Lux the Cat
Lux first entered my life in the early fall of 2002. Nikki, my girlfriend at the time, was looking for a cat and heard about a couple with kittens a few weeks old out at a trailer park. I was living in Morgantown, WV, at the time. We drove out and met Lux, her sister Luna, and some of their siblings. Nikki couldn’t choose between Lux and Luna so we came home with both of them. Nikki named her after Lux Lisbon from the Virgin Suicides.
I always thought it was a funny choice because Lux was a thoroughly black cat (although she did have two tiny white spots on her belly if you looked carefully). Often, especially if you tried to take her picture, all you could see was her big green eyes. Lux is the word in Latin for “light,” which her fur was the opposite of. Anyway, I always thought it was a very good name for a cat.
Lux has always been a skittish, aloof sort of cat. As she got older and decided she liked people, she would come over, and if people didn’t pay attention promptly enough, she would lightly rake her claws across them and look at them plaintively to ask to be pet. She did this because she figured out that people don’t like it when she clawed at them, but they would sort of put up with it if she did it EVER so gently.
She did not like other cats much, although she put up with her sister. When she didn’t like how things were going with other cats she could get very loud. She was very loud in general. There are numerous recordings of my radio show where I am talking on a microphone only for her to come over and begin meowing loudly and audibly. This was also relevant when she wanted fed, or wanted to caterwaul into the night in the laundry room when she thought no one was looking.
Lux was skinny as a rail and loved exploring. She was the direct opposite of her sister, a chubby lap cat who ruled the roost but got terrified anytime we moved house. Lux was always the first to go exploring, mapping the corners of her new territory, while her sister cowered under the bed. Like most older cats I think, she loved being around us. At one point during lockdown we would turn down the lights, and I would DJ and my wife Leila would dance as we streamed to the internet, to give ourselves and people we knew something to do. We put on a few party lights to make it look more fun and Lux was a fixture in these settings, hovering around the oscillating colored lights, generally getting underfoot but somehow managing not to get stepped on.
At some point after Lux’s kittenhood had moved into cattenhood, Nikki and I stopped dating, and I didn’t see much of Lux. For a while Nikki and I didn’t talk, but we managed to rekindle a friendship not long before she decided to move back to Utah. Nikki was not able to bring Lux and Luna with her and asked me if I would take them for her. I had grown up with cats, and as a big fan of Lux and Luna I quickly accepted her offer. Hey, free cats.
I don’t really remember the first days of my care of Lux and Luna. I’m sure they missed their mom, and it was weird for them, but at least they knew me from before and had a little continuity. They had sometimes stayed in my apartment for days on end, once running terrified of a field mouse that came up into our apartment out of a shared basement. They spent their first years in Morgantown, but for a while they lived in my hometown of Charleston WV when I was driving back and forth between jobs. They had several cat roommates during this era, all of whom Lux hated to varying degrees. I moved apartments almost every year so Lux and Luna became accomplished cat movers.
In 2007, I moved to NYC, and I brought Lux and Luna with me. I drove them there from West Virginia in crates (a 6 hour drive), wailing at the top of their lungs the entire way. My first apartment in Brooklyn was nothing to sniff at but the second apartment had a big enclosed backyard. After years of being indoor cats, I decided to let Lux and Luna have free rein of the backyard since it was more or less completely contained. Lux really flourished in the backyard: she loved being out there running and hiding under plants, and often would refuse to come back in until the morning. She became an adept hunter of birds, and I’m sure the neighborhood wildlife quaked in terror.
Lux’s love for exploration got her into trouble more than a few times. Once she climbed under kitchen cabinetry and fell through the drop ceiling into the apartment below mine (thankfully our friend Rob lived there). I think he was pretty surprised. In Morgantown, Lux loved to run out when a door was ajar and get into adventures. One time she climbed a tall tree, and we discovered this by hearing her loud wails when she could not get down. Our landlord came over with a ladder and rescued her. I’m not sure she fully appreciated his efforts.
But Lux’s biggest and scariest adventure came in that backyard in Brooklyn. Unbeknownst to me, workers in the business next to my neighbor’s yard had knocked out all the cinderblocks from a window frame, which meant that Lux could jump down into that business, which was being gut renovated into a coworking space. That night she did not come running home when I called for her, as often happened. The next morning when she didn’t run into the house, I was worried, and I discovered that hole the workers had made for the first time. By that point, she was nowhere to be found.
I don’t know if you can appreciate how scary this was. New York is a huge city with all kinds of ways a cat could get hurt. I combed the neighborhood. I put up flyers. I called all the shelters. I discovered that it’s really hard to tell one black cat from another if you’re a human. I mercilessly harassed a neighborhood cat that lived in a construction lot because I thought it was Lux, until eventually I figured out it wasn’t her. Anytime a shelter had a cat that looked even close to Lux, I would drive out to some far-flung neighborhood to have a closer look, but once I got in and could see the cat it would become obvious it was not Lux. Once as I waited to talk to a receptionist, I had to listen to her explaining to a man with a cat in a carrier that the shelter was at capacity and if he left the cat they would have to immediately put it down. I began to doubt I would ever see Lux again. It seemed hopeless.
