Origin Stories: Mango

It's been a hard week.  Mango has been gone for a little over a week now, and it's kind of amazing how much we miss her.  It's weird, because even though it was always the five plus Mango, it's very very hard to have to tell people now that we only have five.  I can't tell if any of the other buddies have noticed, since they haven't really had any contact with her except for brief sightings since April.  

Nonetheless, it occurred to me that I never told you how I came to be Mango's Big Buddy Girl, even if she never actually saw it that way.  So here goes...

Mister and I were living by ourselves in Columbia,SC, and because every day I would come home from work and find him there in the window waiting for me, it occurred to me that he might appreciate having a buddy.  I was taking science classes at the time at the local community college, and a friend of mine who worked as a vet tech said they had a litter of kittens come in who had been born to a feral mom.  Sight unseen, I decided to adopt the tiny ginger tabby as a little sister for Mister.  

As sad as this is to say, I don't really remember seeing Mango for the first time.  I remember trying to come up with a name, and rejected a bunch of options.  I thought it might be nice for them both to have "M" names, but I also wanted something that reflected who she was.  This was slightly before the Saturday Night Live character of "Mango" was created, or perhaps just during.  She wasn't named after him, but to this day, when I have told people about our cat named Mango, people always assume she is a boy.  I named her that because of her color, not because of that character, and because Mister and Mango had a nice ring to it.  

I don't remember much either about Mango's formative months.  I don't think she played much, but she got along with Mister.  We have pictures of some of my friends holding her, because at that age she didn't really have a say in the matter.

I still regret, to this day, agreeing to let my friend pet-sit Mango at her house one weekend when I went out of town.  She had a large dog, and I found out after the fact that Mango had spent almost the whole weekend under their furniture, terrified of the dog.  When Mango started withdrawing, I always feared that perhaps it had been that formative experience that had caused it.  I felt guilty for months.

Then I found out that Mango had been a litter of three, and while one of the other kittens turned out to be friendly and outgoing, another one was exactly like Mango.  This one was withdrawn, afraid of people and other cats, and basically feral.  I felt a lot better after I heard that.  Perhaps Mango's personality had nothing to do with the dog encounter, and everything to so with her genetics, and perhaps a bad time in the birth canal.  It occurred to me that perhaps she and her sibling had lost oxygen during their birth, which might have resulted in who she eventually became.

I kept thinking she would eventually get it--that I was her friend and meant her no harm.  About six months after she came to live with me, I met Sean, the Cat Whisperer.  He couldn't get through to her either.  (I'm sure I seemed like a great bet, with not one but two cats who wanted nothing to do with him...)  

Years passed.  Mister eventually became Sean's friend, but Mister gave up on Mango.  Reggie had a brief period, when we lived in Hendersonville, where he tried to befriend her.  We'd sometimes see them snuggling on the bed, looking like two peas in a pod.  I don't know if she just didn't have what it took to maintain a kitty friendship, or if something else happened, but it wasn't long before Reggie gave up on her, too.  

It was at the first Asheville house that things started to get bad.  I may have already mentioned this in a previous blog, so stop me if you've heard this one, but when we moved to that house, we all lived down in the basement for the first few days, so that everyone could get acclimated to the new place.  We slept on the futon and the kitties had the whole finished room to smell things and explore.  When we opened the door to the room so they could go up the stairs to the rest of the house, everyone went upstairs but Mango.  We kept waiting on her to join everyone upstairs, but she never did.  We kept the door to the basement open so she could come up any time she wanted, and so everyone else could go down to visit her, to eat, and to use their litter boxes, but she never even approached the stairs, much less used them.

But I digress.  As Mango became less and less a part of the other kitty's lives, they became less tolerant of her.  Otto and Wanda had previously left her alone, but then they started picking fights with her for no reason.  The other cats sometimes joined in as well.  So that's why when we moved to the second Asheville house, Mango set up camp in the garage.  And...well, you know the rest of that story.

It was weird.  While I was at the vet last Thursday waiting to take Mango in, a woman from South Carolina was there waiting with her orange tabby, too.  We talked for a while about her brood of cats and mine, and we commented on how much our cats looked alike.  I asked her how old her cat was and where she got him.  Turns out he was 14, exactly as old as Mango was, and she'd gotten him in a shelter in South Carolina.  It was hard not to wonder if that might have been Mango's long-lost sibling, but I admit at that point I might not have been thinking straight.  It had been a rough week last week too, even before Mango had to go to the vet for her final time.  

So there you have it:  Mango's Origin Story, and Mango's last story, all rolled up into one.  It's hard to believe fourteen and a half years have passed since it began.  It all seemed to go by in the blink of an eye, but then I guess the important things in life always seem to do that.  Tomorrow, after the ground is hopefully no longer covered in snow, we will lay her to rest.

I hope wherever she is now, she's finally happy.