Katrine
Katrine (pronounced ka-TREEN), aka Katrini, Jelly (short for Jellybean), Cute-trine, KAT-trin. Nov. 25, 1999-Jan. 4, 2016
We named her after Loch Katrine in Scotland, where we went the summer of 2000. Loch Katrine was the scene of Sir Walter Scott's poem, The Lady of the Lake. When we visited Katrine's namesake lake that summer, we found out the pronunciation of the name had its emphasis on the first syllable (i.e. the Scottish version of Kathryn), but we decided to continue our original pronunciation. She quickly made friends with Toby, played with him, and looked up to him as a big brother. He was her role model, and unfortunately she picked up some of his bad habits!
Katrine was a rescue by a friend of mine in the DePaul Library. Her mother had given birth to kittens in my friend's garage, and while the mother was feral and unreachable, Katrine was socialized and brought into the house. Alas her brother did not survive. (Subsequently her mother gave birth to two more litters before finally getting caught, neutered, and brought inside; my friend also adopted all of the kittens from those litters). Her introduction to us was somewhat traumatic. When we visited my friends house to take her home, she managed to escape her room and got herself caught under a kitchen cabinet. The cabinet had to be disconnected from the wall to extract her. When we got home we put her in a small room by herself and closed the door before introducing her to the other cats. The next morning when I went to check on her I couldn't find her at first, and finally found her hiding behind the huge computer monitor!
We adopted Katrine when she was four months old, the first time we had had a kitten that young. Needless to say, it was quite an entertaining several months to live with such a bundle of energy. One episode while she was still a kitten was legendary and often talked about in subsequent years. During one of her mad dashes around the house Katrine sprang up and got caught on a screen door. My immediate reaction in surprise was to exclaim, "Ka-treeen!" Later we used that inflection whenever she would do something naughty or silly. Katrine was quite shy and timid, and we quickly discovered that she was a master at finding hiding places, some of which Sparkle had used. We became convinced that the spirit of Sparkle was guiding Katrine to find the choice hiding places, even finding ones that Sparkle hadn't used; the presence of Sparkle's spirit was almost palpable.
Katrine gradually became bolder at approaching us for affection, but it had to be on her terms; if we approached her, she would bolt away. She discovered the benefits of my petting, and would come up to me for some pets. In the early days she would also join us in bed for a few minutes and cuddle next to one of us, but never for very long. Katrine also got better at vocalizing her needs, having found her own voice. When we first adopted her, she imitated Toby's meows, but her meows soon became quite distinctive and communicative. After Toby died in May, 2007, she assumed wakeup call duties (usually around 4 am!) by persistently scratching on the side of the bed. After we adoped Calvin and Clover in 2009 she often shared wakeup duties with Calvin, the two of them acting as a tag team. When we moved to a new house in the fall of 2007, it took her awhile to adjust but soon adapted to the increased space and safe places for naps. In warmer weather she would occasionally join us on the patio with the other cats, and gradually became bolder at exploring the patio.
In the fall of 2013 she was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism. We managed to control the disease initially by sprinkling liquid generic tapezole in some canned food, but blood tests revealed the medicine adversely affected her liver, so we switched to a special diet of Science Diet Y/D, which managed to keep her thyroid in check. Because of her special diet, whenever we would go away on a lengthy trip (3-4 times a year) we would lock her in our guest room with her own litterbox, food and water. When we'd get back she would let us know her displeasure at being cooped up; the length of time for her protests seemed to be in direct proportion to how long we were gone! We had to do this to her several times in the fall of 2015, and each time we released her from her room she would make a beeline for the outdoors onto the patio to join the other cats. One time she became so bold as to first visit our neighbor's deck (she had never ventured that far before!) and then go to the house on our other side while a party was going on! We were amazed at how bold she had become.
In late October she stopped eating and tests revealed she had liver cancer. Rather than subject her to an invasive biopsy and treatments, we opted for palliative care, giving her any food she would eat. She hung in there for over two months before her eating became more picky and she gradually became weaker. In early December she began lying on Alison's lap for hours at a time; up until then she had never been a lap cat, but in the last month of her life she clung to Alison and even sat on my lap briefly the day before we put her to sleep. A housecall vet visited us early in the morning of January 4, 2016 and eased her journey from this life to the Rainbow Bridge. She knew all of our cats, past and present, with the exception of Sparkle and Leo, and lived the longest at just over 16; at almost 16 years we had her the longest of any of our cats so far and outlived her mother (who died of cancer in 2012) and all but one of her half-siblings.
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Katrine lying in the doorway leading to our deck. In her bolder moments, she would go onto the deck, but being half inside and half outside felt safe to her! |
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Katrine sitting on a barstool in our basement, emulating a pose Sparkle took occasionally. Despite the pose, Katrine was a teetotaller. |
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Katrine lying on our bed |
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Another view of Katrine lying on our bed |
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This photo illustrates how long Katrine could be when she put her mind to it! |
You can see more recent pictures of Katrine at our Flickr photo site.