The Death of New York City Cat Girl

I think we “animal people” grieve so much when a beloved pet dies because a part of us dies with them. At least that’s how it’s always been for me. The part of me that died with my dear Katusha, who passed away a month ago from cancer at only eight years old, is the New York City cat girl. So I’m still grieving for the loss of my kitty, as well as the loss (at least for the time being) of that part of myself.

I adopted Katusha seven and a half years ago from the Los Angeles County shelter when I lived in West Hollywood, years after I’d moved out of New York. I’d wanted a friend for my cat, Rhea (whom I did adopt in NY, and who passed away two years ago, also from cancer). So I never actually lived in NY with Katusha.

Even so, after she died, I realized how much she actually was the quintessential New York cat. She was perfectly content to stay inside, never tempted to venture out, unlike Rhea and Najma, who were my NYC kitties at various stages of my life there. She would have been perfectly happy to sit in the bay window, looking out at the birds and the people, the way she did at the patio window looking out over our West Hollywood deck, to cuddle in my lap while I read on the couch, and to snuggle up with me in bed.

I keep thinking how different our lives would have been if we (she, Rhea, and Sofia, the chihuahua mix we adopted in LA) had moved back to NY after leaving California, instead of Arizona. I grew up in Phoenix but hadn’t lived there since graduating college.

I’d left New York in 2011 after having lived there for nearly two decades following grad school. I didn’t intend to leave forever, but just to take a break. I was sick of all the noise, sick of tourists who’d largely taken over Manhattan, sick of the lack of space and the increasingly unaffordable rents. Also, I’d written a dance blog, and I’d self-published my first novel. The blog became rather popular among the dance crowd, and the novel did reasonably well for a self-published book in 2009. New York being the epicenter of traditional publishing, and still in the midst of the 2008 recession, the increasing popularity of eBooks and the advent of online journalism, the city just seemed to be seething with very angry displaced publishing execs and writers. As basically an indie journalist and author, I really felt a lot of their venom directed at me. I just needed a break from the hostility. Los Angeles was a big city where I could still find the legal work I’d been supporting myself on while writing. San Francisco culture would probably have been more akin to New York, but I couldn’t afford that city. So I chose LA.

I loved West Holllywood but hated LA. West Hollywood, being smack in the middle of Los Angeles, meant I couldn’t venture out of my little cocoon without some degree of stress. And I had to venture out often, for things like work and friends who wanted to go to the beach, and shopping, etc. We had a nice big apartment between the Sunset Strip and the gay bars of Santa Monica Boulevard. It was a crazy fun place. I adopted Katusha as a friend for Rhea, and then, seeing all my neighbors with dogs and missing my little childhood terrier mix, I decided to adopt Sofia, a chihuahua mix.

Five years later I was really sick of all traffic, the lack of public transportation, lack of parking spaces, lack of culture, and lack of affordable property to buy (in my income bracket anyway). I’d thought of returning to New York at that time, and, being honest with myself, I’m not completely sure why I didn’t. I think I just wasn’t ready yet. I remembered the lack of space in New York and I now had three animals, including a barky dog. I wanted to try home ownership. I wanted a back yard. There definitely wasn’t as much traffic in Phoenix as in LA, and there was even more space. Plus, an aunt in Arizona was sick and had no one to care for her. So I packed up the fur kids and moved one state over, back “home,” instead of back across the country.

We rented a condo until I had enough work experience in Arizona to qualify for a mortgage. And then we found my dream home. It was a little out of the city, close to the open desert and south of Phoenix, en route to Tucson, the city where I’d gone to undergrad and which held very good memories. Funny but what I really loved about the house was the parts of it that resembled my last apartment in New York, on the Upper West Side. Part of the house was two stories, so we had a cathedral ceiling on one side, perfect for my little art collection. But the builders had left one of the upstairs rooms open-walled, so our living room was basically two stories, giving us a balcony that I knew Rhea would love, as she had our NYC loft balcony. And I was right. That little gymnast cat loved to run up the stairs and hop through the balcony bars onto the top of the bookcase.

I loved the whole house but especially the upstairs room I used for my writing loft, the sun room with floor to ceiling windows facing the back, and the side patio where I could see both the front and back of the house simultaneously. Rhea loved the balcony, Sofia loved the fig tree out back, under which all kinds of creatures would shade themselves, and Katusha loved the big walk-in closet in the master bedroom where she could cocoon herself among the footwear (her foster mom had named her Cinderella because of her fondness for fitting herself into various shoes!).

Rhea died of cancer about two years after we moved in. It was horrible, as death of a beloved pet always is, but I think hers was made worse because of what she meant to me. With my New York companion now gone, part of my New York self was gone as well. I put her ashes on the top of the bookcase near the balcony.

I began volunteering at the local SPCA and decided to adopt another dog. We had a big backyard now and a large house, so we could have a large dog. I’d never had a big dog but my mom took care of several labs and I became very fond of one of them on my visits to her. Anyway, long story short, I ended up not with a lab but with a German shepherd Belgian malinois mix. I’ve grown to love Irina fiercely, but our lives together have not been without lots of drama, mainly due to the fact that I am not an experienced dog handler and she is a dog who needs just that. Anyway, love is love. It took some time for the other animals to get along with her, but due largely to the pandemic when I worked remotely from home and spent a lot of time acclimating them, we eventually became one big happy family. And then Katusha got sick.

