Luna was my cat. Both in the sense that, for nearly her whole life I was the one who took care of her, but also because she devoted herself to me in a way no other pet has, and perhaps none other will. She was a soft, fluffy black and white cat, kind of on the smaller side but at the same time she was round and chubby. Luna was confident and relaxed. She almost never ran anywhere, and she usually ruled the roost. She was no tyrannical alpha cat, she left the fighting to the others unless it was to assert her dominance. She was secure in her position and would hang out with other cats, sometimes lying against them and grooming them.

Luna had her share of quirks like any good cat. She liked to tug at the water bowl before she drank it. When she wanted my attention she would sink her claws into my chair, or my bed, or my side and pull at me until I fed her or chased her away. Most people took away her good qualities when they met her, and that was all true, but she was also bossy, and willful, and stubborn. I eventually had to keep her out of the room I slept in or she would wake me up well before my alarm to be fed increasingly early. We often recounted how I’d shut the sliding door in one Brooklyn apartment, and unable to open it but wanting in or fed, she would grab the door from underneath and bang it against the frame over and over until we paid attention to what she wanted.

But most importantly, Luna was the rare kind of cat who loved people. Anytime I found myself lying down somewhere, usually Luna would not be far behind, laying near me, or snuggling up beside me, or sometimes after a kneading session, lying directly on my chest. I could move from one room to another and she would find some reason to be there nearby. She also liked strangers. People would come to visit, and as they sat on the couch, she would jump and settle in on their lap, like she’d known them for years. Friends gave her nicknames. Moocow, Tuna, Ultimate Lap Cat, Nice Cat (the vet’s nickname, written on her file with an exclamation point as the vet once showed me), and Colonel Sanders. The last one I can only guess was because she always looked both regal and ridiculous. She made an impression on people, and when I revealed the news she was sick, it surprised me how intensely people reacted to it and wanted to speak out about her.

When Luna got sick and we knew the end would come, it saddened me that no one seemed to know the full story of her life. I’d known her the longest, but she touched a lot of people’s lives, and it felt selfish that I was the only one who knew most of it. So I decided I wanted to write down the story of her life, maybe not for anyone else to read, perhaps just for me, so that in theory I could share some piece of her, so that I had a way to remember all the nooks and crannies I could put together about the time she was here with us and remember the length and breadth of her.

I was not Luna’s first owner. She was born in a litter of kittens in Morgantown, West Virginia, in the Suncrest neighborhood, sometime around the middle of 2002. I was in college there, getting a second bachelor’s, and my girlfriend at the time had decided she wanted a kitten. Someone, I can no longer remember who, was at a liquor store and ran into a woman named Madonna who was trying to give away kittens.

I went with my girlfriend to pick out a kitten, and we drove into the backroads of Suncrest. Morgantown is a fair sized city by West Virginia standards, but even bigger towns in West Virginia have hollers that snake up onto the mountain side alongside similarly serpentine back roads. On one of those roads was a trailer where Luna was born and spent her first days, along with a bunch of brothers and sisters, some older cats (presumably her parents among them) and a few dogs. Animals roamed through the yard as we approached it one evening in early Autumn.

My girlfriend cooed at all the kittens and tried hard to pick one. There was a fuzzy black and white one and a sleek black one, and she couldn’t decide between them. I remember she had a favorite, and I want to say it was Luna, but I can no longer remember for sure which she wanted most. In the end I convinced her she should get both, so they had someone to keep them company, like the cats I’d had growing up. She anounced Lux would be the name of the black one, after Lux Lisbon from The Virgin Suicides, but she asked for my help coming up with the second name. I decided we should name her Luna, which was Latin for moon, since Lux was Latin for light, and I liked the alliteration.

Not long after, I told my brother John about Madonna and her many kittens, and he went and picked out two of Luna’s siblings for himself as well. One was a boy he named Walter, and none of us can remember the third sibling cat’s name. John lived in an apartment downtown with many roommates, and by the time he moved out to another place his roommate had become attached to Walter and the third sibling, and taken over most of their catly duties, so he left the cats in her care.

