Our Cat Died

We have a tendency to attach too much significance to last words as though the avalanche of words in between somehow meant less by their placement in time. There is a whole collection of books based on this idea called, "the last interview: (fill in the blank).

I was just home, visiting for a few days before returning to the marshes and swamps of DC. I didn't pay much attention to the cats while I was home. Children and catching up tend to take precedence over our old pets. Note: I thought the cat was twelve. It turns out he was fourteen. And what I remember saying, because I suppose it qualifies as the last thing, "I didn't even pet the cats." At the time it seemed like a forgivable offense, an omission without any real consequence. And now that the cat is gone I keep hearing myself say, "I didn't even pet the cats."

However, now that I interrogate my memory of my time in Chico, I seem to remember stooping over once in the soft morning light and petting the ears of Murray, who is now gone. He leaned up against my leg, rubbing his head vigorously against my hand, turning again and again trying to get the perfect pet. Disclaimer: I don't know if this really happened. I may or may not have petted the cat. There's a chance that my memory has invented this for my well-being, that, in fact, I did not ever pet the cat. Honestly, I don't know.

But now I'm guilty of thinking too much about what was said last. I am not sure that we attach too much to our beginnings. Beginnings, unlike endings, are more like minor explosions than endings. Every relationship has a beginning where before there was nothing. It is like being brought into being. The first day we brought him home Murray, who was then named Mirial, because we'd been told he was a female kitten, a fact that we were only disabused of months later when we took her/him to be spayed, he hid behind the toilet in our bathroom, afraid of nearly everything.

Murray/Mirial was the kitten that I'd picked out as I'd been too young when we'd acquired our other two cats, and I was kind of miffed that he'd turned out to be such a wimp. On the second day I was hanging out with my then girlfriend when suddenly a little ball of fur flew into the room and began attacking the blinds, the blankets, and everything else in sight. We eventually had to give him/her the boot due to a collection of scratches and irritation at having our conversation interrupted by a tiny kitten trying to perform Jackie Chan like karate moves on a pillow.

In between some other things happened. For instance, after he discovered he was actually a boy, Murray grew even more in confidence, behaving, for all intents and purposes, like a dog. You could be three rooms over and call for him, and he'd come running in to see you. You could pat the bed and he'd hop up. The plus side is that unlike a dog he didn't feel the need to lick you and poop in the back yard to top things off. He loved being petted and would always turn himself practically inside out to get the proper scratch, and he'd purr like a slight motor. He was a big beautiful cat and then one day he was gone.

It happened while I was away, and I was never quite sure what the story was. One day he was just gone. We all told my mom that he'd probably been run over. However, she kept a picture up of him in the hallway and insisted that he was alive. It was my first experience of knowing that my mother could be just as loony as a child, and I joked around with her about it, calling her "crazy cat lady." Except, after he'd been gone for a couple of years my mother got a call from someone miles away telling her that a cat with her phone number on it had just been picked up by animal control. So, two or three years, I don't remember exactly, a little worse for the wear, Murray returned from his walkabout.

He'd changed in the interim. Not a great deal, but enough. He was more wary of people than when he'd been just ours. If you petted him with your foot rather than your hand, he'd nip you. He was still sweet, but it was more on his terms. In a way, despite his return being entirely silly and wonderful, it was a bit of a sad thing. Whatever he saw outside the confines of our home had turned him a bit hard, and I don't think I ever forgave him for not staying that little ball of amazing that he was at first.

I'm not a big pet person. I've got something approaching a phobia when it comes to dogs over two feet tall. And yet, when I read the e-mail from my mother about the death of Murray, I came close to crying. I didn't cry, because I wasn't sure that it was warranted, or because the tears didn't come, or because I held them back, or because he was a cat, or because I was not sure I knew him anymore, or because I didn't want to cry just then. The story of his passing goes like this. He slept at the foot of my mother's bed, keeping her company at night. At six, he woke her up to be let out. The night before he'd been tearing around the house terrorizing our much smaller and timid cat with his ferocity. By seven, my nephews, five and three, found him underneath the rose bush, ants already doing their best to take him apart. And they ran inside saying, "Ooma's (grandmother) cat is dead." Who told them what a dead cat looked like? Perhaps he was just sleeping.

And of course, I made it through the conversation with S and with my sister and mother, talking about the day's events, what might have happened. I could tell my mother was sad by the way her voice was catching, but I didn't want to cry. I opened up the e-mail and read it much closer, coming to the last sentence again, written by my mother, "I will miss his warm comfort very much." And that, dear reader, is when I started to cry.