It wouldn’t quite be fair to say I wasn’t considering adopting another cat, but I definitely wasn’t considering adopting two.

Turns out, life had other plans.

Ever since Ned’s passing two years ago, I’ve lived with four cats. Some people think this is a lot of cats, but it didn’t seem like a particularly large clowder to me. A few months ago, I considered adopting a diabetic ten-year-old tuxedo cat named Julio. The problem was that Julio is on a very strict diet to manage his diabetes. Since all my cats are grazers, there would be no way to keep him on his diet. So although he’s a lovely boy, I concluded that I wouldn’t be able to take him in.

The next possibility was a five-year-old blind cat named Owen. He’d been dumped in an apartment building parking lot. He was sleek, pewter-gray, and incredibly sweet. I was supposed to be writing his bio, but instead, I decided to adopt him. The next day, as I was completing an adoption application, I received an email advising me that Owen had died earlier that day. Apparently, he’d had an undiagnosed tumor on his spleen, and it burst that morning.