How it began

Hi. You can call me Jae. I’ve had the privilege of taking care of Susu since June 2016. It’s tough right now to face that her time is limited, so I figured I’d write about how she came to be in our lives.

It was May of 2016, and I was attending graduate school. It had been a tough spring; I’d lost my old man cat in March after he’d had a long battle with chronic kidney disease. The loss had been devastating. I lived just off campus with three other people, one of whom worked at the Facilities Departement of the university, and she knew many of the professors quite well. This roomate and I had a pretty good relationship, and she knew how hard the loss had been, and how much I still loved cats.

In mid-May, she approached me and told me about a professor she knew who did TNR (trap, spay/neuter, release) work with the local feral cat community. This professor was going on a sabbatical that summer, and wanted to know if we could foster two cats for her. She’d caught them and their mother and gotten them medical care. She told us it was a brother and sister, both of them void cats, the brother with short fur, the sister with long fur. The brother was friendly and sociable, while the sister was much shyer and liked to hide. She also told us that they liked to play with the letter magnets on her fridge.

I wasn’t sure at first if I was ready to welcome another cat into my life, but I figured that if we were just fostering, there’d be less pressure, and it would be nice to have another cat around. We made the plan to accept and foster the kittens, talking about names. My roomate wanted to name the brother Watson, and gave me the chance to name the girl. The only name I could think of was a little non-traditional: Susuwatari, named after the little soot sprites in Miyazaki’s films such as Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro. It just fit; I was told she was a long-furred black cat, and the soot sprite idea stuck. We made the plan to foster them and add two four month old cats to our space, just for the summer, of course.

We went to pick them up on June 2nd. When we got to the professor’s house, we got some bad news. While the professor’s son was gathering the cats into their boxes, the brother panicked and made a break for it once he was his sister put into her carrier. He’d run onto the porch, climbed the screen, and found a hole. While it was disappointing, we were glad to still have the sister, and picked up her pink carrier.

She was just a little thing, very nervous, crouched inside the carrier and looking around warily. We could tell she had long fur, but the extent of her future fluffiness wasn’t apparent yet. It was nearly impossible to get a picture of her face. From what we knew, nobody had ever been able to pet her. She hid too much. She came to us with the name Miss Noir. I later learned from the papers of her first vet checkup that her first name had been Jedi, so named because she was still very much feral and scared and trying to climb the walls. She was so shy, we joked that we’d essentially be fostering a fuzzy houseplant. Once we got her home, we let her out in the space we’d set up for her in my roommate’s room, and the little fuzzy blur dashed under the bed to hide.

My roommate who’d suggested fostering commuted to the school, living in the apartment Monday-Thursday, and the weekend came just after we got the little fuzz home. I very much wanted to make friends, so I spent a good amount of time in the room just sitting quietly to try and get her used to me. I learned a few things that first weekend: she loved playing with my roommate’s rug, which was frequently found in new and exciting varieties of disarray when I’d visit. She also loved food. She didn’t have any toys, so I went out and got her a little fuzzy gray catnip mouse, which she promptly latched on to and happily pummeled when I tossed it to her under the bed. (She later carried that mouse all around the apartment.)

After three days of hiding under the bed, a miracle happened: I managed to coax Susu out from under the bed, luring her by tapping the can of cat food with a spoon. Slowly, nervously, she emerged and walked around me, meowing loudly and kneading the carpet with her paws. Then, slowly and very carefully, I reached out to her, and she let me scritch her behind the ear. She found this offering acceptable, leaning into it almost to the floor. She was soft. She was soft, and I could hear her purring. We had a lovely moment together until I sneezed, which spooked her into diving back under the bed. We had made progress. She got the nickname “Little Miss.”

It didn’t take long for me to very, very attached to her; we became fast friends. My roommate joked that she shouldn’t have left that weekend, because me and Susu had already become buddies by the time she’d returned to the apartment. I knew I could never replace the old man cat I had lost, and I didn’t want to replace him, either. But, this scruffy little void kitten had made her way into my heart. At the end of that summer, the question of returning her to the professor became moot, and she officially became a foster fail. A few years later, when I was looking at moving to my own place, my roommate and I talked about what would happen to Susu. My roommate said that it was obvious how much the cat was attached to me, and we agreed that I’d get to keep her with me as I moved on. Thus, me and Susu began our new adventure together.

The skittish little void with the ear tip that showed she was a spayed feral eventually blossomed into the resplendent fuzzball princess Alex and I know and love today. I’m grateful for all the time I’ve been able to have with her, and while it’s sad to be coming to the end, I’m grateful for every bonus day we get.