When I Think of You

In July of 2020, I took two four-week-old foster kittens into my home. A rescue group posted pictures of them on Instagram with the caption, We are desperate to find a place for these little ringworm kittens. Do you have an extra bathroom or spare room? Open your heart and help the helpless! I’d had ringworm once as a kid, on my leg, and I knew it wasn’t actually worms. I had an extra bathroom. I thought it wouldn’t be a big deal.

As kittens tend to be, they were adorable and disgusting. They had sparse, pipe cleaner-like fur, thinned from the tenacious fungus and usually dried in a whacky fashion thanks to the medicinal baths. They ate their messy food messily, while standing in the bowl, and they had diarrhea that they frequently bumbled through while negotiating the litter box with their pitiful baby coordination. Their names were Ryan and Connor but no one could ever tell me who was who. Both were so tiny that I couldn’t pet them with my palms, only my fingertips. One was tabby and one was black. One was rumored to be a girl.

My cat Putchki had died a few days before the kittens showed up, and I was in emotional free fall. I obsessed over fate—the randomness of him, exactly him, existing and then coming into my life—and it felt urgent to me that everyone who had a Putchki, waiting for them out in the world, locate him immediately because their time together would be short no matter how long it was. That isn’t how the world (or even the concept of fate) works but I was ready to roam the streets with a megaphone, shouting about the necessity of action: the love of your life could be tearing up the bedding on his cage in a shelter right now! Please go find him. I took in the kittens as part of that mission though I assumed everyone—my family, friends, followers on Instagram—would think I was trying to replace Putchki, and I wasn't. The extent to which he was irreplaceable blackened every waking moment. Also, I was afraid that if I waited too long to bring another cat into the house, I’d be unable to do it at all.

I spent a lot of time in the bathroom with the kittens, who seemed to regard me as furniture. I’d talk to them, clean the poop-smeared room, feed them, give them their various medicines, then sob for a while as they tottered around on my body, piercing through my socks and pants and shirt sleeves with their needle claws. I appreciated how often they made me laugh with their pratfalls, and that their caretaking required simple, clear acts of which I was capable. I believed it was important to treat them tenderly and give them everything they needed. But I felt no connection to them. If the rescue group had said they needed them back, that would have been fine. I’d just take in someone else.

I gave them new names since their old ones were boring and barely attached. I picked Mojo for the black one, like Mojo Jojo, and Fifa for the tabby because she was so good with a ball. Strangers online complained to me that FIFA, the organization, sucks, but that wasn’t relevant. I’ve never seen an episode of the PowerPuff Girls and maybe Mojo Jojo sucks too. They just needed cute sounding monikers.

Fifa was gorgeous and dignified but Mojo was irresistible. He had a bad eye that the medication did nothing to fix yet he was exuberant and intrepid. He screamed constantly whenever he was in a carrier; his voice never gave out. He loved rolling and there was no sweeter sight than him showing his round little tum.

Within a month, I started hating the rescue group they belonged to. Its founder was, I think, married to a cop; cops somehow saturated their whole vibe, and the highest ranking volunteers were often combative and mean without provocation.¹ I’d be at a Black Lives Matter march one day and driving through an extremely thin-blue-line-feeling neighborhood in Queens the next, to reach the garage where the kittens would get one of their endless series of FVRCP shots.² Mojo needed to see an ophthalmologist but it didn’t seem like a priority to them, and I had to go through them for his medical care, which was frustrating. It seemed it would be easier to just adopt them, so I did. I wasn’t sure that I loved them—Putchki had left such a big hole that I was mostly a void who felt little except the world blowing through her—but I knew I could give them a good home, and they needed one. By this time, everyone else in the house, human and feline, had ringworm, and would pass it around for the next year.

Mojo had his eye taken out and came home like nothing had happened, hollering for the duration of the ride. He grew more and more transfixing as his coat filled in. An aunt of mine had for a long time only adopted black cats, which I thought was strange, but now I understood. Mojo was so shiny and sleek, and very vocal, with a lexicon comprised largely of gentle, expressive murrs (not purrs, though he had a loud purr too.) He vibrated his tail ceaselessly in excitement and anticipation, usually whenever we started paying attention to him after a little time apart, or when he came to us with a toy he wanted thrown. He crawled around my shoulders and back while I worked at my desk, bringing me springs collected from the box where I put them away. Cats aren’t supposed to like human music but I got into a loop of listening to Janet, Mariah, and Whitney and he seemed pretty into it.

By the start of the new year, I adored him so much that sometimes just looking at him was agony. He was funny, affectionate, demanding, and unbelievably soft, like no cat I’ve felt before or since. (Sam and I joked that the ringworm did it.) He was the biggest personality in the house, the biggest presence: indefatigable, annoying, wonderful. Then one day in August, when he was 14 months old, he came down the stairs and vomited a prodigious amount of oily, bloody puke. I know blood in vomit and stool is not necessarily cause for alarm, but I’d never seen barf that looked like that before. In July, he’d been treated for a bout of diarrhea with fluids, antibiotic, and an OTC digestive-support paste, and he seemed to recover. The fecal analysis then was normal and I’d declined an X-ray. Now, I took him to the emergency vet, where an X-ray showed nothing, and he was sent home in a similar fashion.

