Devon the Cat, 2012-2026

Content Note: This post is about unexpected pet loss. It's mostly a remembrance of our cat Devon, but after the last bunch of photos there are descriptions of medical details.

A newsletter about Worldcon is forthcoming but I needed to write this first.

Stu and I decided to adopt a kitten together a few months after I moved in with him, in the summer of 2012. We put in a request with Glasgow’s Cat Protection Agency and were a little stunned to be paired with a kitten almost immediately. Millie wasn’t thrilled with the new arrival – ostensibly a companion for her – but she came to a grudging acceptance of his presence over time.

He was a scraggly little guy with the loudest purr either of us had ever heard. He arrived to us with ear mites, which was unfortunate, and the name Floyd, which was arguably worse. We changed his name to Devon – (I said the patterns of dark and light on his fur made me think of the way clouds cast fast-moving shadows on the Devonshire moors; Stu said “like Devon Miles in Knight Rider!”) – and treated the mites by rubbing oil into his ears, so during his weeks of optimal kitten cuteness he had a perpetually beleaguered and bedraggled air. But he’d soon bloom into the most photogenic cat I’ve ever had.

He was a playful, mischievous, vocal, highly strung little rake. He once stole a whole chicken carcass out of a momentarily unattended stock pot and was almost under the bed with it before I caught him. He had a baffling appetite for carbs; we quickly learned we couldn’t leave bagged bread in places he could reach. Mercifully he had much higher charisma than dexterity, was more a comedy bard than rogue – literally, as he developed a habit of plucking my harp’s strings with his teeth.

His Glasgow-era exploits included falling out of a first-floor window twice (never hurt, but quite confused) and into the litterbox at least once – which I only discovered as I went to pet him when he wandered into the kitchen. At my outraged exclamation of “he’s covered in poo!” Stu started laughing with an incapacitating helplessness (that would persist for several years at any mention of the incident), leaving me to mutteringly pick Devon up and take him into the shower to wash him off.

I think he became more my cat, after that.

He loved being petted, but was easily overstimulated; Stu and I joked that he had an affection gauge that, once filled up, provoked him to violence (never damaging, but often startling). I learned early on that he calmed down almost instantly if I slowly stroked from between his eyes down to his nose, something that I did for him so often that I unconsciously started doing it for myself.

Stu moved to Canada with the cats in October of 2016, and we’d thought that Devon would have an easier time of it than Millie; he’d always seemed the more curious and adventurous of the two. But it turns out that Millie is so Stu-oriented that she settled in fine the second she was reunited with him, while Devon slept under the covers with us for several days as he adjusted to the change in scene.

He was never much of a lap cat; he liked to be taller than us wherever possible. He would lengthen himself along me while I read in bed, stand on my belly if I read on the couch, or curl up by my head while I watched TV. Sometimes he’d gently pat me for attention during a film or TV show; it always made me feel so blessed, so actively accompanied.

I think I took the same photo of him almost every night for over a year after we moved into our current place, and I’m so glad for every one of them. I’m so glad I never took his sweetness, his proximity, his affection for granted.

On August 30, I won a Hugo Award in Anaheim. On August 31, our cat-sitter reported that Devon hadn’t eaten his breakfast. We asked our sitter to monitor him, let us know if anything else seemed amiss – after all, we were headed home to Ottawa the next day. The morning of September 1, we woke to texts saying Devon still wasn’t eating and was making noises of distress. We asked them to take him to the emergency vet, and over the course of the next couple of hours while we cabbed to LAX and navigated the airport, we learned his condition on arrival was critical, that he was severely, irrecoverably anemic, and after stabilizing him enough to run tests, the vet found a mass on his heart that was most likely aggressive lymphoma. 

There’d been no signs that we or our cat-sitter could detect. In retrospect, he’d been sleeping on our bed more often, but his appetite and energy levels were all fine. Millie is two years older, and we’d been keenly aware of her entering into her seniority, feeling her sleekness diminishing little by little under our hands – but Devon was still spry, still woke us with his breakfast yowling and bed-jumping and loud purrs. It was so shocking, so unexpected. On the way home Stu and I kept reaching for each other in airports and airplanes and crying. My brother called to congratulate me on the award, asked me how I was feeling, and I just choked up.

Devon held on long enough for us to arrive. He perked up a little when we got there, enough for me to be able to believe that he knew it was us through the pain, registered that we were there with him, telling him how much we loved him and how sorry we were. But he was already so far gone. We helped him the rest of the way. 

Fourteen years, and just like that, no more. Combing through photos to share, I'm struck by how many different versions of ourselves Devon witnessed, how many phases of life: countries, sickness and health, lengths of hair, shapes of home, travels and lockdowns, studies abandoned and pursued and concluded, shifts in style and living, the beginnings and endings of friendships. I think of all the loved ones I assumed would meet him eventually, who never will. Stu said he keeps thinking of future things, things we’d be doing in a few weeks or months, that he’d imagined Devon present for, just out of habit, and how strange it is to think of doing anything without him here.

I keep thinking I see him out of the corner of my eye, sleeping on my pajamas or the bed in our spare room. Millie, who never more than tolerated him, keeps mewing in disconsolate confusion at his absence – and I say that as if we aren’t doing the same thing, moving from room to room under our own power and suddenly startled into voiced and aching grief at the memory of him, the fact that memory’s all we have left.

But it's still a blessing, to have had him at all, for as long as we did.

He was such a sweetheart, such a very good cat. We miss him very much.