But he was never so amenable with animal kinsmen, particularly cats.

His strongest urge, to the end, ran to patrolling in search of a handsome Black Persian — a stray — who made his home amid the tangled undergrowth around our Cambridge home. On one side, there was the battlefield we called Falluja — the sprawling gardens of a world-renowned expert in international law, with Jack Russell terriers resident and primed for Scuzzi’s incursions; on the other, the deep woodland of one of Cambridge’s sprawling colleges, which became Scuzzi’s Anbar.

Many were the days when Scuzzi and the Persian met in combat, Scuzzi coming home with deep scratches on his face, fur hanging in clumps from his flanks. No counseling, no remonstrance that he, too, had once been alone, unfed, and frightened, made the slightest impact. For Scuzzi, civility ended where the hinterland began. Once aboard the good ship of family life, the drawbridge in his mind had been raised, and no other cat could hope for rescue.

His long-range patrols astonished us. Once, when he had been missing nearly a week, my wife, Jane, then working in Baghdad, reproved me at long distance for not having called the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which has a missing-animals database in Newcastle, 250 miles away. Waste of time, I thought, but I called all the same. “Black-and-white cat, you say, Cambridge? No problem,” the R.S.P.C.A. man said, clicking his mouse. “He’s on the roof of the university library, been there five days.” And so he was, three stories up, cowering from a losing fight with one of the library’s own battalion of strays.

Now, with the family gathered and only hours to go, he was still agitating for a chance to go out on one last, remorseless patrol. And it was that instinct, in the end — the fear that he would disappear into the undergrowth, too weak to return and too remote to be found — that helped settle the family debate that had lasted weeks, through the cat’s equivalent of dialysis, insistent blood tests, and variations in diet. Anything to keep him alive.

John Grieve, the thoughtful family vet who had cared for Scuzzi as his illness worsened, told us consensus was imperative if we resolved to end his life. After scouring the Internet for advice, Jane and our two adult children who grew up with Scuzzi, Jamie and Emily, agreed that with all quality of life gone, and nothing ahead but suffering, the humane thing was a painless end. But my sense has long been that death is in the gift of God, or Providence, not man. And I felt we should treat Scuzzi as we knew him — the most independent, do-it-my-way of all our cats — and not deny him the right to exit life on his own.

The singularities of our family life weighed heavily. As a career foreign correspondent for The Times, and the son of an itinerant air force officer, I have lived a vagabond’s life; so too has Jane, whose family lived more than 200 years in colonial India. For 30 years and more, assignments in far-flung places have been the root condition of our lives. Wherever we have gone — Africa, Soviet Russia, China, Bosnia, India, Afghanistan, Iraq — we have adopted strays.

Perhaps that has been because, in a sense, we were strays ourselves; or perhaps, more simply, because the animals, at each move, became mementoes of all we’d left behind.