We were supposed to go to a wedding that weekend but I ate the flight cost and stayed home with Mojo while Sam went. I was sure something more was wrong. His behavior reminded me of Putchki’s before Putchki died. I called the vet’s office but they were unconvinced by my concern, and I had nothing but my sense of unease to submit to them.

That Tuesday, while I was away for work, Sam took Mojo back to the emergency vet, who said he needed an MRI but they couldn’t give him one; their machine was broken or the tech was away—some insurmountable obstacle like that. Mojo hadn’t eaten in two days and he was having anal prolapse, which we’d never seen before. Mojo shrieked incessantly as Sam got another Lyft and took an hour-long ride to the next closest hospital where they found a mass in his bowels. Sam was sent back to the other vet, who took Mojo in for surgery the following morning. It was estimated to cost $6,400 and Sam put it on his credit card. I changed my plans to take an earlier flight home and wept while I boarded the plane, wetting my mask.

The next morning, the surgeon called before the operation and told me he thought Mojo might have dry FIP, a specific type of feline coronavirus. I’d learned from various rescue accounts on Instagram that FIP was almost always fatal, one of the most dreaded diagnoses among cats. Some rescuers had success treating it with an expensive, multi-week course of off-label/black market medication,³ which the doctor mentioned, but the far more common resolution was euthanasia. His opinion in part came from Mojo’s missing eye. Ocular issues are often “the only clinical sign” of dry FIP.

“But…you won’t know until you do the surgery, right?” I asked. I didn’t understand why he was telling me this, if he was trying to spare us the expense of the surgery and go straight to killing him, or what. Mojo was missing his eye because he’d been born with it wrong. And the mass was just that—a mysterious shape that could be a tumor or a swallowed hair tie or any number of other things. The surgeon said yes, he’d only know after surgery. We’d get another call later to let us know how it went.

I rejected everything the surgeon said. I had to. I was thinking, he’s too young and this hurts too much. I was thinking this isn’t fair. Why would I lose two cats in a year, how had I put myself in this position again? I hadn’t even meant to love him. But I also thought that if Mojo really only had one year of life, if this was it for him, I should be so grateful that he gave that year to me. What if I hadn’t seen that Instagram post? What if I hadn’t replied? It would be horrible to lose him and so much worse to never know him at all.

Sam and I took a walk and we were almost back to our door when the surgeon called. I put the phone on speaker and we sat on the front steps. The doctor said it had been an intussusception, which is when the intestine folds in on itself, like a pulled-off sock, layering its tissue.⁴ Sometimes that portion of bowel has to be removed but the surgeon said he used pressurized air to move it back into place. Sam and I sagged with relief, sweating and crying in the horrible heat. We put our trembling lips together. A few hours later, we brought him home. He screamed in the car. He was so alive, always so alive.

The biopsy was negative, normal; he didn’t have cancer or FIP. We confined him to the bedroom during his recovery in a futile effort to minimize his movement. He kept us up all night every night, rooting around the blankets, rolling between our bodies, nosing and murring and snuffling and stomping. He acted like nothing was wrong and nothing had ever been wrong. He wore a gray onesie to protect the incision site. I’ve never really forgiven the surgeon for his FIP hypothesis but I can admit he did an incredible job on Mojo’s long scar. He healed without incident. His belly is still beautiful.

When we took Mojo to a new vet this year for his annual shots, the vet seemed almost afraid of him. He’s only three years old and he’s missing an eye, has had emergency intestinal surgery, and still struggles with anal prolapse, which is imperfectly managed with a special diet and, when necessary, steroids. His medical records are (no exaggeration) about 50 pages long.

Mojo was active and curious in the office, so robust seeming (to me), full of character and charisma, but the vet saw him as sickly and vulnerable, more temporary than most patients, a collection of errors. He said Mojo’s teeth looked bad, that some needed to be pulled and he’d probably lose them all before he was ten years old because that’s common among cats with mysterious immune issues. I felt the familiar spike of panic, that eruption of terror and uncertainty regarding his durability, the same one that flared up with every anal prolapse, which had, during what was one of the most miserable stretches of my adult life, happened as often as twice a week. By now, though, I was a little better at tamping it down, clearing the flashes of doom away. Let him be toothless even earlier, by next year. Who cares? He would be toothless and happy. No one loves life more than our special boy.

I dutifully made a dental appointment that, through a series of fortuitous cancellations and rearrangements, was handled by a different doctor. She cleaned his teeth and said they all looked great; not one was pulled. She said everyone in the office loved him, but they say that to everyone. Mojo came home acting like nothing had happened. He cried in the car the whole way.

1  There were reviews to this effect on their Yelp page, which no longer seems to exist, but there are a few recent Reddit posts warning people away from them.

2  Young kittens need A MILLION of these and it’s so annoying.

3  I think the situation is better now.

4  It’s fatal if unaddressed; at a later vet visit, I spoke with a woman in the waiting room who, crying, told me her cat died from it because it went unrecognized for too long.