Melina

Melina 2009—7 Oct 2026

By Zazie Todd, PhD

On Wednesday we lost our beautiful tortoiseshell cat, Melina. She was 17.

We adopted Melina from the BC SPCA when she was around 18 months old. 

She was good friends with our cat Harley, and also with our Australian Shepherd Bodger, who she would sometimes tease by creeping up on him when he was resting. Her friendship with Bodger is immortalized in the Companion Animal Psychology logo, designed by Lili Chin, which depicts her sniffing noses with him. 

More recently, she made friends with our Shih Tzu Pepper when he joined our family. In the morning after he’d had breakfast and been outside, Pepper would often go back to the bedroom, where he and Melina would snooze near each other for an hour or two.

She was a very chatty cat and we could have long conversations together. After trips to the specialist vet, she would meow more than usual and it felt like she was telling me about her bad day. 

One time at the emergency vet clinic, one of the vet techs came from out back to tell us that she was the most beautiful cat he had ever seen. 

She was very clever, very lovely, and also fierce. In the weeks before she became ill again, she was enjoying learning to walk on the cat wheel. She only gave up climbing the curtains earlier this year.

In recent years, Melina had chemotherapy for what was presumed to be small cell lymphoma and radiation treatment for thyroid disease. She was a trooper through all of it. She was quite comfortable at our local vet clinic, where she knew and liked all of the staff. We’re grateful to all of the veterinarians and their teams for giving us extra time with her.

Her legacy lives on in my books Wag, Bark!, and of course Purr, which begins with the sentence,

“Melina is busy trying to distract me from writing this book.”

Melina was a wonderful friend and will be sorely missed.