We lost Lily today

July 22nd, a week shy of one year since we adopted her.

Some time in the early morning she snuck out to the balcony, and fell off the railing to her death.

It sounds comical, irresponsible. I recall the year before Ben and I, half-jokingly and half-seriously, promised each other that we would not blame the other if one of our cats manage to fling themselves off the balcony. Our friend Glenna told us quite nonchalantly that our building’s pet owners Facebook group occasionally had people posting to please claim your dead cat from our balcony.

I’m still thinking of all the actions I could have done differently in the last few hours to avoid it.

—

I was awake from three to five in the morning due to some insomnia. I got up to get water, do stretches, or whatever I thought my mind wanted me to do so I could go back to sleep. I remember smelling some lingering gas in the kitchen from when Ben was baking nuggets off the night before, and figured the cats could use some ventilation.

As I left the kitchen, I saw Lily in the half-light, awake but still in her sleeping spot on top of the ottoman. I gave her a few pats and left her alone.

As I opened the window to the balcony I asked myself if it was a good idea. I shrugged it off, figuring we’ve done this so many times in the past and our cats seemed smart enough; it was only a few hours until light, until Ben got up, and I wasn’t expecting our cats to start frolicking in the balcony. The worst I expected was that one of them might uproot one of my seedlings, which they’ve often done in the night.

And I think there was my mistake.

—

Ben’s words jolted me awake.

‘I can’t find Lily’.

It’s normal to not find your cat in the middle of the day. Our cats tended to find good sleeping spots out of sight. Lily in particular learned to open our wardrobe and turn it into her cubbyhole. But it’s not normal to not find your cat first thing in the morning. They would come to whoever got up first. If we took long to get up, Luna would start bounding on the bed, and Lily would be under it.

We phoned reception and they confirmed that the unit nineteen floors and a unit apart reported a cat falling into their balcony at around 5:36 a.m., and that the cat ‘wasn’t alive’.

I think that even if we didn’t come down to confirm the body, we knew without a doubt it was Lily.

She was always a ball of energy, too smart, too careless, for her own good. Let me tell you about Lily.

—

Before I do, you must be wondering—how difficult is it to just keep the damn balcony closed off? It was an obvious risk, especially for cats. When I first moved in with Ben I was terrified of even approaching the railing. I get nervous whenever we invite children out to the balcony.

The answer is that we wanted our cats to be free to do what they wished. We live in a condo unit. While it’s large for Philippine standards, it’s small by Western standards. Our cats have to contend with the closed space all their lives. Luna and Lily both loved hanging out in the balcony. They would bask in the afternoon sun, smell the plants, and just stay there to keep us company. They like the ‘fresh’ air, the new sounds and smells. Whenever they hear the curtains drawn or the balcony door open they make a beeline for it, sometimes even foregoing their food.

Ben and I agreed that it was more cruel to keep them shut in all their waking hours. Hence, embracing a bit of the Filipino fatalism we resolved to give them what we felt was the best life, as far as we could. A month or so ago I bought them leashes to ease them into ‘walkies’, but to be honest it was a tall order.

As for cat-proofing, our building is a bit stringent and especially since we’re not unit owners, we have fewer rights. I got excited at the prospect of installing top-down wire netting on our balcony, seeing a few units do it, but it was going to be a PHP 50k spend for a unit we don’t own, and there was no guarantee that our landlord would agree to it.

—

When I adopted Lily she was only several weeks old, weighed 500 grams, and was severely undernourished—her stomach was bloated yet her spine was showing through. I reckon she was days away from dying of starvation. I picked her off the street. She had no energy to even run away from me. Ben used to joke that I only got to adopt her because she couldn’t run.

Over time, she grew into what I argued was a prettier cat than Luna. Luna took weeks to stop being hostile to her, but she loved Lily more than Lily loved her.

Lily was a handful as a cat. In contrast to Luna, who had occasional feistiness and played with you a bit, Lily was something else.

