Our cat Jacqueline died on October 25, 2026.

I’ve been going through our photographs from June 2013 onward, gathering every picture of her I could find and reliving so many memories from the thirteen years we spent together.

Back in June of 2013, I made an unauthorized (i.e., I didn’t talk to Carole first) trip to the Humane Society of Chittenden County shelter in South Burlington. We had only recently lost our first cat, The Cat Who Was Thursday, and were down to two, Starlight the tortoiseshell and Huck the large gormless gray tabby. Somehow just having two after a few years of having three seemed, well, wrong… so there I was at the shelter attempting to rectify the situation. There were many nice cats there, but my attention was grabbed by two black cats — one long-haired and one short-haired — who were sharing a room. I asked about them and was told that they’d been there for over six months — “people tend to be less willing to adopt black cats”. I felt bad about that. I felt terrible about the idea of adopting one and leaving the other behind going “Where are you taking my sister?” So, next thing I knew I was adopting both.

I very quickly found out the other reason they’d been slow to get adopted. The first time I tried to actually pick up the longhair, she made her disapproval clear with several quick swipes of her claws and drew blood. But I’d filled out the paperwork, so there was nothing for it but to take them home and fill their little hearts with love and affection. I was sure they’d quickly fit right into the family.

The cats’ shelter names were “Little One” — the shorthair — and “Farrah” — the longhair. We agreed that “Farrah” would have made more sense for a blonde, but I didn’t plan to keep those names anyway. It seemed to me that two new arrivals were clearly little French mademoiselles and named the shorthair “Marie” and the longhair “Jacqueline”. Cats tend to develop nicknames; Marie eventually came to be known as “Bear” because, well, she kind of looked like one, especially after she plumped up. Jacqueline quickly became “Jackie” and before much longer, “Fluffy” because of her luxurious fluffy fur.

Carole was less than enthused by the new arrivals — she tends to be very slow to embrace change and I’ve learned that it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission. Carole’s the one who told me that in the first place, for what it’s worth.

Jackie and Marie were very insecure in our house at first. They stayed together as much as possible, sleeping in the same bed and rarely going more than a few feet away from the other. They got along with our other two cats, Huck and Starlight. That is to say, there was no fighting and hissing, but by the same token, they weren’t immediately frolicking together. Carole and I did our best to respect their boundaries as they got used to the new situation. It didn’t take more than a couple of weeks before they started exploring the house and accepting our presence.

But there was this one factor that we never really did overcome: the abuse they’d suffered before going to the shelter. Both cats would let Carole pet them and hang out with them and so on, but they were much more wary of me. Marie was more trusting than Jackie, who took a long time to trust me to any great extent. One day when I was out and Carole was home, Carole took part in an audio conference call. The cats were fine and kept on doing catly things — right up until a man’s voice came on the call. Then they hightailed it out of the room. It became evident that whoever had done the abusing at their first home had been a man, and their distrust of me was based mostly on that.

Jackie had a curious way of scampering in tiny little but very rapid steps — with all her fur hiding a lot of what was going on, it seemed at times like she had eight little legs churning away. (The similarity to Odin’s horse Sleipnir did not go unnoticed.) “There goes Fluffy zooming down the hall,” we’d say. And the reply would be “Still got the eight legs?”

“Still got the eight legs.” Our little black mythological crypto-cat.

Mealtimes at our house became rather interesting once we had the two blackies living with us. Marie, née Little One, did not stay little for long, as she never got over her food insecurity worries and hoovered up any food she could get at, including that of the other cats. Jackie, on the other hand…

Well, Jackie needed her privacy and security and a safe space free of grasping hands and prying eyes. She found it in a cubby in the rafters immediately next to our basement stairs. It’s easy for a cat to go partway down the stairs and just hop into the rafters there. Jackie tended to go there when she was feeling anxious.

We spent years feeding her there. We’d put bowls down in the usual places for the other cats, then walk down the steps, turn around, and tuck her bowl there on her rafter. I don’t recall who originally invented the term, but we came to call that cubby “Room 102.” (Note the engraved plastic sign I added there one day when I was feeling whimsical.)

An explanation I only thought of today: we couldn’t use “Room 101,” because that’s where they strap cages full of rats to your face. Room 102 is where you get cats.

Jackie would eat there, and sometimes she’d push the empty bowl out when she was done and wanted to go get water or use the bathroom or maybe get back to her knitting.

A couple of times she pushed full food bowls out. Let me tell you, it’s not the nicest thing to find wet cat food liberally distributed across the sofa we have down in the basement next to the steps. Said sofa was not a House Beautiful piece of furniture, but it was functional enough. (When we were poorer, an acquaintance made it known that they were buying a new sofa and wanted to get rid of the old one, so it wound up as our “basement sofa”.) I’m fairly sure that on at least one occasion Carole and I both pretended not to notice because neither of us wanted to have to clean it up. It didn’t become any more pleasant of a chore after the food had been there for 18 hours.

