Beginning Again After Loss: The Complexity of Welcoming a New Cat
“You can grieve both a dream and an untold future . . . the risk of loving anything is to lose it.” -Alua Arthur from “Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real about the End”
There’s no prescription for when to welcome a new pet family member into your home after a loss—a week, month, five months, a year, more. It is as individual a decision as it was to bring your former beloved home in the first place. Others can offer insight but no one can tell you what or when is right—only you will know.
This is a refrain I heard often. It’s sound advice, given our own recent experience welcoming a new cat, Mica (rhymes with “pizza”) into our home and then making the painful decision to return her to the shelter not long after. I wasn’t expecting to adopt so soon, nor had I ever envisioned a prompt return-to-shelter situation. But after a month without Stella, I had felt ready to meet other cats, to be exposed once again to the love and companionship they offer. While all of this happened shortly after Stella’s death, I had spent the last three months in varying stages of grief—both anticipatory grief and traditional, post-death grief. The grieving, of course, continued with Mica as a new companion and intensified after surrendering her. Adopting a new cat didn’t exile the grief. Rather, it brought it into sharp relief.
Seeking Counsel from Friends
To better navigate the decision of whether to welcome a new cat home, I turned to friends who’ve lost a pet. I wanted to learn what compelled them to seek out a new companion or what made them decide to put that path on hold. My friend Andrea has been without another cat since her late Sammy passed four years ago. She’s interested in adopting again but practically, her current apartment complex doesn’t allow pets; perhaps in the future, she thinks. Tracey waited a year after her cat Jasper’s passing before welcoming a bonded pair of kittens in to join her and her senior cat, Agate. Chelse and Jordan also adopted a young cat pair a few months following their sweet Nutmeg’s passing. They found it to be a harder transition than expected, given the frequent reminders of Nutmeg they saw in Cashew and Juniper. Plus, it took awhile to find a good rhythm with their new family members.
Similar to Chelse and Jordan’s experience, I too saw Stella in Mica’s movements. Her mannerisms were more fluid, graceful, and less silly-awkward than Stella’s, and she brought her own unique mix of energy, fun, and curiosity to our home. Every so often though, I’d see Mica blend into my memories of Stella, moving as if they were one cat. This happened when Mica walked over to me on the couch, grasped a toy mouse between her paws, nestled onto a kitchen chair for a nap, or lapped up water from our dog Daisy’s bowl.
In her first few days with us, there was a moment where Mica cuddled up against me, purring up a storm and asking for pets by nuzzling her head into my hands like Stella had. My eyes welled with tears and my mind filled with memory after memory of Stella, like a slideshow on loop. Instead of being startled or afraid of my sudden expression of emotion, Mica drew closer, curling into my lap and staying there until I found calmness again. That moment turned from a sudden rush of pain into a hug that pulled me back and through, much like the comfort Stella provided me time and again.
Continuous Reminders of Loss
Beyond Mica, the smallest things still remind me of Stella: her toy rattle mouse that I found in my office and that I’ve now elevated past the reach of Luna (our remaining and original cat) and Daisy (our dog); a photo my sister texted of Stella and my nephew, who holds up Stella as if offering her as a blessing to the universe; and, weirdly, the sweeping up of litter from the bathroom floor where Mica’s litterbox resided as we got her acclimated to the house. It was a chore I did repeatedly while Stella was ill, when her own litter box was brought upstairs to make things easier for her. These reminders prompted me to wonder about what we had done—inviting even more reminders of Stella via Mica into our home. Some hours I felt regret lingering: how could I care about another cat as I did Stella?
The connection I had with Stella—the connection I deeply desire to have with another cat—feels broken beyond repair like an open dial tone forever unanswered. But I may never feel as connected to another cat as I was to Stella, and to place such an expectation on any future cat is wholly unfair. I must take them as they come and love them as they are. My grief already feels complicated (as pet loss grief can be) and adding another cat to the mix is unlikely to untangle that on its own. I didn’t expect it to either when we initially brought Mica home. I simply wanted forward movement, to be carried both back into the present and into the future.
When an Adoption Doesn’t Work Out
Unfortunately, our adoption with Mica didn’t work out. She was with us for nearly a month. I absolutely loved spending time with her. She was/is gentle, kind, playful, cuddly, silly, and incredibly sweet. She’d purr quickly when comfortable and she would find the coziest spots to lay, from a hamper filled with laundry to the space between the couch’s arm and a blanket. While we had a lot of fun getting to know Mica (now back to her shelter name of “Meeka”), we couldn’t avoid what continued to brew as each week went on: Mica and Luna were not getting along.
It’s typical for cats to warm up gradually to each other and it’s highly advisable to take introductions between cats slowly if they aren’t already acquainted. We know this and did a slow intro to both Luna and Daisy, including an isolated acclimation period with Mica only. The isolation period went well and it seemed as if the slow introductions did too and so we opened up the rest of the house to Mica. While it appeared that Mica was settling in fine, her interactions with Luna were anything but.
