moments that we spent together, bonding in silence and something else I can't quite put a name to.

The first time I ever saw Violet, it was New Year's Day in 2018. I took the above picture of her from afar, through a window, because this was a brand-new cat in the yard that I'd never seen before, and I thought that was neat. As best as I can tell, she was grown at this point. My best guess is that she was born in March of 2016. I assigned her the birthday that I did because earlier in 2016, there was another black-and-white cat that I saw outside a few times—I'm positive it wasn't Violet, as the markings were different, but this cat looked very much like Violet. This was also very pregnant early in the year. I have no way of knowing, but I like to think that maybe this cat was Violet's mother, and when I saw her, Violet was about to be born.

After that day, I didn't see Violet again for over a year. The next time she came around was March of 2019. I didn't name her right away. It took several more months before she came around the house regularly. She was a total mystery, and completely feral. I took photos of her through windows and from doorways, because she would bolt if there wasn't some kind of barrier between us. If I dared to be outside with her, she would run if there was anything less than probably 200 feet between us. Nevertheless, my mom and I began to put out food for her. She was the only feral cat coming around at the time, and I wanted to keep her coming around so that I could try to trap her and get her spayed. By the time summer arrived, Violet was showing up pretty regularly, but she evaded the trap like an expert. I found her very interesting, and I couldn't quite name why. Perhaps I recognized then how smart she was.

I don't remember exactly when I named her, but I do remember that I first considered calling her Swift, after a kind of bird, but also for how fast she ran. I decided against this after realizing that people might assume she was named after Taylor Swift (something I learned after naming one of my dogs Katy, after someone in a Mayday Parade song, but everyone assumes she was named after Katy Perry). Then, the perfect name came to mind. I'm a nearly-lifelong fan of the Warriors book series (which is about cats), and one of the characters is a black-and-white cat named Violetshine. Violetshine is a character who can seem very distant, but she is also observant, brave, and strong-willed. I thought this suited Violet perfectly, and so she was named after this character.

Finally, in October of 2019, I managed to trap Violet and have her spayed. The look on her face when I found her in the trap is still one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Like, I kind of feel bad because I know she was stressed, but:

That is the expression of feeling an ultimate betrayal.

Violet was successfully spayed, and when I brought her home, I was afraid that she might run off and never come back. She did run off at first, but she came back the next day. Then, she never left.

After her spay, Violet became much less afraid of us. She still wasn't tame by any definition, but she no longer bolted when we got within sight of her. She became more curious about people, especially me, and would often watch me from a safe distance of several feet. She began to follow me around when I walked around the yard.

I got to know Violet better by spending a lot of time with her. As early 2020 came around and I spent most of the year in quarantine at home, my pets were even closer companions than ever before. Being at home all the time made the house feel suffocating many days, and so I would go outside. Every time, Violet was there waiting for me. We sat on the porch together in the evenings and walked laps around the yard together at night. I learned more about this small wildcat's giant personality, and a few things about her physical quirks. She had a permanent head tilt, and some days, it was barely noticeable. Other days, her head was tilted almost completely sideways. It didn't seem to bother her or keep her from doing the things she loved. She rolled in the dirt under warm beams of sunlight. She saw tiny things moving in the grass across the yard, and took off running after them. She sat beside me and gazed around, seemingly content in the present moment no matter what. The silent companionship she gave me was therapeutic, and I looked forward to my daily time spent with her.

Our relationship was always on her terms, from the day we met to the moment she departed. This is a quality I really admire about feral cats. In all honesty, I love interacting with feral cats just as much as I do tame cats. There are many wonderful qualities about relationships with tame cats, but in a way, the love received from them feels slightly less... earned, I think, for lack of a better word. Tame cats are generally socialized as young kittens and so they pretty much always trust people. Feral cats have no reason to inherently trust humans. Violet grew up in the wild, almost certainly away from people. She somehow found our home and chose that place to live. She chose to tolerate my company at first, and then she chose to seek me out and chose to spend time with me. She had nothing to lose by ignoring me completely, but she didn't. When feral cats do this, it's because they want to. They decide that they feel okay with you. They realize that they trust you. That is something incredibly special to me. It is particularly special that Violet—who I would later find out had had at least one terrible experience with people—chose to spend time with me and perhaps even loved me.

I've always said that Violet was born to be a model. She was scarred, ragged, and perpetually had a really pissed-off expression, but she was gorgeous. Her scarred-up nose told the story of a cat who's fought to survive. Her missing ear tip told of a love that wanted a better future for her. Narrowed, often-angry-looking eyes told of an animal that was alert, aware, and calculating her next move. Violet never really feared my camera. I swear this cat was posing intentionally. I have hundreds of gorgeous photos of her. In total, including blurry and silly photos, I have thousands.

I didn't know how old Violet was. At the time of her spay, the vet had told me that they believed her to be an extremely young adult, due to the fact that she had never been pregnant before—which makes sense, as the majority of outdoor cats end up pregnant within their first couple of heat cycles. And so I believe Violet to be young and relatively healthy. We shared our daily lives from the end of 2019 through 2022 before I believed any differently. Even though she lived outdoors and I knew anything could happen to her at any moment, I desperately hoped that we would get many, many years together. She was tough. I watched her fight any cat who looked at her wrong. I knew that she could take care of herself.