One of our fondest memories is coming up the steps from the basement and seeing these bright eyes in a dark, furry face peering out at us as though to say “Hey, it’s got to be meal time soon, right?” Carole said that Jackie peering out of her rafter safe space reminded her of Statler and Waldorf peering down from their private box on The Muppet Show. In recent years Jackie stopped going there because she wasn’t as agile as she used to be. But for years, part of feeding the cats meant walking down the steps, turning around, and delivering dinner to Jackie in Room 102.

Despite Jackie’s standoffishness, we did have our small successes with her. We read somewhere that slow-blinking or narrowing our eyes at a cat would come across as a smile, as opposed to looking right at them, which would come across as staring with uncomfortable tension. I spent the better part of an afternoon one day sitting on the ground near, but not too near, Jackie, idly slow-blinking and acting as laid-back as I could. It actually made a difference — just not the one I wanted. To our surprise, Jackie started being much more trusting… of Carole. Me, she was still wary of. On a few occasions I would sit on the living room floor and inch slowly toward her, literally taking fifteen minutes to go three feet. About half the time she let me get almost to petting range before scurrying off, but the other half of the time I did get away with thirty to sixty seconds of petting before, yes, her scurrying away. But I did my best. I wanted her to feel safe and loved and, cats not being the most talkative of animals, I can only guess as to how successful I was.

Jackie and Marie aged along with us, becoming a little grayer and a little less spry, as one does. Marie developed skin cancer in 2020 and we tried various treatments, but unfortunately, the chemotherapy that shrank the tumor on her side also obliterated her ability to produce white cells; she passed on July 4, 2022. Jackie soldiered on, bereft of her sister, behaving pretty much as she always did — skittish, interested in cat treats, fond of lying on electrically heated cat pads or in front of our electric fireplace. 

But then, earlier this year, Carole got up one Sunday morning and found Jackie on the floor of the kitchen, unable to stand up, as though her legs were not working at all. She was visibly upset and scared. We immediately took her to the emergency veterinary clinic in Williston and one of the docs diagnosed her as having had a seizure. Vets have a way of gently hinting when pet owners are in denial regarding their beloved pet’s chances of recovery; I’ve never had a vet come right out and say “you’re being stupid, we could keep your pet alive for a while longer but her quality of life wouldn’t be all that great. Man up and make the compassionate choice.” But that day at the emergency clinic the veterinarian came about as close to that without stating it plainly. I didn’t want to prolong her suffering but I still felt that somehow, someway, there was a chance she might recover with *handwave* treatment. They sent us home with an antibiotic and some phenobarbital to squirt into her mouth twice daily. 

Amazingly, she did recover, getting almost completely back to normal within just a couple of days. We saw no sign of her having a seizure again and she seemed able to get around just fine. She still had plenty of appetite and could reliably be counted on to put in an appearance in the kitchen around 9 pm each night when the cats were accustomed to being tossed a few kitty treats. I was so glad that I’d listened to my heart and not given up on her.

But six months later, it all came crashing down. We’d been out of town on a trip to Atlanta and according to our pet sitter Jackie had been fine. But upon our return we could clearly see that something was wrong. Jackie took up position in the downstairs guest bedroom near the electrically heated kitty mat, waterer, and litter box, and stopped moving around the rest of the house entirely. Over the course of the week she seemed a bit worse off each day. On Thursday and Friday it didn’t look like she’d eaten anything (with other cats around, it’s sometimes hard to tell who ate what). We had some friends over on Saturday and so we weren’t watching her every second, but once they left I went in to check on her. I tried lifting her up to stand on all four feet and then letting go, and she immediately collapsed. I tried again with the same result. It was as though the medicine had just completely stopped having any effect at all and she was terribly weak.

And so, last night, we went back to the emergency vet. They did any number of tests; she was dehydrated, her blood pressure was a little above normal, and her blood glucose was low. I wanted to see if getting IV rehydration and feeding would help at all. We discussed the situation with the vet on duty and decided to leave her there overnight to have additional tests done including X-rays.

This morning we got a call bright and early — 8 am or so — to give us the bad news. She had a bone tumor on one of her legs and hence standing was not only difficult, but painful. We knew it would be outright cruelty to subject a sick, older cat to chemotherapy and all sorts of heroic measures which might accomplish nothing and which certainly wouldn’t give her any quality of life. We went in at 10:30 to spend a last few minutes with her and tried to communicate to her how much we loved her and how sorry we were. She mostly just lay there; we couldn’t get her to purr at all and her eyes were just dull and void of any energy. And then it was time to say goodbye. Carole stayed in the room while the veterinarian was doing what had to be done; I was too upset to stay and went to wait in the waiting room. It only took a couple of minutes — and then Jacqueline, aka Jackie, formerly known as Farrah, and lovingly referred to as “Fluffy” for thirteen years, was no more.

She’s resting in our back yard now, in the graveyard with Thursday and Freddie and Huck and Starlight and Marie.