Lux and Luna were initially very sedate kittens, one night my girlfriend decided to bring them with her on a trip to Wal-Mart, in a little bag like some rich lady’s tiny dog. It worked just fine despite my protestations, although some other Wal-Mart shopper had asked her where she got the cat, to which she replied “In the pet section.” Once the cats went to the vet, we soon found out the source of their sedateness: they were covered in fleas. They were old enough for the vet to give them a flea dip, so the infestation didn’t last long, but it did last long enough for them to infest my apartment with fleas, on a day where I had cat-sat them. I came home from work the day after the flea dip, and went over to my girlfriend’s apartment, where she had saved something for me. Lux and Luna liked to perch on top of her couch, and there the fleas had died by the dozens. The top of the couch was covered in a carpet of dead fleas, she had waited to clean it so that I could see just how many there had been.

Soon after Luna and her sister Lux moved in with my girlfriend, they moved apartments, from a studio in Suncrest to a bigger place with roommates in the South Park neighborhood. No longer sedate, Lux and Luna began to behave like proper kittens. They loved the newfound space and multiple rooms, they would barrel down the stairs into the basement, they would run around everywhere, and they would mercilessly attack feet under sheets. They grew up some, and they were no longer kittens, so we began to call them cattens, since they were sort of in between.

Sometime after that, my girlfriend and I broke up. It was a hard breakup, and after a while we stopped talking because it was going horribly. I didn’t see or hear about the cats for a while. Sometime later in the school year, we made up, having distanced ourselves from the breakup and being able to settle in our newfound role as friends. Not long after, she announced to me that she was moving back to the west coast where she was from, and couldn’t bring the cats with her. She asked me if I would take the cats. It was a big surprise, but I loved Lux and Luna, and I loved cats but I hadn’t kept any during my adult life, and my childhood cats had passed a few years before.

So, when Luna and her sister Lux were about a year old, they came into my care. It’s hard to remember details about when they first moved in with me, but I remember I was in the same apartment they had infested with fleas, only I had moved to the bigger bedroom. It had a mantelpiece, and I had strewn various things across it. Luna very quickly developed a technique for waking me up: jumping up on the mantel, knocking something over, and then looking over at me to see if I’d woken up and got out of bed to feed her. If I hadn’t, she moved to the next item, and then turned to see my reaction. Rinse and repeat until the food came.

Not long after I moved into a new apartment with my upstairs neighbor Eir-Anne and another friend. It was in the second floor of a house, with shabby thick carpet everywhere, like a bad student apartment in 1975, only aged. By this point Luna and her sister Lux’s personalities had emerged. Luna was effortlessly the dominant cat, and was gregarious, and soon became Eir-Anne’s favorite, earning her several nicknames. Lux was more aloof, and dainty, and she loved to explore. She managed to climb her way under the kitchen cabinets one night. We found out when we got a call from the downstairs neighbor, after she’d fallen through his drop ceiling, emerging filthy with dust but unharmed.

We moved again the next year, into a big beautiful house near Gene’s Beer Garden. That house felt kind of haunted, we even had a team of amateur paranormal researchers check it out once, and in the process of giving them the tour, a door slammed shut in front of us of its own volition. I think the cats were creeped out by the place too, Eir-Anne still remembers them staring at weird places, mysteriously. They hated moving, as most cats do, and on the day we moved into that house they cowered beneath my bed. After a time, Lux went off to explore the rooms of the house, but Luna just stayed there for hours, well into the night before she finally got up the courage to check out her new domain.

I moved one more time in Morgantown, to a run down house up on a hill with a big gravel driveway. It was surrounded by trees and a few friendly stray cats hung out in the environs. Sometimes those cats would come to the window and Luna would have a standoff with them. A few times Lux and Luna got out of the house through a window or door. Luna was always the easier one to find, at least once I found Lux later up in a tree. I heard her plaintive mews when I was walking by an upstairs window. She’s lucky my landlord had a ladder.

After a year in that place, my roommate moved out and was replaced by my friends Jeff and Karla, each of whom brought their own cat, giving us four cats in the same house. It was three bedroom house, but that is still a lot of cats. Luna fought fairly constantly with Mina, Karla’s cat. I don’t know that either one of them ever became the de facto top cat, and they certainly never got along. Lux was bullied often, but the one who got the worst end of the stick was Jeff’s cat Gobbles, who was so sweet and docile that she wouldn’t even fight back when she was attacked, just sort of cowered or ran.

Towards the beginning of 2007 I decided to leave Morgantown before my lease was up. I turned my bedroom into a storage unit since I couldn’t avoid paying rent on it, and I drove the cats down to my hometown in Charleston, south of Morgantown. I felt bad putting the cats in carriers because they hated them so much, so I stupidly decided to let them roam the car for the two and a half hour drive. As usual for being in a car, they wailed pitifully for ages, only stopping when they started to fall asleep. Luna tried to get over by my feet but I had to keep her out so I could drive. She settled in by laying against my right arm on the seat rest and quieted down, though occasionally waking up to wail and show me she wasn’t happy.

