Sad News about our Willow - and a Safety Warning about SureFlap

It's hard for me to write about things that hurt. I wrote multiple posts about rough life moments, but they never seem good enough to honor the memory of the one who is missing. So I bottle them up, a hidden journal close to my heart, too fragile to be seen by others' eyes.

This post won't be good enough, by far. But it's time to share it, and move on.

You might have noticed that we've stopped being responsive to texts/emails/missed calls for multiple weeks this summer. Happy blog posts were put on hold. That's because we have been grieving by day, and searching night, after night, after night.

Willow is missing.

She's been a happy nighttime-indoor / daytime-outdoor cat for the past 8 years of our lives, she's spent the past 12+ years as part of our family. Willow was pretty much our first "child" and the reason we started using this blog more. We had adopted her as a 3-months-old white fluff ball, with angel looks but devilish behavior. I'll tell you her adoption story sometime, when you catch me at night near a campfire. Right now, it's too soon.

But I can tell you now how she disappeared, and our hearts have been broken since it happened.

In the least, we are posting this for any small chance to save another pet from disappearing. 

As background, you might know how Greg gets excited about good internet-connected smart devices. We have multiple Roombas, each named after a different Asimov robot. You can tell them to start vacuuming through your Google Home (though you still need to pick up small items off the floor).

Our garden irrigation is controlled by a device that uses soil/slope information and weather, Rachio. 

Greg's even taken the charter for the past two years to slowly upgrade our light bulbs throughout the house to programmable Philips Hue. I can turn off all the bedroom lights at once on command to declare sleep time, or suddenly kick off a colored-light party.

Frankly, these have been so much fun, and have made life a lot easier!

The one that broke our heart is the SureFlap pet door.

The SureFlap cat flap ensures the only animal going through it is the microchipped pet you've registered. It worked great for two years since we got it. We named it RaccoonBlocker because of its main purpose: to stop raccoons from entering the garage cat door and eating her food. SureFlap connects to the app on your phone for easy control and it notifies you when your pet goes in, or out of the house.

But they had a glitch in the curfew mode that let Willow out after curfew.

We've had the curfew mode set for over a year, and it worked so well that it made us let our guards down. It would block the doors at 9pm so that Willow could not leave the garage at night, where she slept, and opened in the morning to let her come in the house. We know the curfew worked, because the app would let you know when Willow looked through a door and she would occasionally look out the garage door but not be allowed to leave.

Yet on Friday, May 15 at 11:30pm Willow left the house through the garage door, curfew untouched.

We never saw her again.

The SurePet customer service is denying it, claiming we never had a curfew set which contradicts the UI on both the phone and web. They are unresponsive after we offered to help root-cause the issue to at least make something of Willow's disappearance (case #00371387). In the meantime, do not use the curfew feature on the SureFlap pet door.

These past two months have been hard. We've been in touch with all the nearby shelters and pet hospitals from the get-go. We sent them her microchip number. We searched and called endlessly in all surrounding neighborhoods for the past two months. We spent late nights and extremely early mornings, fighting exhaustion. We've posted hundreds of flyers, walked all sorts of streets with slowly-waning hope.

Kind-hearted people in our neighborhood and surrounding ones have reached out as well, looking for her everywhere. We've investigated a bunch of leads. We've discovered a ridiculous number of cats that look so close to Willow, who are roaming in the area undaunted. The last encounter, at 4am last month, literally made me cry in a deserted parking lot. It wasn't her.

So, Willow is gone.

It was surprisingly hard to cope with the loss.

With every tiny movement at ground-level your heart jumps and you think she's back, slinking gracefully toward you. She's not, and your heart sinks so much lower. Even Fae's sweet morning smiles had faded to grey. And we couldn't even talk about it without first steeling our hearts. We had many dreams about her coming back only to wake to the nightmare of her still being missing.

In our nightly checks at all the shelters in the area over the past months, in case the microchip hadn't scanned well, we've seen hundreds of cats. Something good came out of that, but that's a story I'll tell you later (hint).

For now, we'd like to send a warm goodbye to Willow.

Thank you for being our guardian, and our friend, and our child, and our playmate, and our comfort in times of pain. We wish you were with us now. 

Looking Back

Here are some of the memory crumbs throughout the years, in reverse chronology. 

Willow guarding Fae:

Willow guarding Gaius in 2015:

Willow guarding Mara in 2014

Helping Elena create the Wedding puzzle Save-the-Dates:

Helping model a race through time in Elena's gradschool years:

Literally writing Greg's PhD thesis:

Being thoroughly vicious at times:

But in the end, still fetching that paper ball:

Thank you for joining our coast-to-coast road trip when we came to California:

We're glad you got to see the Grand Canyon (though I know, the people were more interesting than the canyon itself):

Thanks for stalking us from various bathtubs:

You used to be so small, you'd fit in Greg's hand:

You sleepily stood on chairs:

You made a great a Mărțișor token:

Thank you for being a huge part of our lives. Though we have an enormous gap in our lives, we treasure every moment we've spent together.