Elli as a kitten, taken with an ancient digital camera.

She was my first pet after I graduated from college. I adopted her from the Columbus, Ohio Humane Society as a kitten in the Spring of 2000. She lived with me there for about a year until Carol and I moved to Cleveland together in the Summer of 2001. The house we were renting was much larger than the two-bedroom apartment in Columbus, and Elli enjoyed exploring it. Once, she found a gap in the floorboards on the second floor and crawled around between the floor and the ceiling, coming out after much cajoling, covered in a black, sooty-like substance. With Carol at work, I managed to give her a bath by myself, suffering only a few scratches.

In 2003, we then drove across the country with her in a crate in the back seat, jammed between as much of our belongings we could stuff into a VW Passat. She didn’t especially enjoy the trip, but she didn’t complain too much and spent most of the time sleeping in the little litter box we had put in there with her. She didn’t use it as a litter box until the very last day of our trip. We moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Tacoma for a while we got our bearings and looked for a house to buy. The apartment was definitely a downgrade for Elli, but she made the best of it. She found a nice place to sleep while I worked from home on my computer: on top of my monitor. It was nice and warm, and she could keep an eye on me.

Elli on the computer monitor.

We bought a house in 2004, and it was a great place for Elli, with two floors, a big basement, and nice backyard. We found out that we could let her out on her own into the fenced-in yard, and she’d just wander a bit and nibble on some grass and then come to the door when she was ready to come back in. Often, she’d want to go right back out again. We got Freddie not long after moving into the house, and Elli was not very pleased about that. For many months, she was not as friendly with anyone, preferring to spend her time sleeping on our spare bed or by herself out in the yard. She eventually warmed up enough to Freddie to tolerate lying on the couch with all of us at night and even would lick him a bit when he’d come over to her with his head bowed, asking for some attention. I wish we could have stayed there for her, since I think the stress of the move was a main contributor to her stopping eating.

Elli doing her favorite thing, exploring our backyard.

I think the thing I will miss most about Elli is our nighttime routine. Every night, almost without fail, she would wait until I got into bed and then jump up beside me, wanting to be scratched. If I didn’t scratch her enough, she’d meow in complaint until I started again. Once she was satisfied, she’d lay down next to me for a while until she got up to go eat and do whatever a cat does at night. Going to bed tonight without her there really made it hit home that she was gone.

Another routine that Elli had was bring us one (or both) of her two toys: a small stuff-animal sort of thing and an old white sock. She’d stuff one of them in her mouth and meow the whole time she was carrying it. If we were watching TV on the couch, she’d bring one to us, drop in on the floor by the couch and jump up to get scratched. In the middle of the night, she’d bring it up to the bedroom, meowing the entire way. She’d drop it on the floor, jump on the bed, and curl up and go to sleep. Sometimes, if we’d been away for a few days on a trip, we’d find them near the back door, as if she was putting them there as an offering so we would come home.

Elli was a great cat. She wasn’t all that friendly to strangers, but she was very affectionate to Carol and I. She also was her own cat, doing her own thing when she wanted to do it, but that always included spending time with us. We will miss her greatly.

I am hoping we didn’t wait too long to take her to the vet. The military vet wasn’t equipped to provide the level of care she needed, so she’s now being treated by a local German veterinarian. She’s had x-rays, ultrasounds, blood work, and even some exploratory surgery to see if there is a blockage in her digestive tract. She came through that surgery fine, and no blockages were found, but she’s still in pretty bad shape. All we can really do now is hope that she can start keeping food down without vomiting and her liver recovers.

I’m trying not to feel like we put her through unnecessary surgery, or that we’re doing too much to save a sick cat. The vet thought the surgery was the thing that should be done, so we went with it. It will end up costing us a fair number of Euros, but, hey, we get free people health care from the military, so that balances it out, right?

We’re going to go visit her this evening after she recovers a bit from the anesthetic. Hopefully she’s awake and happy to see us.

Update: We visited Elli and she was still sleepy from the anesthetic. The vet said her liver looked very bad, and the prognosis isn’t very good. We’ll have to wait and see how she is doing tomorrow, but there’s a good chance that her illness has progressed past the point of a recovery.

Elli on the Stairs

Originally uploaded by Mike A.

Our home was part of an agent tour today. Twenty-eight agents stopped by to get a look at the place to get an idea about if it will meet the needs of potential buyers that they represent and also to provide some feedback on the saleability of the home. With the large amount of traffic, doors were sure to be open for long enough periods to let a cat or two escape, so we put them in their kennels in the basement. Freddie didn’t really mind, especially after I tossed a few pieces of food in the cage, but Elli was not pleased in the slightest. She was whining as I left for work.

I got home and noticed a slight off-putting smell in the air and saw that the basement door was now closed. A nice (and by that, I mean definitely not nice) smell hit me as I opened the door and got progressively worse as I went down the stairs. Elli was whining and was also standing in a mess. I’m assuming she freaked out with all of the realtors traipsing through and ended up decorating the nice pillow in her cage with the contents of her intestinal tract. Whether it was intentional or accidental, I don’t know, but it stunk up the place all the same.

Bathing a freaked-out cat is quite a chore, and both Carol and I have the scratches to prove it. A load of laundry and a generous airing-out of the basement got everything back to normal (if not even better than before), but now I’m hoping all of the neighborhood realtors don’t think of us as the “cat poop house.”