Prior to Mica, Luna had Stella—a young six-month-old companion who arrived into her space when she herself was less than a year old. Their integration was unexpectedly fast and they figured out their roles quickly, with Stella taking the more confident, dominant position. They also had the chance to grow up together, moving through the ups and downs of our various life transitions. Throughout her own life, I hadn’t considered Stella especially confident, but after our experience with Mica, I realized how much she was a take-charge, don’t-back-down type of cat. I took this for granted and assumed, incorrectly, that any other cat entering our home would be a good fit as long as they were relatively comfortable around other cats and dogs. We soon learned that a cat like Mica can be wonderful for us humans but not a good fit for our existing pets, especially Luna who herself is a picky, anxious, and sensitive cat.
Luna took to her new cat companion harshly—she was vocal about the intrusion into her space and we’d often find her bullying Mica, circling and cornering her, ready to pounce. Mica, in turn, retreated and expressed her stress quietly, urine-spraying around the house. We hadn’t anticipated this cause-and-effect scenario, given Luna’s prior relationship with Stella and Mica’s otherwise calm demeanor. Perhaps we were naive to assume Luna would just roll with things as she’d always done, albeit begrudgingly, and that Mica would likewise accept things as they were.
Bringing a new cat, especially a more timid one like Mica, into our established multi-pet household proved to be a difficult learning experience. David and I deliberated regularly as week after week unfolded. We also kept in touch with the shelter so that they were aware of what was happening and to gather any advice we could apply to the situation. Ultimately, we made the agonizing choice to surrender Mica. This was not a decision made lightly and it was one I never thought I’d ever make, being the animal advocate that I am. But we knew it wasn’t working and that the longer we held out, the harder it would be to make this same decision.
A more saintly person than I may have thrown all the possible fixes at the situation and decided to keep both cats, making accommodations so they didn’t have to interact much. I commend anyone who would choose this path. Perhaps it could work for many families, but for ours it wasn’t an option. Mica deserved to exist happily in a space without the threat of bullying. She deserved to fly solo or to settle in with an equally chill cat companion who would adore her. At the end of the day, Mica deserved more than we could give her. And so, we made the most compassionate choice we could—to return Mica to the comfortable, loving sanctuary of her original shelter so that she’d find a home without the stressors found in ours.
Saying Goodbye Again
I wish our adoption experience had turned out differently, but we did what we could and made what we felt was the best decision for Mica and our family. During our last week with Mica, I cried every day, mourning what was and what could have been. Our final days together felt similar emotionally to our last week with Stella. Though different, both circumstances shared loss as the throughline. Grief rushed in easily, finding the well-worn path already established after Stella’s passing.
“The nature of [a] non-death loss, in the context of one’s life, informs how the grief will be experienced,” Smith (2020) notes. Indeed, my experience of Mica’s departure felt raw, unhinged, and ugly. I felt the loss intensely, moreso perhaps because I had recently experienced a larger loss that hadn’t yet been fully grieved (a process called cumulative grief or grief overload). The timing was off, and I was off. The grief was like a river breaking through a dam—sudden, unexpected, powerful. I feel it still ebbing in and out of my consciousness, a mixture of grief from Stella’s passing and Mica’s leaving. It finds me as I walk through our home, making routine rounds. I see Stella and Mica simultaneously, batting around toy mice on the basement floor and settling into a cozy slumber on our bed. Unfortunately, one of them can no longer have these moments while the other will find them anew at a different, more comforting home. Both realities feel hard to grasp, but there they are right in front of me, sharp and unapologetic.
According to Smith (2020), “Losses can occur slowly or immediately, overtly or subtly, publicly or privately, and temporarily or permanently. Fundamentally, the defining feature of a loss is the realized experience that something is no longer present in the way that it has been in the past.” As I move forward, I know for certain that my life is and will continue to be shaped by both Stella’s and Mica’s departures. Each loss will remain with me, informing the ways I feel compassion for others moving with and through their own grief and providing me with lessons I can pull from during future trying times.
Even as I come to terms with these losses, what I can’t deny is this: that Mica brought me a joy that I hadn’t fully felt since before Stella fell ill. I began looking forward to coming home again, to lounging on the couch with everyone nearby, and to opening my heart up to love once more. Mica carried with her a continuance of Stella’s spirit—of her sweetness, her enjoyment of simple delights, her funny quirks, and her blissful contentment. I remain grateful to her for that.
Beginning Once More
With time, maybe less or more of it, we will return to shelters and rescues to meet new cats. We’ll be more prepared with additional information on the right fit for our well-established multi-pet home. And we’ll be especially tuned into who will be a good match for our feisty, opinionated cat Luna and feel comfortable with our excitable, happy-go-lucky dog Daisy.
As my friends Chelse and Jordan shared with me, welcoming in a new cat is the start of a new beginning that comes with many exciting possibilities. Perhaps the love next time around will be a slowly growing one. When we do decide to adopt a cat again, I know they’ll need to find their rhythm just as I will find mine again. Together, we’ll stumble our way through.
Continue on with my pet loss essay series by reading In & Of Grief: Navigating Pet Loss and In Memoriam: An End-of-Life Reflection.
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