I had been living part of the week in a small yellow cinderblock house owned by my grandfather, so I put the cats there temporarily while I drove to NYC and found an apartment and a job. My cousin Jessica lived in the cinder block house next door (at some point, nearly everyone in my family including myself, my brother, my dad, my grandparents, my great grandmother, and countless aunts, uncles and cousins lived on that same street). Jessica fed the cats for me while I was gone and kept them entertained. My parents had gotten some nice leather furniture there for me, but the cats liked it all too well and seemed ready to slowly tear it to pieces, so I left it all there. Once I had secured an apartment a month or two later I came back and got them and the rest of my stuff and drove everything to New York. This time I didn’t make the mistake of letting them roam the car.

By this point Lux and Luna were five years old. This was just over ten years ago now, and we settled in to Brooklyn, where I’d lived before moving to Morgantown. The first place I lived was pretty unremarkable, and it was a basement apartment, so the cats couldn’t really see out the windows. But the second place had a big enclosed back yard, so after I’d lived there a while I decided to let Luna and Lux roam the backyard. I remember the first time I let them go out, Luna wouldn’t leave the threshold when I opened the door and left it open, much like her time hiding under the bed when we had moved. Lux immediately began to explore, but Luna hung back for several hours as the day wore on, lying on the floor of the open doorway, before eventually mustering her courage and beginning to explore.

The backyard was huge by New York standards, and covered in plants. Some previous tennant had planted two fig trees, some roses and a grape trellis, and it was shaded by a another big tree and the next door neighbor’s small peach tree. The door opened to an enclosed porch on our side, and to the left was the wall of a building. In front as you walked out back was a towering fence that even I couldn’t have climbed, and to the right was a more reasonable fence leading to my next door neighbor Mike’s yard. Quickly I discovered that despite every effort of mine, the cats could easily get over or under to the fence to Mike’s yard, but he had cats of his own and didn’t mind them, even seemed to enjoy their company. The far wall on his side was yet another building wall, so they couldn’t get any further than Mike’s place, andit seemed safe.

Lux and Luna loved their time in the backyard. To my dismay many years of being indoor cats did not temper their hunting skills, and many a songbird met its end there at their hands. Luna loved lying in the long grass, mostly hidden, or rolling around in the dust on the flat stone pathway. I spent a lot of time out there gardening , and often they would come and hang out next to me as I worked, even though they had the run of the whole place.

Sometimes I couldn’t get them to come in for the night, because they’re cats and cats almost never do what you want them to do. One night Lux didn’t come back in so I figured she’d be back in the morning for food, as was her way sometimes. When she didn’t come the next day, I began to worry. Eventually I discovered that workmen had knocked the cinderblocks out of an old window in the building next to Mike’s backyard, and she’d snuck in there to a work site on the ground floor. The next morning she must have run out as the workmen opened the site up. It struck me later that Luna didn’t even bother to explore there, content to stay in the backyard and come inside.

I spent the next week looking for Lux, increasingly worried as to her fate. New York streets are different from Morgantown, and I soon discovered the city pounds were nearly always filled to capacity. One day I watched as a clerk explained to the man in front of me that they had no room for cats and if he turned the cat he had found in they would have to put the cat down immediately. I began to worry more. I had a number of false positive identifications. Black cats are hard to identify, even if you’re their owner. I mercilessly hounded a neighborhood black stray cat in a construction site I thought for a time was Lux. Eventually I did find Lux. She was at a great no-kill shelter called Barc, not far from my apartment. I had called them the first day she went missing, but because of Lux’s ferocity when cornered, they couldn’t identify her gender, so they thought she was a male cat, giving her the name William Tecumseh Sherman. When I called they said they had no black female cats. I called again later in the week, and by that point they’d corrected the error and told me to come see if it was her, so after a week we got her back, and Luna didn’t become an orphan after all.

I let Luna and Lux go back outside once the workmen put the windows in place, but I got both Luna and her sister microchipped to avoid this from ever happening again. Like every cat, Luna hated going to the vet, but she feared or respected them, and never really misbehaved like her sister. She was always confident until she got out of her environment, and then she turned into a scaredy cat, at least until she got her nerve back.

