Mira turned 20 last year!

We found Mira in 2005.

If I hadn't been in the back yard at the right time, I wouldn't have heard her blind cries from the other side of the fence, as she dragged herself out from under the neighbor's house with failing strength.

La and I were pretty sure that without the immediate rescue, Mira wouldn't have survived the night. If a hungry animal hadn't taken her, the cold would have. She would have had one miserable day outdoors for her tiny life, and that would be it.

Instead she got formula, several flea baths, a hot pad to sleep on, and more formula. La was determined to show the world the proper way to treat this little creature, and we and the housemates threw ourselves into it. In a matter of weeks Mira's kitten ears unfurled and she doubled in size. We gave her run of the house, her own litter box, then pride of place on the bed between sleepy humans.

We also gave her an absolute flood of affection and joy every day, which she reciprocated. In a few months she had doubled in size again, and we had a strong, graceful, lightning-fast, endlessly curious, and surprisingly well-adjusted little force of nature inhabiting the house.

For a while one of her brothers would hang out in the back yard, and they would play. She briefly met her mother but didn't seem to recognize her. Other cats that weren't family made her nervous, and she would try and fight them. Sometimes I would have to charge outside to break up some ruckus, and she'd run past me in the other direction, into the house. Other times she would just trot up to me, like, "Where have you been? We're supposed to be patrolling this perimeter together, human."

I discovered that she liked to follow me around. In the evening, I led her out onto the sidewalk, then to the corner. She sniffed everything, and hid under the parked cars when the moving ones rumbled by, and she always looked for me and caught up when I moved along. Pretty soon me and La and the other housemates were taking her on walks all around the neighborhood. Whenever we crossed a street we stood patiently on the other sidewalk until she worked up the nerve to canter across and join us. A little bit at a time, she developed her habits for avoiding cars and other dangers, and for three years, taking Mira out for the pre-bedtime walk was a household tradition.

We got a place in San Jose, so I wouldn't have to risk my life driving over Highway 17 to get to work. It was Mira's first big move, and we engineered it carefully, sticking close as she emerged from the box and cautiously learned the extent of her new empire.

The house was two stories with a basement apartment. One day I was sitting at my desk on the top floor, and saw Mira's face outside the window. The window was set into the roof, and Mira had learned how to jump from the back railing to the eaves on the porch to the top of the house, and was standing on the little one-foot-wide strip of rooftop that sloped away from the window. Beyond was a 30-foot drop to the sidewalk. I wanted her inside the house pronto, so I opened the window.

The lesson she learned - of course - is that if she wanted into the house, sitting outside the door was the slow way: She got better results climbing up onto the roof and yelling at us from that precarious cliff outside the window. If we ignored her pleas and left the window shut, she would just yammer on, with us being quietly nervous inside. I think the longest we held out was half an hour. We knew it was a bad habit but didn't know how to un-train her, and we lived in fear of finding her smashed body on the sidewalk in front of the house one morning. But she never fell off. One time she got into a fight with another cat while on the roof which was very alarming, but she didn't fall off even then.

We definitely did almost lose her in San Jose, and I will never forget how close it came. One night La and I took Mira out for our usual walk, and we went up a block, then another. The city was especially quiet, and the conversation was good, and we kept going. Block after block we waited at the corner, and Mira trotted happily across the street, then along behind us, sniffing and darting.

Something like ten blocks north of the house, we finally turned around. We made sure Mira saw us, and was following us as usual. Then we kept talking. 20 minutes later we arrived at the house and went inside, and settled in.

20 minutes after that I was walking upstairs and suddenly stopped cold. "Where's the cat?" I said, out loud.

Heart in my mouth, I ran around the house, then ran around outside. We both called for her. Nothing. Feeling like time was essential, I hauled my bike outside and began pedaling north, retracing our route, calling her name every block. Mira had a chip in her ear but no collar. If she wandered away from our path, I would never, ever find her.

