John and I made the very difficult decision to put our Flavia to sleep yesterday morning. She was just a couple of months shy of her 22nd birthday. We rescued her from the parking lot of the Embassy Suites Hotel in Little Rock on October 13, 2004, when she was just a kitten. She made countless moves with us after we joined the Foreign Service, including Washington DC, Mexico, Israel, Pakistan, Liberia, Argentina, and, most recently, Guyana. She was a trooper.
It will be so strange to come home to an empty house, but she is at peace after feline dementia coupled with kidney disease had begun to rob her of her health and well-being, and her good days no longer outnumbered the bad. We were with her, petting her and holding her as she passed peacefully. We’re not sure what life without Flavia will be like, but some of the joy has definitely gone away.
The rest of this week’s post is just some photos and memories of her.
The photo above was taken in 2004, I think, when she was just a kitten and still an outdoor cat. We were on the back deck at our house on Saddle Hill in Little Rock. It was a high deck – two stories off the ground – so we had a ladder built on the back of the house – a series of landing pads – so she could climb up and come to the kitchen door. To teach her to use it, I dangled chicken bones on a long string over the edge and she learned quickly how to use the ladder!
When John and I were first married and went on a house-hunting trip to Costa Rica, we stayed at the Camino Real for a couple of weeks. The taxi drivers hung out in the back corner of the parking lot, and I learned they had a cat out there they were taking care of. They had built her a little house and gave her food, so I started bringing my leftovers to her. They had named her Flavia, so when we found our Flavie in a hotel parking lot in Little Rock, it made sense to name her Flavia, too.
One Saturday morning in the early spring, Flavia disappeared. We searched everywhere but couldn’t find her. Three weeks to the day, she returned – again on a Saturday morning – hungry and skinny. She came inside and ate and ate, and all the while we petted her and she purred and purred. From then on, she loved being petted while she ate – we called it “scratch and eat.” Anytime we started petting her, she would run to eat. I’ve always been convinced that she got locked inside a lawnmower shed and didn’t get out until the neighbor went to mow the lawn again. I don’t know how she survived that long, but she did! After that, we started training her to be an inside cat!
When we adopted Flavia, we already had Noodle, a silly gregarious cat. Noodle used to love licking Flavia’s ears and she always tolerated it. Noodle died when we were living in Ciudad Juarez. We always joked that when he died, Flavia started saying “I’m #1!”
I love this photo so much. John is in his happy place with a book and a very contented cat! Her face just radiates happiness and security to me.
When she was living outside, she used to occasionally kill chipmunks, so we always called her the Mighty Chipmunk Hunter. One day in particular, I remember looking outside and seeing her chewing on one in the flower bed in the photo above. The house backed up to a green belt, and we had deer. One day I was watching from the deck and saw Flavia playing in the green belt. She was playing around a big rock when a deer wandered up. The deer didn’t know she was there but Flavie saw it and hunkered down behind the rock. The deer was munching grass and finally got pretty close to the rock. Flavie JUMPED up on the rock and kind of stood up on her back legs, clearly trying to scare off the deer – and boy did it run! She was fearless sometimes! (On the other hand, she was scared of most other people and would hide when the doorbell rang or she heard strange voices. It wasn’t until she got older that she would even let our housekeepers be in the same room with her without hiding.)
When John and I moved from Little Rock to Washington in 2007 to join the Foreign Service, we drove out. I gave the two cats a bit of tranquilizer before putting them in their carriers to be loaded in the cars. The house was completely empty and the cars were ready to go. I put Noodle in his carrier but couldn’t find Flavia. We searched the empty house high and low but absolutely could not find Flavia to save our lives. John even went under the house, thinking she might have gotten down the dryer vent somehow. To this day, we have no idea where she was! All of a sudden, she just appeared out of nowhere — then we were on our way to Washington!
She did like to hide and scare us. When we lived in Juarez and moved into our house there, she somehow climbed up around the top of our very high bedroom ceiling and found a hole and crawled into it. We had no access to any attic and no way to get her out. It was a harrowing couple of days while she was stuck inside – eventually she came out but the hole was small and it was a tight squeeze to get her out! Once in a hotel, she actually crawled up inside the bathroom sink and it was the devil to get her out of there, too! Whenever we checked into hotels, I had to find all the holes she might squeeze into and stuff them with pillows. She was quite the Houdini sometimes.
Flavie went with us to all of our postings and she never, ever had to ride in cargo. We always found a way to take her in cabin (it helped that she was tiny, just six pounds or so at her heaviest). When she and I had to get to Pakistan, we bought our own ticket on Turkish Air (a non-US carrier, so not within USG guidelines) because it was the only way I could take her in cabin. I was always petrified that she would escape going through airport security in my arms, so she traveled with a harness and leash on. I shouldn’t have worried – she was always very happy to get back into her carrier and hide.
She was our very brave little girl, our world traveler, our companion for over two decades, and we will miss her dearly. I always felt like it was a privilege to take care of her, especially as she got older and some things became more difficult for her. She was always so sweet, so dignified, always ready for a head scratch. After the vet euthanized her (and they were so very kind), we drove her to a Hindu crematorium. We went back this morning to pick up her ashes. I’ve packed up her things and made a stack of food to donate to a local rescue group. I’m so grateful that 21 years ago, a woman named Mardi came to do some contract work with my firm in Little Rock. She was staying at the Embassy Suites and came in one day talking about this little kitten in the parking lot who was eating scraps of food people would leave her. Who knew back then that we’d be loving that little kitten so much 21 years later.
