RIP Misty

It was back in the autumn of 2007, while we were living in Germany but near Strasbourg in Eastern France, that Danielle and I went to dinner with our friends, Anne and Materne. They lived in a majestic converted farmhouse in the country outside the city.

On the way, Danielle told me that one of their cats had just had kittens.

“They’ll try to foist one on us. We’re saying no, OK? I don’t want another cat now.”

It hadn’t been that long before that we’d said goodbye to Chalky, a black cat as you’d expect from the name, one of the best we ever had. He’d come out for walks with us and, if we’d been out without him, would be waiting for us on our return, with a cat smile – dipping his eyelids. 

But then he developed an inoperable cancer on his tongue. We kept him as long as possible, but there came a time when he could neither eat nor drink. Just to be merciful, we had to have him put down. He was young and, in every respect other than the tumour, entirely healthy. 

We’d been devastated. We felt no inclination to start over again with another cat for a time.

At dinner that evening, I suddenly felt a terrible scratching on my lower legs. Startled, I looked down, only to see, to my astonishment, a kitten scrabbling up my trouser leg, using his claws for purchase, until he got to my lap. When he did the same thing with Danielle, he didn’t stop at the lap, but climbed right up to her shoulder.

Inevitable, wasn’t it? At the end of the evening, we drove home with the kitten in the car. That’s how Misty became part of our family. And suffered his first international move, across the border from his native France to our home in Germany.

Early days. Young and happiest in small places

Unluckily, it was a bad time to join our household. We soon had to move back to England for my job. Misty was too young to have had the treatment for rabies the UK required. Since that treatment came in two rounds six months apart, it was quickly clear that he was going to have to remain at least half a year longer on the Continent after we’d gone.

Early days: Misty with our dog at that time, Janka

Neither of us has ever forgotten the howl of anguish he let out the evening before we left. Somehow he knew. It was anguished and it rent our hearts.

We had, as it happened, made some good arrangements for his time away from us. He would stay with our friends Félicie and Yannick. The arrangement proved such a success that Yannick was won over to the idea of having a cat, and their family hasn’t been without one since then. 

He won his way into their hearts by such endearing acts as rolling her engagement ring off her bedside table and around the room until it went down a crack between two floorboards. They eventually gave up looking for it, and Yannick gave Félicie a new one.  But then, not long before they moved out, they found the old one again.

At any rate, as that story shows, it was a good home-from-home for Misty. On the other hand, I don’t think he ever forgave us. He’d been one of the most affectionate kittens I’ve known, but after this abandonment, he developed an angry side to his character, so that he would sometimes respond even to being stroked by biting the hand that was stroking him.

Why, he did it last night, as if to underline how deeply ingrained into his soul this trait had become.

Nor was that abandonment the last of the disturbing experiences we inflicted on him. For a time, we travelled frequently backwards and forwards between England and France, and to avoid a further separation, we would take him with us. Which he hated. Before the end of any such trip, he would start walking around the car, moaning softly but by no means inaudibly.

Even within England, his third nation of residence, we imposed four homes on him. He adapted reasonably well, but I’m sure he must have found so many moves trying. After all, even I did, and I was responsible for them.

Misty focused on his objectives

Then came another separation. Again we arranged it well. We’d sold our house to our friends, Bruno and Jose. And they agreed to keep him for some months. That meant that while we were looking for a permanent home in our new country, Spain, he at least could live on in a comfortable, familiar environment with people he knew and liked. And who liked him.

Misty enjoyed his last home in England

Then, once we had moved to where we now live outside Valencia, I took advantage of a business trip to England – my last, before my fourth and final redundancy led to my retirement – to collect him and take him to his new home. 

Misty and Toffee exchanging views

He took this last international trip well. He peed on my feet in the taxi on the way to the airport, but I didn’t feel I could really complain, given all I was putting him through. And he took the flight without complaint, and only started some eloquent growling for the last twenty minutes or so of the five-hour car trip to Valencia.

Friends Reunited
As seen by Senada Borcilo, in her cover design for
Paws for Reflection

Once he arrived he set out to explore the house thoroughly. He smelled the dogs carefully, reviving an old friendship that had been dormant some months. In the morning, he got to know the gardens, front and back. That’s when he discovered just how wonderful the weather in Spain, his fourth country of residence, can be.

Spain: a good place for a cat to retire to

Just the place, he decided, for a discerning cat to take his retirement.

He would lie out on the table in the back garden, or on the couch in the front one. Sometimes, if he wanted some real heat treatment, he’d have us let him out on the first-floor terrace, an excellent sun trap with tiles to catch and retain the heat.

That was two and a half years ago. And, despite minor irritations such as the tedious Siamese next door, and the occasionally over-boisterous behaviour of the poodles, it was a great retirement.

But then he went into decline. His movements slowed as he developed a range of pains. He found it increasingly difficult to eat. He had once weighed twice as much as our poodle Toffee (“not twice as much – only nearly twice as much,” he always growled if I said that), but now he came down to little more than her weight. Even with strong painkillers and treatments prescribed by the vet, for a condition she couldn’t fully identify, he grew steadily worse as his appetite vanished until he could only absorb liquid.

“There’s nothing further I can do,” the vet eventually told us.

Which meant that there was one thing, and only one thing, she could do. And so, on 12 April 2022, we did it. An untreatable condition leading to increasing suffering had to be ended, and so we ended it.

Misty, we’ll miss you. It was nearly fifteen years. I wish it had been longer.

Last hours

At least, as Jose points out, his biography is out there in print.