She had one brief sickly time period in 2021, where she didn't groom well for a few days and she dropped weight quickly. At that time, I wasn't able to trap her and get her to the vet, but luckily, she got better within a few days. I worried about her every day. I wished that she would become tame enough to move indoors, thinking that I could prolong her lifespan by doing so. But Violet was relentlessly wild. I didn't think she would ever be tame enough for that. While she ran up to me every day and loved spending time with me, she immediately fled if I ever made any sort of move towards petting her.

Over the course of 2021, Violet began to show the slightest signs of becoming more tame, though nothing was concrete. I got her a cat tree for the front porch, and she began to sleep on it every night. She began to jump onto the windowsill outside my bedroom and meow loudly for me to open the window so she could poke her head inside.

One day, she chose to come all the way in. She wouldn't walk inside the front door for anything (valid, as there were three dogs and another cat inside), but she would come in through the bedroom window. I would always remain quiet and still inside and just let her explore at her own pace.

I was endlessly patient. I sat next to Violet as she ate, showing her it was okay for her to be near me and not have to keep an eye on me. One day, I carefully touched her back. She turned around and hissed at me. I tried again later, and got the same result several times. But, eventually, Violet began to not react at all when I stroked her back as she ate. It was progress.

We shared many wonderful days together. Violet joined me outdoors for my birthday party one year, where she tried very hard to steal some pizza for herself and for Shadow, her somewhat friend. Shadow, a tomcat who was much bigger than her, liked to hang out with Violet, but he was terrified of her. She beat him up several times, and then he would flinch if she even looked at him. I don't know that she actually liked Shadow all that much.

Violet was there for me during some really hard times, and some really fun times. We shared a snow day together, running and leaving trails of footprints and pawprints behind us, and she seemed quite pleased with the snow. I don't know if Violet had any way of understanding how much times like that meant to me. She was my solace in times when I felt like everything was crumbling around me.

Violet remained my steady, daily companion up until the spring of 2022, when I moved out of my parents' house. There are a lot of personal, complicating factors that went into this, but when I moved out, I was only able to take my two indoor cats with me. The animals who are at my parents' house don't seem to care—I still see them extremely regularly, and they are adored and well-cared for. I can't even really say that I wish things had been different. I moved out for a wonderful reason and it has resulted in only good things for me, and Violet got to stay at the home she chose and became comfortable with. I just missed seeing her every day. I missed seeing her waiting for me in the driveway when I returned home every day, oftentimes sitting next to her best friend—a very old cat statue that had been on the porch for many years.

In my time away, my mom worked hard to tame Violet. She's less afraid of cat bites than I am, so she was persistent in petting Violet when Violet ate, and holding the front door open, encouraging her to come indoors. She found moderate success. A few times, I went over to visit, and instead of finding Violet waiting for me on the porch, she would be in the living room with the dogs. Violet never feared the dogs for a moment. I think that their excitement annoyed her in previous times when she wouldn't come in. She never had to claw any of them, as they all seemed to understand that this was a wild animal who was not going to tolerate a single ounce of their nonsense. Still, much more often than not, I found her outdoors, doing the things she loved.

In August of 2022, everything changed all at once. I hadn't been over to visit in a little bit, and I was informed that Violet had suddenly begun to look extremely sickly. I went over, trapped her in a dog crate, and took her to the vet. That was the day I learned that my beloved wildcat had cancer. Her bloodwork wasn't great, and she appeared to have some sort of infection in addition to a tumor. The tumor was growing on her left kidney. The prognosis wasn't very good. The vet said that theoretically, it could be operated on, but the operation would be extremely dangerous, to the extent that he wasn't confident that she would live through it. If she did, she would need to be on weeks of crate rest to recover, indoors, something that I thought would add additional stress to Violet, who wasn't at all used to spending extended amounts of time indoors. We would also need to travel over an hour away for the surgery. Violet received antibiotics that day to tackle the other infection (which worked), and I was told that I could take the risk with the surgery and put her through the stress of an indoor recovery, or take her home and let her live her life until the tumor got big enough to impact her bodily functions (it was not doing that at the time). I thought about it for a long time and decided to take her home as she was. Additionally, during that visit, an x-ray revealed that at some point, Violet had been shot. The bullet was lodged near her spine, in a spot too risky to try to get it out, but it didn't appear to be causing any problems except for the possibility that it was causing her head tilt. I also learned that she was middle-aged. The vet could tell by her teeth, her coat, and her overall build—it had just been really unusual that she made it to be several years old in the wild without ever being pregnant. I was devastated over the news that day. I was furious that someone had done something so cruel to her when she was such an awesome cat, and I was heartbroken that our time was limited. That day, the vet said she would maybe live for a few more weeks to a few more months.

