Kitty here! Umm, I know this is a bit unorthodox, but… Y’all Tumblr bebes are super sweet about this sort of thing, so I’m posting something here and here only.
I just got a cat.
When New Cat is named and fully acclimated, she will def join the dogs, guinea pigs, and chickens as a Tumblr/Instagram regular.
But I have…mixed feelings.
My last cat died six months ago. We didn’t get another cat to replace her–c’est impossible, she was irreplaceable. Rather, we did it because we know two things:
1. A house that’s had a cat in it will always feel empty without a cat in it.
2. We have money and space and time and patience and love, and shelters are full of cats who don’t got none of those things.
Still, I’ve been thinking about my last cat Clementine a lot. And I think it would be healing to me to share a few photos of her.
This was Clementine. We adopted her when she was 14 years old. That’s old. If she were human, she would’ve been in her early seventies. Her previous owner had moved into a nursing home. She was lucky to land in one of the few no-kill shelters with enough resources to accept a cat of her age. Many don’t.
Clementine was terribly stressed out being in the shelter after so many years in one person’s home. Her fur started to fall out, and she refused to eat. She hid all the time and hissed if approached. No one applied for her.
We saw a lot of great cats at the shelter. For some reason, she was the one my partner and I both couldn’t stop thinking about. We talked about it, and decided we had the patience, emotional maturity, and financial stability needed to address the realities of adopting a shy geriatric cat. So we took her home, and released her under the bed.
“We might never see this cat,” I told my partner. “We might just know she’s here by periodic dips in the level of the food bowl.”
“I’d be okay with that,” he said.
“I would too.”
We didn’t see her for 36 hours.
Then, I heard a little sound while I was sitting in bed–not a meow, but a chirp. I looked down, and she sitting there, looking up at me. She chirped again. I patted the blanket. She sprang up beside me and started purring. Surprised, I took this blurry, crappy photo.
Within a week, she was climbing into our laps and kneading us with rapturous abandon. Sometimes she would start to drool out of pure joy.
Now, one complication was our dog. Clementine had never met a dog before, and I’d intended to introduce them very slowly and carefully. When she caught her first glimpse of our dog Brother, I was focused wholly on him, making sure he didn’t lunge or startle her. She darted past me, and ran to rub her face against him.
She was sleeping on top him by the end of the week.
To our complete surprise, Clementine was not scared of dogs.
Clementine loved dogs.
All dogs. Any dogs.
We foster dogs, and every new one that came home got the same treatment. She ran to them like an old lover, chirping her barely-audible chirps, paws warming up to give them a deep tissue massage the moment they sat down.
She put in an application to adopt Sunny, a red heeler mix who was our our 13th or 14th foster. We accepted her application and made him our second dog.
In the course of her four-year career, she cat-trained over a dozen dogs, making each of them infinitely more adoptable. Many went on to permanent homes with cats.
I was always hovering around her and the dogs, incredibly nervous that one might injure her. She’d been declawed by her first owner; she was defenseless.
But she knew exactly how to handle each one. She sat calmly and accepted sloppy licks from overly-affectionate dogs. She hid from excitable, high-energy dogs until after their playtime. We had one that was so afraid of cats that she was borderline aggressive towards them, but Clementine was absolutely determined. That dog was sleeping peacefully next to her after a month of relentless displays of patient friendliness.
Clem was the Nurse Joy of the house. She always knew if someone was hurting, emotionally or physically.
In this photo, our older dog Brother was suddenly deathly sick. Underneath the blanket he’s swaddled in more blankets and many layers of towels, because he was uncontrollably oozing blood. When we brought him home from the emergency vet, Clementine immediately crouched on top of his head, purring and kneading so intensely that it felt like she was in some kind of trance. He recovered fully.
When a (human) friend of ours was recovering from a horrible trauma, Clementine parked herself on her chest and refused to budge.
“But… But… I don’t like cats…” our friend said, a last feeble protest before submitting to Clementine’s healing ministrations.
We had four glorious years with Clementine. She made it to 18–a great age for a cat. She died peacefully, without pain, and is buried on our property, underneath a her favorite catnip plant.
I don’t know what her life was like before we met, but I know she was happy in those four years. She showed it to us every single day.
I’m so glad we took a chance on a shy senior. There were a lot of risks and a lot of unknowns. We were so focused on accepting those that we weren’t prepared for what we got: the best outcome of all possible outcomes.
That’s all I wanted to say, really! Thanks for letting me get this off my chest.
New Cat is 14, the same age Clementine was when we adopted her. She’s in the early stages of renal disease, but we’re hoping she has a few good years left. I’m excited to get to know New Cat. I’m looking forward to posting pictures of her as she finds her place in our house.
I wrote an article soon after she died about why I think senior pets are totally worth it. You can read it here:
I’m so amazingly touched by all of the responses. I knew I could count on Tumblr bebes to appreciate Clem’s story! Thank you so much. My heart feels healed knowing she might convince others to give senior rescues a chance.
Also I’m happy to introduce New Cat.
This is Clover.
Like a clover: she is very smol and easily overlooked, but it’s good luck that we found her.
Friendly reminder that kids need access to good school lunches because it will provide them with needed nutrients and will help their performance and overall health, NOT because it will “prevent obesity”. We are allowed to be angry about Trump rolling back school lunch regulations without being fatphobic and without body shaming.
Healthy eating should be for actual health, not for trying to attain a single body type.
Fanfic written by 14-year-olds is so wild because they all think “smirk” is just a fancy word for smile so every serious romantic scene comes out looking like
Are you implying I don’t look like this when I’m trying to be romantic
an institutional problem that highlights why class reductionism is so dangerous is the infant mortality rates that black women in the united states experience. anyone who calls themselves a “feminist” or a “leftist” is hopefully aware that black women experience the highest rates of infant mortality out of all racial groups in the united states, and the disparities between black women and white women in this context are too astounding to ignore.
i’m watching episode two of a documentary series called “unnatural causes” – the title of ep 2 is “when the bough breaks”, for my women’s health class. it focuses on work done by two neonatologists (doctors who specialize in taking care of infants who are born prematurely, underweight, or both) and who explore the causes of black women’s high infant mortality rates.
one of the doctors initially thought that the reason this occurs is because of the socioeconomic disparities between black people and white people – so when they engaged in empirical analysis of this problem, they wanted to see what the gap would look like if they corrected for socioeconomic status. what they actually found is that the gap didn’t disappear – in fact, it /widened/ as educational attainment level and socieconomic status improved (which means college-educated black women and higher-income black women still have incredibly high infant mortality rates).
next time one of you dimwits says that class is the only real division or the most important division in society, know that your willful stupidity has a body count.
This is something that I am constantly thinking about and it really angers me when white leftists act as if class analysis is the end all be all. Of course that is important but just as you’ve said when looking at mortality rates of black mothers numbers say otherwise. I know that Serena William had a very complicated/dangerous birth with her daughter and obviously she has all the money in the world and access to the best doctors. More money will never mean less racism and trauma in many cases it means more.
I’ve read about and listened to podcasts analyzing studies about the black mother mortality rates and it really is connected to mental health and trauma. The fact of the matter is that especially compared to white women black women have a whole lot to worry about and that worrying is heavily tied to misogynoir. The same misogynoir that prevents doctors from having empathy for their black patients. I find that when you look at racism below the surface level of shouting racist epithets it goes over most people’s heads even leftists.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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