Kiri Speirs: 'We didn't adopt Charlie, he adopted us'

Charlie Cat adopted Zoe Wilson and watched over her while she was ill.

Opinion

Aucklander Kiri Speirs lost her 6-year-old daughter Zoe to cancer three years ago. In this blog post, she describes how a stray cat called Charlie became her unlikely source of comfort

We didn't adopt Charlie Cat, he adopted us, soon after we moved to our new house in 2008, the year before Zoe's cancer diagnosis.

We'd moved from a townhouse to a single-level house with a safe garden Zoe could play in. No more lugging washing up two flights of stairs with a strong-willed toddler, or driving to where she could walk on the grass.

It was a house that matched my dream of how family life should be, in a neighbourhood of other families, close to the zoo, playgrounds and the beach. There was even a walking school bus and a feijoa tree in the garden.

The week we moved I walked with then 2-year-old Zoe to the supermarket. She stopped at virtually every house along the way. "Look, a house, a fence. Look another house, another fence." With the right house, I felt sure we would become that perfect family, give Zoe a quintessential Kiwi childhood and that our marriage problems would become a distant memory. The addition of a household pet seemed like the icing on the cake.

Charlie showed up for the first time when we were getting ready to leave for Zoe's swimming lesson. She had a "terrible twos" meltdown about not wanting "the brown kitten eating the door" (her dad remembers this as "there's a tiger trying to eat me!").

We assured her there was no brown kitten but when I went back to retrieve something essential - an inevitable part of leaving the house with a 2-year-old - there he was, a big brown tabby with no tail strolling out of her bedroom and rubbing his face on the doorframe.

He didn't have a name in the beginning and he looked well-fed, so I didn't feed him - I was sure he belonged to some nice old lady. But he faithfully turned up every evening for cuddles and settled in for the night, hanging out in sunny spots all day in the weekends. So he became Charlie Cat and received a food bowl, a flea treatment regime and all his shots.

It turned out that Charlie was quite the character in our neighbourhood. He was a regular visitor to the fish and chip shop and the gas station, where he would wait for someone to activate the automatic doors. He was often to be seen soliciting affection from a captive audience at the bus stop.

One boy told us Charlie had also adopted them - until they got a dog - and a woman at the gas station told me he used to spend some evenings at her house too.

The thin veneer of my dream life fell apart a few months later. Zoe was diagnosed with cancer, my troubled marriage finally collapsed and my parents moved in to take care of Zoe during the day so that I could work.

I took leave only for Zoe's "long chemo days" every chemo cycle, half days for her six solid weeks of radiation treatment and her in-patient stays. It was nine months of exhaustion, barely concealed terror, vomit, tube feeds, surgeries, and scans.

It was also nine months of hope, love, tenderness and delight in my amazing daughter.

Charlie Cat was not getting his usual quota of attention, but each night he negotiated the tube that connected the button in Zoe's tummy to the pump and liquid feed she needed to survive, settling himself between us in the bed or on the pillow above her head.

At the end of Zoe's treatment, her scans were clear, and we cautiously began to live our new normal. My parents returned to their home and Zoe resumed daycare.

Charlie still had his wandering ways and I had him microchipped. He stayed with us until early in 2012, when he began coming home less and less, until he stopped coming at all.

I looked for him on lost and found pet websites, but as his microchip hadn't been scanned anywhere, we thought he must have adopted another family or met a grim fate.

Shortly afterwards, Zoe's cancer relapsed and we had just a few short weeks left with her. A superstitious thought crossed my mind: That Charlie knew the cancer was back and that was why he had left us.

Without Zoe and without Charlie it was a very quiet house. Over the next two years I hosted the occasional foreign student for company while they studied English, and a friend's teenage daughter boarded with me for a while.

I thought rather a lot about moving house. I contemplated it casually and checked out apartment listings, but never followed through. Memories were keeping me here. And besides, it all seemed too hard.

Since his return from a two-year absence, he's given comfort to Kiri Speirs and has made friends with student boarders.

Then in October, just over two years since Zoe died, I saw two missed calls and some text messages on my phone. One, from a friend, went something like, "A vet in Pukekohe has been trying to get hold of you, they have Charlie."

I was shocked and delighted. He had been brought in by two girls after being hit by a car, but what he was doing 50km from home we didn't know. Our best guess was that the next family he adopted had decided to move there.

After authorising an x-ray (no broken bones, but bruising and fluid around his lungs, concussion and a broken canine), I arranged to pick him up the next day.

Released from his cardboard box, the first thing Charlie did was wobble unsteadily down to Zoe's room. I put one of her blankets on the floor for him, but he continued eyeing her bed and eventually tried to jump on to it. After helping him up, we napped there together until I moved him to my bed for the night.

The next day the first thing he did was go to sit in her doorway, as if guarding it or waiting for her.

Eventually he seemed to realise Zoe wasn't coming back. But he seemed to have a different purpose in life now.

I have a little shadow, who follows me around until I sit down so he can join me for a cuddle (kneading me like the 6kg kitten he thinks he is). A warm lump that appears in my bed in the middle of the night. He greets me at the door when I arrive home from work and once-silent evenings are now punctuated with one-sided conversations as I chat to him in what I will admit is a little akin to baby talk.

And there's something else. I feel my heart unfurling just a little more with every purr, with every heartfelt meow ("but I just fed you").

Even if the drifts of cat hair drive me a little nuts, I can't help feeling that Charlie has found his way home (or been guided by an angel) because it's where he's meant to be, it's where he belongs. So for the first time in a while, I feel like I've found my way home, it's where I belong too, in a house made a home by precious memories, with a little creature who helped to make some of them.

Postscript: When my next student boarder arrived, I became persona non grata as Charlie became her little shadow. Oh well, I guess he hasn't changed that much!