Over the course of 2023, for whatever reason, Violet rapidly became much tamer. I don't know it was related to the cancer or not. I began to get regular updates from my mom that Violet was coming indoors to spend the night, that Violet understood a litter box perfectly, that Violet began to jump up and sleep curled up on top of my mom all night. Violet began to sleep next to the dogs and hang out with them on the couch. Though I didn't see her every day anymore, I was so glad to hear that maybe there was a chance that she could be an indoor-only cat, as that would be much safer. Being ill, I didn't know if she would still be as able to fight off predators in the wild.

Violet made several cat friends in her time with us. She never met Smokey, as he was indoor-only and was gone by the time she started coming indoors, but there were several other semi-feral and feral cats who all seemed to really want to spend time with Violet, even though she didn't particularly seem to like any of them. She hung out a lot with Shadow during his short time here, but she also hung out with Artemis, The Void, Tree, and Leonard.

Violet looked and acted like normal until a little ways into 2023, when she began to have trouble keeping on weight. She ate as much as she wanted (which was a lot), but her waist stayed small. She had all of her usual energy, though. After a couple more months, she began to lose function in her left hind leg. My best guess is that as the tumor grew, it began to press on something internally to cause that. The leg didn't seem to hurt her at all, and she walked normally, but when she sat, she often didn't bend the leg underneath her and instead would stick it out straight by her side. I believe it was most likely numb. Her claws always stayed out on that paw and her toes never bent. If she knew that she was sick, she didn't care. She remained every bit as ferocious, because, here's the thing—though she reached the point where she spent almost all of her time indoors, she was still a wildcat. Everyone knew not to mess with her. She tolerated petting in a somewhat normal amount—even on her head—but the moment she had enough, she would bite and/or swat. She hissed at the dogs when she had enough of them crowding around her. She still looked like she would fight anyone at at any moment, and she had the wild light in her eyes.

Violet spent the last few months of her life safely indoors, surrounded by love and all the tuna juice in the world (a favorite of hers). I tried to go see her as often as I could. I tried to act normal so that maybe she wouldn't know what I was so afraid of. I couldn't help but feel like the inevitable was coming, even though she had already dramatically outlived the vet's prediction of a few weeks to a few months left. She still posed for photos. She let me pet her, and I spent a lot of time doing so, not really believing how far she'd come since we met.

I hate admitting this so soon, but I kind of had a gut feeling maybe a month or so ago that it wouldn't be much longer. She was very skinny and more irritable than she had been for months, tolerating less physical contact from people. She had gotten to the point where my dad could easily pick her up and hold her close to him, and she would reach out with her little foreleg and hold onto him. When I saw her one day earlier this summer, she was much more hissy than usual and didn't seem as pleased when my dad picked her up. I never once held Violet normally in her life, while she was fully with it and consenting. I halfway picked her up once and never got her to my chest, because she was very angry. I couldn't bear the thought of not having her, so I focused on sitting with her and taking pictures of her, because she was still gorgeous.

The next few paragraphs discuss the day she left us; scroll until the next photo of Violet (after the one directly below this) to skip that part, if you wish.

A few weeks ago, I got a call that Violet was dying. I rushed over and found her in horrible shape and got her straight to the emergency vet. Even though she appeared to be paralyzed (or perhaps just didn't have the strength to move), she still reminded me how wild she was. When I started to cry on her, she meowed at me loudly, almost a growl, as if to remind me that I needed to keep it together—she was always like that. Violet always held it together during her troubles, and that was what she needed from me then. I picked her up, held her to my chest for the first time, and we drove back into town. Thankfully, my partner drove us so I could hold Violet and talk to her. I told her how deeply I loved her and how much she meant to me. I hope she understood. I know I'm anthropomorphizing a lot. I know animals potentially don't feel or understand half the things I like to think they do. But I'm just saying, if there ever was an animal to have all the smarts and personality and opinions that I thought they did, it was Violet.

To be honest, I don't know that she was fully conscious for all of the ride. She was already well on her way out. The emergency vet took good care of her and got her ready for the goodbye. Signing the paperwork felt like my heart was being ripped out. I kept thinking that it wasn't fair. I still don't think it was fair. Such a tiny cat with such an impossibly strong will to survive and to thrive despite all the struggles and the abuse that she faced, and she didn't get the decade plus that she should have. At my best educated guess, she was eight years old when she passed.

We were with her when she went. I petted her little head and told her I loved her. It was very fast, and I'm glad that she wasn't panicked. It was over really quickly. We took her home. I felt that she deserved to be laid to rest in the place that she chose as her home six years before.

Violet took a huge chunk of my heart when she left. This is something that's not easy to admit, and it's something that I honestly didn't realize until pretty recently, but I love her as much as I loved Smokey. I didn't think that would ever be possible. They were two polar opposite cats, and we had two extremely different relationships, but I love, love, love Violet. My world is not right without her—not yet, anyway. Time heals all wounds, but it is still too soon and her loss still doesn't sit right with me. She deserved better.

I don't know exactly how to end this—there really are not enough words I can think of to write about how special Violet was. I'm still sorting through a lot of grief and feelings. What I know right now is that my life is tremendously better for having had Violet be a part of it. I can now say that I had the honor of being friends with the fiercest, bravest, most beautiful wildcat there ever was.

#cats #violet #cw pet loss #cw death #domestic shorthair

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