Eight blocks up, I suddenly heard a frantic meowing, and turned to look behind me. Mira had come running out from underneath a parked car and was jogging behind the bike, calling to me over and over. I nearly burst into tears, then nearly fell off the bike, then slowed down and turned a half-circle. She jogged behind me, eight blocks back the way we had come. When I got near the house, she ran past me, up to the front steps, then sat down to wait for me to open the door like it was the end of any other walk.

We fed her a small mountain of cat treats that night.

She loved being an indoor-outdoor cat. We knew it was dangerous but she lived so much more exciting of a life, and seemed all the more happy to be inside with us each night. Her favorite spot in the San Jose house was the top of an enormous armoire which had a commanding view of the living room and front door, but she spent plenty of time on my desk, or in La's study, lounging in a cat bed while we tinkered nearby. She oversaw many dinner parties, and collected endless praise for her self-possessed but friendly nature.

"Self-possessed" really is her main attribute. She's determined to do exactly what she wants, and it's hard to stop her. The best part is, most of the time, exactly what she wants to do is love you. And that's poetry. She'll sit on your chest, bump her nose onto yours, lean into both your hands on either side, and stare into your eyes with her own deep emerald ones and purr.

Are you sitting in a chair? Mira will jump up onto the arm and perch on it. If you lean your head against her, she'll lean back.

Are you in a bed? Mira will nose her way under the covers and curl up in a ball against your chest. Purr, purr.

Bend down and show her your back when she's on a table, and she'll step onto you and take a ride around the house.

Present her with your forehead, and she'll try and lick it clean with her little sandpaper tongue. Humans are so bad at cleaning; we clearly need help.

When she was a bit smaller she would climb onto my shoulders and drape herself around my neck like a scarf. If you put on a sweater, she will turn it into a platform and take a nap.

In 2010 I moved to Oakland. This was the first place I'd rented where I had permission to make changes, and the first thing I did was install a cat door, so I didn't have to be Mira's butler all day long. The door had a cover you could use to lock it at night, which was important because Oakland had plenty of critters wandering around. She spent a lot of time roaming the back yard, or piloting a cat bed in a sunbeam next to my desk. That was a tough couple of years for me, and the continuity of her presence, and her cat-like priorities in life, set a good example.

After that was a place in Berkeley, with beautiful hardwood floors but no cat door. She and I would sit together on the front step in the evenings. Around this time my sleep apnea started to give me terrifying nightmares, and since I was living alone I relied on Mira to shine a beacon with her animal nature whenever I woke up confused and afraid in the dark. Her self-possession, her being totally immune to any and all metaphysical worries, the fact of her warm nose, instantly banished the horror. She and it just could not exist at the same time.

I owe her a lot, you know.

A year after that, she found her best home on Linden Street. The cozy downstairs apartment was half her empire, and the garage was the other half. I installed cat doors in both, and she started lounging and patrolling between them, with the back garden as her hunting ground. She would catch and eat spiders, which always shocked me. Did she know whether they were poisonous? Could she determine that by smell, or was she just winging it?

I filled the place with potted plants, inside and outside. Surprisingly, Mira never developed a habit of chewing on them, though she would nibble on the crabgrass whenever it invaded the back yard, and inevitably hork it back up about an hour later. All my life I've read conflicting information about why cats do this and whether it should be encouraged. It was a moot question really, because I hated crabgrass in the back yard and would dig it out as soon as I saw the first blade, so Mira didn't get much chance to "have the salad" as I called it.

Shortly after me and Mira moved in, I met Kerry. Kerry adored Mira. Everyone adored Mira of course, but Kerry also backed it up with work. She helped me find better flea medication, better food bowls, better kibble. We got regular vet checkups going. Kerry had her own cat too and we split our time between her place and mine. Mira and Princess never met, but they were a kind of extended clan. They ended up sharing a lot of the same accessories.

In 2017, Kerry noticed a lump on Mira's rear leg, and a quick vet visit later I learned it was an aggressive tumor, and made the agonizing decision to surgically remove the leg.

