My Cat.

Emma, taken in 2021.

My cat, Emma, died already one week ago last Thursday. She was 19 years old which does in fact mean she lived a long life for a feline. I was thinking about writing this post four days ago but really didn’t have the time until now. In the meantime, Colleen Grablick wrote a piece in the Washington Post about how hard it is for someone to get over the loss of a pet that I read it twice. True, some of my relatives were right in saying that she was just a pet, but others I know were correct in saying she was part of the family. So, any animal you bring into your home can be considered part of the family.

When I took her for the first time to the animal clinic two Saturdays ago she did not put up a fight like I feared when I put her in the carrier. After all, being the stubborn kitty she was, she jumped on her own on the table near the front porch windows to look outside. That was something she didn’t do in months. The doctor’s assistant at the place said that she was doing okay for a 19 year old though she was dehydrated (stopped eating at home), had arthritis in the back legs, and I was sure kidney issues which a few days later I was proven right when the blood results came. So, Thursday after sleeping in the heat in her favorite chair on the porch, I put her back in the carrier one last time.

The fact that she had a good life for over 19 years is something. In human years she lived to be in her 90s which is no small achievement. I first got her as a kitten and for the first ten years she was with Charlie, the long haired white and orange domestic that my Dad brought home as a kitten of a litter born in my grandmother’s back yard the last year she was living there with the onset of dementia. I brought Emma home since my own cat just died that year (again of old age) and Baby Boy, as my Dad for some reason called Charlie, kept looking for him. By that point my Dad was remarried, living in Mentor with his wife and she didn’t like animals so there Baby Boy was looking around the rooms for my Dad and Buzz. So, Emma filled the void and she drove him crazy for the rest of his life. However, she loved him or she wouldn’t licked his ears when he was trying to sleep on the bed upstairs. To this last month, Emma would go upstairs and nap on that bed. After he died in 2015, I went back and forth about getting another but I listened to an aunt who said she was probably too old to adjust to a new one so I just had her and she was fine with me. For some reason, she would be mesmerized when I watched the Nature show on PBS on Wednesdays especially when they had episodes related to birds. The one they had on cats didn’t interest her at all.

She may have by accident look like a Russian Blue but she had a meow like a Siamese cat. When here working on my blog or trying to eat dinner in the dining room, I would hear her big meow and then see her looking at me. This was mainly to be in the living room with her. For some reason she wanted me in there all the time as she sat on the couch, rubbed her face against boxes I had for her, or scratch her with this wooden back scratcher I got as a Christmas gift at work some years ago. Of course, we would wind up sometimes on the weekends in the afternoon upstairs on my old bed where she was taking her nap.

I have a lot of pictures of her, via cellphone, that I should convert to real photographs. I did find a video clip I did seven years ago with her meowing for the camera.

Already a week has passed.

Photograph by James Valentino.