The pandemic (by which I mean not worrying about getting sick but being home all the time and thinking about my life ad nauseam) followed by Katusha’s illness really made me question what I was doing in Arizona and whether we wouldn’t have been better off in New York. That saying “you can’t go home again” – it’s real. First, would the cats have both gotten cancer? Were their cancers caused by the Arizona sun or air or water? The vets assured me they were not. Second, Arizona not being as big of a legal market as New York and LA, there’s not as much paying work here, which can be unsettling to say the least. And of course there’s nowhere near the culture available in New York.

I miss my life as a dance blogger. I miss the ballet, the theatre (Broadway, off-Broadway, and off-off-Broadway), the wine bar around the corner from my apartment (can’t remember the name but can remember right where I always used to sit), Fiorellos after the ballet, watching Yankees games at The Emerald Inn, the cafe on the Hudson River, Brighton Beach boardwalk, Lincoln Center, Strawberry Fields, 57th Street, Dance Times Square, the Algonquin lounge, the New York City Bar Association (yes, I have fond memories of that as well, perhaps ridiculously), the Center for Fiction, the Strand and St. Marks Bookshop. I miss my friends. For weeks after Katusha’s death all I could think about was what if I’d moved back and lived there with her, writing at my desk with our view of Columbus Avenue out the bay window, her wrapped around my feet, cuddling on the futon with her while I read. Would I have been happier?

(Above: Rhea in the bay window of our old apartment, 71st Street and Columbus right after I adopted her in 2011; below, Lincoln Center, 9/11 memorial dance performance, 9/11/2011).

Of course, if we’d have moved back to NY instead of Phoenix after leaving California, we never would have lived in this house I so love and that Rhea and Katusha so loved and that Sofia so loves, and that is now so full of memories – most wonderful, some painful.

And we would never have adopted the crazy, playful, always-excited, always getting into something, often barking to let me know the neighbor is in his back yard, always pulling on her leash, but always available for cuddles whenever I need her to be, our sweet, kind of scary-coyote-looking but always lovable “desert dog”.

A few nights ago I had a dream that really made me think all over again about my life and helped me put things into perspective.

When I first moved to New York in the early nineties (I feel so old!) I had a friend whose father was a doorman in a nice Upper West-Side apartment building. (I don’t have a picture of him, but the below picture is of me with the doorman in the building I lived in at the time, 1993.)

One day the friend and I were out and about in the city and we had to visit her dad so she could get something (keys I think). Anyway, while we were in his building, a very elegantly-dressed elderly woman emerged from the elevator and walked through the lobby, full of energy and spark. My friend’s dad greeted her, wished her a happy birthday, and helped her into the cab he’d hailed for her. She was very sweet and thanked him profusely. After she took off, he told us she’d just turned 97. I remember thinking how wonderful that you could live to be such an age in such a big city and do so with such vigor and glamour. This was back when New York was expensive but not exorbitant like it is today, and you didn’t have to be an investment banker to afford a small place.

So my dream was weird, as dreams always are. In it I was somehow that woman. Obviously I was much later in my life than I am now. But it was me. And I was living with a cat and a small dog. They weren’t exactly Katusha and Sofia, but they inhabited their essences, you know what I mean? In the dream I knew it was them, basically. I was happy looking out my window over Lincoln Center (which was based on the apartment of another friend I met later), waiting to go somewhere.

But then in the dream for some reason I started to remember the big “desert dog” I’d had long, long ago, whom I couldn’t bring with me here. I saw her always-happy face. And remembered her silliness and constant excitement over her ball and her tug toy. And her barking. And her leash pulling. And her antics. And my always unsuccessful attempts to control her.

And I missed her so badly it hurt. I missed her and our lives back in the desert house with the back yard so very much.

I woke up in a sweat. And I realized I was happy here. Even though I loved my life in New York as the cat lady, the dance blogger, the girl always about town, I really loved big crazy dog and our lives in the desert. And I wasn’t ready to leave it yet.

(Above: with Najma, my first NYC kitty, in my Upper West-Side studio loft, around 2004.)

After I woke I started to think about the things I love here: the Desert Botanical Gardens (specifically, seeing Ballet Arizona perform there, and bring-your-dog days), the Heard Museum (of Native American art), the Poisoned Pen and Changing Hands bookstores, the galleries of Old Scottsdale and Roosevelt Row in downtown Phoenix, the Musical Instrument Museum, moonlight walks and wild yoga at The Southwest Wildlife Conservation Center, all of the wonderful animal sanctuaries, Saguaro National Park, trips to Sedona and Verde Valley wine country, the DeGrazia Studio in Tucson, the Tucson Festival of Books, walks with the dogs around the lakes in my neighborhood, plays at Tempe Performing Arts Center, dining on the canal at Olive and Ivy in Scottsdale, road trips back to LA to see friends, hanging out with friends here, particularly all those I’ve made volunteering with animals and in my romance and crime writer groups.

Maybe someday I will go back to New York. Maybe someday I’ll be that elegant old lady with the sweet petite fur babies in her one room apartment excitedly sprinting through a lobby on her way to her cab (or self-driving Uber, or Jetson air mobile?) ready to be whisked off to the ballet or a play or reading or restaurant for birthday dinner. But for now I’m happy in my desert house with my desert life as a “desert dog mom.”

Sorry, this was navel-gazing to the max! But writing often helps to me figure things out. So if you got this far, thank you for indulging me 🙂