rax | Selene, July 2003

Selene, July 2003 — May 2022.

I'm going to tell some stories about her and intersperse them with photos.

When we first got Selene, a bunch of us who lived in an MIT dorm all piled into my van to go to the “faraway” land of Braintree to adopt some of the kittens one of the people rebuilding our dorm had unexpectedly had. There were four kittens — one who looked Siamese, one who looked tuxedo, and then two with Selene’s fur pattern, the other’s colors much darker. The other three cats were excited to meet people, affectionate, purring, rolling around on the floor. Absolutely adorable. Everything you’d want from a kitten. Selene stood up on a chair, all of a few inches tall, made eye contact with me, puffed herself up as best she could, and growled.

It wasn’t a choice.

When she came back to the dorm with me, the first thing she did was bolt into a tiny hole in the wall that I hadn’t even known was there. This dorm was built in the… 30s I think?… as temporary housing and just never got un-temporaried, so there had been a lot of half-assed renovations, including leaving six to twelve inches of space between the hallway wall and the next-door lounge’s wall. Also, the ceiling at one point hadn’t been sealed, and students in the 70s (I eventually tracked some down and asked!) had thought it was funny to throw their beer bottles over the wall into this interstitial space before it got sealed up. So there’s Selene, maybe five weeks old, staring out this hole, surrounded by vintage beer cans and bottles and dust, and my hand doesn’t fit in the hole, and if you put anything in the hole she attacks it. We had to make a trail of treats leading out of the hole, and hide, and when she started to come out for the treats hours later, drop something in front of the hole. (I don’t remember what it was. It would be appropriate for the era for it to have been a SPARCstation, though.)

I don’t have a lot of pictures from this era — it was 2003, I didn’t even have a cell phone, let alone a high-resolution camera that fit in my pocket — but here’s one of her as a very young kitten, in the lounge past that wall:

Not too long after that, I moved dorms to get away from a bad ex situation, and one time the ex followed me back to the new place and tried to force his way into my room. Selene jumped on him, climbed up him, and started clawing at his face. This made him go away. I was and remain grateful for this, both because of the situation it ended at the time, and because it demonstrated that I had welcomed into my life an elegant little murder machine who knew not fear. This is not the face of mercy:

I moved to California, driving everything I owned in The Van(tm), and Selene had to follow me afterward. When she did, she pretty quickly got hit by a car (after being let out by someone working on the apartment), and we found her a few days later under the house (I didn’t know at the time houses HAD an under, and thus hadn’t looked), unable to walk and … well, the thinnest I’d ever seen her until very recently. I was just about to start a new job with something like $10 to my name, like literally, and Anna, my friend and housemate, generously cosigned on a loan to get her leg replaced with a bunch of metal. The metal is still in her leg. (Morbid: I wonder how that works with cremation.) She spent much of the brief time she was in LA confined to one room with nothing high to jump on, learning to walk again, with only me and sometimes Anna for company. It wasn’t great. She was never much of a jumper after that, although otherwise she recovered splendidly.

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Later she ended up living with me and a number of other people and, periodically, cats, at Cathedral, a shared apartment in Somerville. This included her sister Anath — the tuxedo cat — who had also had a terrifying early accident, but it was her front leg, so she was constantly jumping on top of shelves. (And I just learned a day or two ago that she’s still out there, almost 19! I hope you’re doing well, Liz and Anath. <3 ) It also included a bunch of mice, who Selene LAID TRAPS for. She would take bits of dry food, knock them over to the part of the room where the mice were, hide them under rumpled-up clothing or blankets (which she would pull out of the laundry basket if I hadn’t already left some out myself!!), and then hide and wait to see something moving around under the blanket trying to steal the food, and pounce on it.

Is that tool use? I’m pretty sure that’s arguably maybe tool use.

I sadly only have one picture of her from Cathedral:

The texture of that couch was even weirder than it looks, I promise. She didn’t get along well with any of the other cats we introduced her to, though, and so while she did live with other cats, it was always a little… touchy.