She’d dig at the litter box for no reason. She’d try to ‘dig’ other things—a surplus of bin liner hanging off the bin, clothes, sheets. She obsessively claws at the washing machine outlet pipe in the bathroom, to the point that we’ve had a few floods in there because of her. She had a battle going on with the water buckets in the balcony. She had a problem with them standing upright, and would often tip them over. She would uproot my seedlings, although Luna also did that. She liked resting on the gutter on the sides of the balcony, even if she got wet. All the little nuisances she introduced in the household, and her penchant for the gutter earned her the nickname ‘trash kitty’ or ‘gutter kitty’.

In the year we had her, we’ve had a few heart-stopping moments when we’d catch her walking on the balcony railing. We’d hiss at her, belt her, spray at her to discourage the behaviour. But I guess she knew she could do what she wanted if she knew the right time. It was so bad that Luna was catching on for a while back there, the chonk.

But what I loved and adored about Lily was her habit of tucking herself in. She liked being underneath something—sheets, floor rug, pillows. I have a lot of photos of her doing it herself. Her behaviour seemed so human.

She had two sleeping modes—derp and snail. She had a ‘Karen’ meow—just prolonged, complainy meows when she didn’t want to be picked up. But she also meowed expressively when she felt sooky and wanted someone to cuddle her.

She loved the balcony. There is a corner that she owns where she just sits moment after moment, even during the hottest part of the day, looking at world below. She’d always sit the same way. She’d been doing it for months. I could never have taken that away from her.

She never bit or scratched me. She’d complain about being picked up but Ben told me it was unusual how chill she was about me and my gigil and face-smooshes. A few days ago I told Ben that Lily is like a ragdoll when you carried her.

—

The unit owner that found her had enough care to place her inside a plastic bag, then inside a shoebox. Ben and I had been crying beforehand, and he insisted that I not look at the body.

When he saw that he could, he uncovered the part of Lily I could see without remorse. She had her paws over her face, like she was asleep. In these circumstances we cannot really bury her, not that it was easy to do in Metro Manila even in the best of times. We laid her to rest in the trash—she began and ended a trash kitty.

We visited the unit owner that reported her. The woman and her husband heard the loud noise, and said Lily died within seconds. ‘We understand how you feel. We have three dogs.’ We left before we became a sobbing mess in front of two strangers at eight in the morning.

—

To be honest, I’m still blaming myself for the few hours’ actions I could have changed. I’m a little ashamed I had to be the cat parent whose cat died from something completely avoidable. I don’t know. Maybe instead I could think that Ben and I gave her an extra year of life, where she was living a really good life—all the fancy wet food and biscuits, clean filtered water streaming from a drinking fountain, so many pillows and sheets to hide under, so many toys, so much love and security… Our cats are so vulnerable when they sleep. They don’t even budge when we rub their bellies.

Just weeks ago Ben and I were discussing the future—it was largely impractical to get our cats to Australia when the time came. Australia has one of the most stringent biosecurity laws in the world that the requirements almost felt insurmountable, if not impractical. I was sobbing at the thought that I would have to leave them one day.

This must sound cheesy, but perhaps Lily went in the way that fit her temperament. She loved to live on the edge and just kept picking away at everything. Even then, the freedom we thought we gave our cats isn’t worth typing all this. We’ll be much more stringent with Luna.

—

Ben and I are not trying to find Lily’s replacement, but Luna does need a companion in this tiny space that is her life. I still walk past a lot of streets cats whenever I’m out. Just last Sunday I found a kitten, alone, hiding in a bush by a busy street, meowing for her parent. Whenever I walk past a frail-looking kitten I wonder in my head how many weeks it’ll last before starvation takes hold, or a car runs it over.

There are so many people out there giving street cats a new lease on life, saving them from the streets. Luna and Lily are the first pets I’ve had that I truly lived in close quarters with. I grew up with the standard of having pets as keeping the dog leashed nearly all its life, and feeding your ‘pet cat’—a stray that happens by your home—whatever leftovers your household had for the day.

We’ll try again and we’ll be better.

Signing off with all my love for Lily, whom we also called LehLeh and LerLer.