Sometime after that, I decided I would move in with my girlfriend Leila. She asked me if we could get a kitten, because she’d grown up with a cat and her roommate of many years had been allergic. I demurred, worried how Luna and Lux would react to a new kitten. One day though, walking to a birthday party we spied a little grey alley kitten. She came right up to us, hoping for food, and let us pet her and didn’t run away like most stray cats. She even let us pick her up, so we took her to the local pet store where we discussed getting her adopted. After talking it over a bit, we decided to try fostering her and see if my cats could handle her presence gracefully, figuring it would be easy to find her a home if not.

Lux and Luna didn’t love the prospect, but eventually Luna especially warmed to the idea. We named our new kitten Graham, because we found her on Graham Avenue, and at first their interactions went predictably poorly. Graham didn’t fear other cats, or their boundaries. Soon after coming into my care she got very sick and nearly died. We had to keep her in the bathroom away from the other cats. Eventually, though, she bounced back and soon after I moved into a new apartment with Leila and our now three cats.

Luna initially didn’t seem to welcome Leila’s intrusion into her domain, maybe because she was jealous of my attention in the time honored tradition of many pets being protective of their owners’ attention. It took time but eventually Luna came to love Leila too, and would lie on her and hang out near her the same way she did with me, having fully accepted her.

As for Luna and Graham, they eventually came to be about as close as I’ve seen two cats be. Luna and her sister got along mostly, and sometimes would lie next to one another. But Lux and Graham, though they did still sometimes fight, would lie in a giant furry heap on some ratty old furniture Leila had brought, a faded flower print chair and an ottoman that had been torn at by Leila’s childhood cat KK before she inherited them. Often Luna would meticulously groom Graham, ending either in a nap or a fight.

A few years afterward, one of my friends noticed how much weight Luna had lost, initially mistaking it for a good thing. The vet had always said they’d wished Luna could lose a bit of weight, and this had come since we got Graham, but it was not a positive. The initial diagnosis was kidney disease, which was manageable and affects a lot of older cats. Luna was by this point 15 years old, firmly into the retirement years for cats. We had to give Luna water injections under the skin every night to make sure she didn’t get dehydrated. For a while things began to look up and, no longer dehydrated, she got some of her pep back, along with a little weight gain on her next checkup.

Eventually it was clear that something else was wrong. I worried as we left town on a trip, and told Luna firmly she needed to be there when I got back. It was a few days without giving her water, but when we got back she was there but her health had begun to decline visibly. We took her to the vet again and had an ultrasound done, which showed us that she had a couple tumors, and the prognosis was not good.

I don’t know exactly how long we had her for after that, but it was something like two weeks, perhaps a bit more. She had always had a voracious appetite, but she increasingly turned even wet food away. I tried everything I could think of, giving them tuna, half a dozen different kinds of wet food, treats, bonito flakes, putting the food on a makeshift platform so she didn’t have to bend over, and later I just sat next to her and held the food dish up to a comfortable level myself so she could easily get to it, which seemed to work the best out of everything. Sometimes she wouldn’t eat for a day, sometimes she’d eat a little, sometimes she’d eat well.

She’d been kind of a snuffly cat for a while, we couldn’t really remember when she began to make the sort of noises a cat would make if it had a stuffy nose from a cold, but it had begun some time before. She always had an eye that would tear up, which I always thought was related to allergies, but as she got worse it, similar to the eye and snuffly-ness, she had some drainage problems that seemd to give her trouble eating, and probably trouble smelling the food. The vet had noticed some arthritis in her knee in our visits, though at the time she was still doing normal cat things. Eventually it began to visibly give her trouble, and she stopped jumping, stopped going up stairs, and her walking became wobbly, difficult, and sometimes she stumbled. She began to spend most of her days lying on the floor, getting up only to sometimes eat, drink, or use the litter box.

We knew there wasn’t anything we could do to help Luna get better, so we did our best to keep her comfortable and happy while she was with us, and enjoy her company as much as we could. Through all the pain and discomfort, her personality shone through in ways I would not have predicted. When we had a handful of friends over during the worst of her illness, I brought her upstairs to our home office with her food, water, and a litter box, figuring the noisiness and the feet of the people would annoy or scare her and she could be by herself. I had read cats in hospice are supposed to like things quiet. But not long afterward, she came bounding down the stairs to hang out with our house guests. That’s just how much she liked being around people.

Eventually, I saw how hard it was for her to get around, and made the decision to schedule an appointment to have a vet come to the house and put her to sleep. The finality of setting that appointment was crushing, but I could see how difficult her days had become and it felt like a kindness to bring those days to an end.