Until we rescued Leo.

Leo (also a perfect being, and also a traceable blood relative of the cat I grew up with, because it is a very small and confusing world) was part of a big household of cats and, when he started on a medication for his asthma, something about his … smell? IDK? changed and the other six cats in the house just turned on him. His people had to keep him in an entirely separate room because he was just having violence done to him all the time. It was very sad. Selene didn’t like him at first, either, but where the other cats Selene had tried to live with had also had chips on their shoulders, Leo was just like “Oh. You want to be in charge? Yeah, that’s fine. You can be in charge.” And they grew pretty close, actually, getting to spend almost 10 years together before Leo passed in December 2020.

Seriously, I have a lot of pictures like this:

They fought sometimes, usually because Selene wanted to play rough and Leo wanted to lie still and look pretty, but I’m pretty sure they were genuinely friends, as much as that’s a meaningful concept for cats, in a way Selene never really was with another cat. <3

(they did reach detente with one other cat once, though. hi bigby!)

I’m sort of just skipping around the timeline now, but did you know about the time Selene interposed herself between me and a mountain lion? (Or maybe a bobcat. (Or maybe a hybrid? (You can try to ID the big cat from the photos if you’d like.))) In Tucson, our yard attracted a lot of wildlife. and there was one big cat (and then that cat’s kitten!!!) who liked to come and sit next to the dining room window. The first time this happened, Selene’s immediate reaction — bless this cat. — was to attempt to protect me, a 300+ pound human who can use tools, from an apex predator five times her size.

The mountain lion was not impressed:

Once, one of my friends who was trying to understand the shape of my life better asked me which of my partners I would save if everyone was in the house and it was on fire and I could only get one person. I said without blinking “Selene,” which I knew, BECAUSE I HAD ALREADY DONE THAT. This is not a recommendation for running back into a burning building, a thing you should definitely not do and that I KNEW you should definitely not do (I care a lot about fire safety for Reasons). I just didn’t care. (Admittedly I did secure all humans and stop the fire from growing first.) I would do it again. If it were this morning, and I knew she was going to be put to sleep tonight, and the house were on fire, I would do it again. That’s not really wisdom, it’s just. I am very pair-bonded to this cat. And I couldn’t write this and not tell the burning building story. (Seriously though DO NOT RUN BACK INTO A BURNING BUILDING OKAY)

Like many Siamese and part-Siamese cats, she has been dealing with kidney failure for many years. (This is what got Leo, and also what got my childhood cat who Leo was related to.) We managed it with medication, with special food, with all kinds of care, for a number of years. It is in some ways a wonder that she made it this far. I really appreciate the support of our vet, of our family, of everyone who’s been part of helping her get this far and have this good of a life. If there’s one genuinely positive thing that came out of COVID it’s that we have been able to take so much time, and so much care, with her; that she hasn’t had to deal with pet-sitters because of work travel; that her routine and our routines have been incredibly consistent; that we got so much time with her, because we were always at home, and so was she.

…This is the end of this story, though.

Today she is very sick, and she is dying, and I wish she was not. I wish that more than I have wished most things most times. But also today, I curled up with her and I slept. She had her favorite treat. She rode around on my shoulder in the kitchen. She stole my margarine. She slept on Vari. She purred on my chest and then, when she was bored with me, went and faceplanted in a sunbeam. I am glad that we had this extra day, as sad as I am, to do the things we were already doing. I am glad that we will have one more afternoon with her to remember, both sitting lazily on the couch. I love her, and I will always love her, and I will hold her in my heart in moments like this. She is ragged and weary; she is gaunt and in pain. It is time for her to go. But she is still and will always be a part of me.

I don’t really believe in an afterlife. I tend to think what we see is what we get, and I’m deeply grateful for what Selene got, even though it wasn’t enough, it could never have been enough. But if there is a heaven, I hope the angels or whoever are ready to deal with a lot of knocked-over holy chalices, because she will not wait for us patiently.

Those are all of my words. Here are a few more pictures: