Three Word Review: Best Kitty Ever

Let me preface this by saying my memory is not always reliable. So the events I outline here may or may not have happened the way I relate them. It doesn't matter, because it's my reality.

We picked up Kitty at the animal shelter in the spring of 2002. Cate and I went to pick her out, and I remember her picking us out just as much as we picked her. She batted at me as we walked by her cage, and then bit my hand through the bars. We were smitten. While signing off and paying the fee for her spaying, we learned her name was "Precious". That wouldn't last long. We didn't deliberate, really. We just started calling her "Kitty". It never seemed like a placeholder name...from time to time we thought we'd try a few things on for size. "Gandalf" because she was kind of gray...but she was also kind of a tiger. "Smeagol" because she was sometimes spiteful, and sometimes loving and joyous. "Samwise", but it just didn't fit.

Kitty was Kitty. She was a petite little thing, who took a while to warm up and trust us. More than once, she climbed a tree or got on the roof of the house, and meowed incessantly but wouldn't trust us to take her down. But she always loved the kids, and was always a bit of a booger. She loved to see what you were doing, and then disrupt it--reading, writing, laptop--if she wasn't being paid attention, she'd make sure she got it.

About the time she was starting to settle in and be the queen of the manor she would later become, we agreed to keep my sister-in-law's cat for a few months. Even though Maggie only stayed with us for a short while, Kitty held a grudge for at least a year, not trusting that she was secure in her surroundings, or that we were her people forever.

Then when she was something around five or six years old, everything changed. She became the most loving, trusting cat I've ever known. She'd follow our kids to the bus stop, and come back home when they got on. She'd walk around outside and hang around in the garden while we were working, or under the hammock while we rested. She loved her squirming dirt baths in the road in front of the house; she loved squirming and writhing on the concrete porch, scratching herself in the warmth. She loved sitting under the lilac bush, watching the kids as they played outside.

She also vomited. A lot. For a while, it was nearly every time she ate. It was her most annoying trait, which is pretty minor. She never dumped trash cans (well, at least not until she was in the throes of dementia, within the last six months or so), or left messes on the floor. But stepping in cold cat puke in the middle of the night can make a person forget about the good things for a brief, fleeting moment.

Her best moments were riding on my shoulder (Pirate Kitty), dashing across the lawn furiously when we were sitting out at by the fire on a warm summer evening, and when she cuddled on my hip while I slept.

Last year she started to get clumps in her hair, when grooming began to be a chore. It took us a good long time to catch up with the clumps, cutting them out and combing until she was her beautiful self again, but we did. That's one thing that makes me happy about her last year of life: she came to enjoy being combed, she knew she was loved, and she was happy right to her final days. Ben wasn't able to be with us in the vet's office as we said our final goodbyes, but he did know what was going on, and texted us to tell her he loved her.

I'll miss Kitty. There are sure to be moments where I forget she's gone, and I look to her usual lying places, expecting to see her. I'll be sad when I remember. But I'll be happy, too. She made me happy--she made all of us happy--on a daily basis. Ultimately she was Cate's kitty, and to me the two are kind of inseparable. Some of the emotion I've felt at the loss of Kitty is, I'm sure, tied to the anxiety and anticipation of Cate going away to school in New York next year. I know this. And I know Kitty's pain was short, and it is gone now. And I know when Cate leaves this place next fall, she will have a whole world in front of her, and she'll be able to blossom in a way that this place never allowed. It's all good, but it doesn't always feel that way.