But I kept calling the shelters asking about a skinny female black cat, and after Lux had been missing for a full week, I got a lead. The nearest shelter to my apartment (no-kill, thankfully) had taken in a black cat a few days before, but the cat was so ferocious and uncooperative that they could not gender it, and they assumed it was a boy. I tried not to get my hopes up. There had been many many false leads, but this time it really was Lux. I will always remember how she did not show any obvious signs of recognition of me, did not yell or meow or purr. At first I wasn’t certain it was her. She simply marked my hand when I extended it into her cage, something she often did before and after, while I burst into tears of relief. She had run out onto the street that morning the workers came to open the future coworking space next to my neighbor. And she was so friendly to a random lady that she brought Lux to the shelter, figuring she was someone’s pet.
I often think how close I came to losing Lux then. That was over 12 years ago now, so over half of her life with me has happened since that event. I’m very grateful to have had those 12 years, although they were less filled with adventure as I was hesitant to let her escape out into the streets again. We spent eight more years in NYC after her escape. At some point we added a kitten to the mix, Graham, whom we had found on the street looking for some friendly humans to feed her. Lux didn’t like Graham very much and made this known early on, but Graham and Luna became pretty good friends as cats go. Sadly in our final summer in NYC, we discovered Luna had developed cancer and she passed a short while later.
I remember wondering how Lux would take the loss of her sister. They were never close but they had lived together some 15 years, the only true constants in one another’s lives. I thought about how hard it would be for me to say goodbye to my brother. But cats are not like us. Lux came and sniffed Luna’s body after she had gone, and then went back to her business, having processed the loss immediately. I buried Luna in my mother-in-law’s garden next to her beautiful cottage in New England, and planted a butterfly bush so she would have some good company.
Lux was not destined to stay on the east coast. Leila and I drove out to Austin, Texas, where we secured an apartment. Lux stayed with a friend back in NYC for a full month, in her own room near some other cats that she probably would have also hated. I picked her up and brought her to the airport to fly her to her new home in Texas. She made sure to let me and all the other travelers know her displeasure loudly throughout the flight, and also peed all over the place. But she travelled under my seat and made it to Texas in one piece, thankfully.
In Texas she enjoyed two of her favorite hobbies: bird watching and laser pointer chasing. She was not a sprawler as some cats are, but almost always perched high atop things, ready to spring into action if needed. While she was never a proper lap cat, she eventually grew to enjoy perching on top of me somewhere when I was sitting or laying on the couch, or playing a video game. Graham tried to befriend Lux the way she had done Luna, but Lux would not hear any of it. Graham was too rough, or playful, or kittenish. Lux never gave up on exploring. Once we moved into a house, she would totter agedly out into our backyard any chance she could, even as I imagined all the hawks or coyotes that would swoop down upon her as soon as I let her out of my sight.
About six months ago, after returning from a trip to New York, I noticed Lux was bumping into things. It turns out she had gone blind. She had very high blood pressure and that’s probably what caused it. We put her on medication to help with the blood pressure and there was even a brief spell where her vision returned, as it sometimes does in cats in this situation. But eventually she lost her ability to see for good.
She had also seemingly become pretty hard of hearing, but neither affliction, either of which would be a calamity for me, ever seemed to bother her much. She navigated throughout our house mostly using her whiskers to guide herself along walls. For a time she would even slowly go up and down stairs. She became hard to care for, but she seemed to be enjoying life just as much as ever. She would perch upon us at every opportunity, or press her forehead into our hands or legs, feeling secure in the closeness with us.
Lux continued on in this way for a lot longer than I would have thought. Mostly she was the same day in, day out. She became a daily sunbeam sleeper, which she could find and feel even in her blindness. She detected Leila and my presence via our footfalls. She traversed the entire house although she eventually gave up on the stairs. She would walk a little gingerly, but confidently. We tried putting her on painkillers for arthritis but she got woozy and lethargic and seemed to enjoy life much more without them, so that experiment ended. Every night at her dinner time she would wind about the house taking random angles until she softly collided with one of our legs, and then she’d wail loudly as we prepared her dinner, as if that would speed up the process.
A couple days ago, she slowed way down. One minute we were thinking of setting up a vet appointment to see how she was doing, the next she was barely moving at all and visibly struggling to stand she was in so much pain. It had been very hard to watch her deteriorate the way she had throughout the last few months, and so difficult to see her in so much pain. Throughout all the tough times Lux had taken everything in stride, determined to soldier on while savoring the things cats do.
Lux passed Saturday afternoon. I had thought myself prepared for this after her long illness, but I discovered you are never really ready to say goodbye, it is always hard no matter the circumstance. Sunday morning I woke up early before the heat of a late summer Texas day to dig for her a place in my own garden. I didn’t have a butterfly bush to plant with her but I will get her one soon enough. I told her goodbye as I filled in the dirt, and that I look forward to saying hello to her every day I come out to water my garden.
Our other cat Graham has been a big help, hanging close to me these last few days either for her benefit or mine. Today she was laying in Lux’s sunbeam spot, and on our first night without Lux, I caught her staring out at our shed where Lux was waiting for me to dig her grave. I wonder what Graham thinks of all this? For my part, Lux has been my friend and companion for 19 years and life seems very strange without her here. At times I can still hear her or imagine seeing her, and I have been making little pilgrimages out to her spot in the garden to tell her hello and my plans to plant her some neighboring flowers. The only way I know to process Lux’s loss is to remember all these years I had with her, and the many memories attached to those years. She will never be replaced, and always be remembered. She was a very sweet and good cat.