Mira spent a week or so high as a kite and resting next to me and Kerry in turns, while we made sure she didn't tear her stitches. As soon as we let her get up, she fell over. Then she got up again, and fell over. Again, and again, for almost half an hour, while Kerry and I looked on tearfully. And then at long last, she formed a tripod, and stood there. Two days later she was hopping around sniffing at things like usual. A few days after that she was chasing cat toys again.

In retrospect, we understood that the dismay had been all ours. Mira didn't spend a single second feeling sorry for herself. She just kept falling down and getting back up until something worked. We loved her for that. We tried to take her lesson.

We didn't know if the cancer was gone. We didn't know if she had ten days, or a month. We hoped for one more year.

We got nine!

Now it's 2026, and Mira has spent most of the 2020's being a grand old lady, hopping between kitchen, garage, and a series of sunlit tuffets in the back yard. When I've been here in the evening, I've taken her on walks, out past the driveway and around the block while she hops curiously from one plant and post to another. Over the years at Linden St a long procession of housemates, upstairs and downstairs, have adored her.

In time she lost the ability to jump down from the cat door in the kitchen window, so I removed it. For the last five years everyone has taken care to haul her inside before nightfall, every single day, because one more encounter with a raccoon would surely be her last.

This year, and last year, her little routine with me has been to barge in through the cat door, yell at me, cram herself under the covers and purr me back to sleep, then yell me awake again about an hour later. With part one accomplished, she then sits down and waits patiently until I have enough clothing on, and when I open the door she hops around the side of the house to the hose in the back yard, which I turn into a little waterfall just for Her Majesty, and she has a long drink. Sometimes I stand there and pet her, sometimes I head back around put the bags on my bike. Either way I shut the hose off a few minutes later, and she settles down on whichever of the pads in the back yard is currently lit by a sunbeam. Then I'm off to work.

I have spent time living in other places, but Mira stays put. I made that decision nine years ago. The gate and the fence now form a fine boundary to her indoor-outdoor life, and she's very familiar with the layout. As a very old cat, probably with memory issues, I want her to remain in familiar surroundings, even if it means we're apart. I absolutely owe it to her. She's been with me for almost half my life, and all that time she's reminded me to enjoy sunbeams, breathe deeply in the present, and put metaphysical fears in their place. Even when I've been away for months, the knowledge that she's been here asserting her view of the world through those emerald cat eyes has reassured me that life makes sense.

Nine years on three legs is definitely - pun intended - a good run. And this whole time, her retinue of human servants has kept her safe in spite of herself, since if she had access to the outdoors at night she would definitely go there, raccoons be damned. But the threat that came calling wasn't a raccoon, or a dog, or a hawk, or a rat trap, or a car. At long last, it was the cancer.

At first I thought she had an infection, because the left side of her face seemed swollen. I took her to the vet and they discovered a growth on her upper palate, starting to push her teeth out of the way. It wasn't painful, as far as we could tell, but it was already growing into both her mouth and her sinuses, and it was growing fast, and there was absolutely nothing anyone could do about it. Surgery was impossible. Another separate tumor was growing near her nose, and where there's two, there's possibly a dozen.

Gradually, agonizingly, over a period of weeks, Mira has been losing her ability to eat, and breathe. Both are already difficult for her. Soon one or the other will be impossible. There are mobile vets who will make house calls and provide two injections - one the equivalent of morphine, the other a drug to stop the heart - and now I have another choice to make, and there is only one option: All I can decide is when. In the morning she still yells me awake, though her voice is weakening. In the evening she still sits happily on my chest, though I can tell purring is harder. I don't want her to starve or choke to death. I owe it to her to do something.

Twenty years is astonishing for a cat that's lived such an adventurous indoor-outdoor life as little Mira. For almost half that time, ever since the leg came off, I've been fighting within myself over the desire to truly feel that little surge of joy I get when she trills "hello" to me from a sunbeam in the back yard, and the need to build a wall of emotional detachment so I can make a hard decision if - when - the cancer returns. I had no idea I would get nine more years. Mira has kept on being her self-possessed cat self straight through it, and it's a lesson for us all. I'm still doing my best to learn it. I have maybe a week left with her, maybe only a few more days. We will sit together in a sunbeam.