The day before, I took her out to the backyard with me. We hadn’t let them out there in this apartment because it was not fully enclosed. It was August and many of the plants had grown long and leggy in the cooling summer. It had rained the day before but the ground had dried, and that day was clear and warmed to a perfect 79 degrees. I was worried she would be afraid, like the time she hid under the bed or wouldn’t leave the threshold of the backyard. But she wasn’t. I set her down on a beach towel I laid in the grass, and she immediately stood up, by that point a rare thing. She began exploring. I followed her around, using my phone as a camera and keeping the mosquitos at bay. She smelled the grass and flowers, marked some, and explored the perimeter of this strange new place. She came back to the towel and laid down, so I laid there with her for a while and we listened as the noises of the birds and insects joined with the noises of the city, the people and the sirens and the bustle. After a while she walked over to the flagstones and laid down there, so I set myself up on our hammock where I could watch her and let her have some space. After a time she wandered over to the stone steps that led from our yard down to a paved patio and the door back into the apartment. I came over and she walked down a few steps headlong in a kind of perilous way, before stopping. I took her down the rest of the way and set her by the door and cracked it open for her. Once again she lingered on the threshold, but this time hesitating to go inside instead of hesitating to come out, as she had on that threshold years before. She looked back out the door and came outside with me again for a moment. I kept the door open, waiting to see what she wanted to do, prepared for whatever whim might take her. Finally she came back into the apartment and laid down on the cool tiles, having had her fill of the outside, so I shut the door and came in with her.

I had until next morning left with her, and Eir-Anne called and video chatted with me and Luna for a while, and we talked about old times and memories of Luna. I decided to sleep on the couch that night to be near her, though I couldn’t sleep much. Some time into the night, she got up and came over to where I was and looked plaintively at me on the couch. Not sure of what to do I picked her up and set her down beside me, watching to make sure she didn’t try to jump down and hurt herself. Instead she turned around in an awkward circle and lay down on my arm, resting against me, and purred. I kept as still as I could to prolong the moment as long as I was able. It lasted a while, but after a bit she had some issues with her mouth, and stood up, dealing with some unseen and uncomfortable part of her illness. I set her down on the ground so she didn’t have to jump down, and she walked away to deal with whatever problems her health was giving her. She came back not long after though, and again looked up at me expectantly. I plucked her up, now so light in my arms when she used to weigh so much, and once again I set her by my side, where she laid down again. This time she stayed with me there for a long while, until late into the night, almost morning, I reached a begrudging kind of sleep, and when I woke up a couple hours later she had left, having jumped down somehow.

I took a shower and then fed Luna, sitting cross legged next to her and holding the bowl up the right height to her head. She ate a little bit. Not as voraciously as the morning before, but more than the food she spurned the night previous. I tidied up the basement in preparation for the vet, but Luna just stayed in the kitchen, so I came and did dishes. She laid down next to the sink with me as I did them. When I ran out of dishes I picked her up and held her close, though she always hated that, more because I knew I wouldn’t be able to soon enough. Then I sat down on the couch and sat her there with me. Leila woke up and we sat on either side of her and took turns stoking her until the vet arrived for our 8am appointment, mercifully a bit late because of traffic. As she curled up and drifted off to sleep for the last time, even though she didn’t know them, out loud I said the words “Goodbye, Luna.”

Every act of finality was an awful but expected blow. Since this moment was so choreographed, we had plotted out every movement and action, knew what to do, which helped, but didn’t still the aches as we gave our final caresses, our last looks. We carefully put Luna in a shoebox and drove her to Leila’s mom’s cabin in the Berkshires, up in the rolling mountains so like the mountains where she was born, up in a holler in a trailer home. We buried her deep in a flower bed, beneath a cairn of smooth stones and a butterfly bush I got to mark the place where she would lie.

The yard there is very pretty, bigger than any simple back yard in Brooklyn, or any stand of trees around a house in Morgantown. There were already two butterfly bushes there, and they bring bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds. Luna is gone, but I will have the flowers in the butterfly bush to remember her by, and the yard will always be filled with sunlight and flying things, in a way I think she’d like.

Saying goodbye is always hard, and it’s even harder when the friend you’re saying goodbye to is so devoted to you. I take solace in remembering how much she loved me, and in how no amount of pain and illness ever took away the things I loved her for. Goodbye, Luna.