a month yesterday

My Blacky Cat died a month ago yesterday. Time has gone by, yes, but it still hurts to have lost him and every time I come home is a reminder that my cat is gone. He would hear me, or sense me, as I got off the elevator on my floor and like as not would be waiting at the door when I came home. For almost twelve years, I have been accustomed to slowly opening my front door because Blacky would often walk out into the hallway to look around.

He’d sniff me up to gather smells – "where have you been?"

"Blacky died" turns out to be marginally easier to say than "Hope died". My first cat here, in 1999, was a kitten I called Hope – she was my hope. I had been in a car wreck the year before, and was in the hospitals 59 days and then in an Adult Foster Care Home for nine more months. I moved into this apartment 13 years ago yesterday. I was still damaged from the car wreck – it took me more years to recover, but I finally had a place to have a pet, and so I got a kitten I called Hope soon after I moved in here.

She had, I found out later, thin spots in her lungs, and one afternoon when she was 11 months old, one blew out. I took my Hope to the emergency pet hospital, but all they could do for her was to "put her to sleep".

It hurt to say :"My Hope died" "Hope died" didn’t feel or sound any better. Up until her. I had given my cats names that meant something to me; Hope was my hope as well as my cat. "Hope died" sounds so apocalyptic that when I got Blacky in June of 2000, I had come to think that naming my cat was very important… for me. I don’t think the cat particularly cares what we call him. As long as it’s not "Bad Cat!"

I got Blacky as an eight or nine week old kitten. They said, where I got him, that they had been calling him Black Bear, which I kind of snickered at – I mean, come on, he’s a little bitty kitten! While I was thinking of a "better" name, I kept calling him Blacky and it stuck – I never did think of a better name.

Saying "Blacky died" hurts as much, but it doesn’t sound so "bad" as "my Hope died".

***

I have slowly been cleaning up my apartment. Not to erase my cat, no. I used to think I had more than one cat – in springtime and the summer, my black cat shed a lot of hair. I have vaccummed fairly well, but there is cat hair still to be found.

Blacky came down with diabetes in 2009 and for three years, I gave him two shots of insulin morning and night. I had a couple of bags of used syringes, and finally today took them up to Metro Waste to get rid of them – two containers full of… love for my cat. People I knew and worked with in 09 said they’d have the cat put down, that they wouldn’t do the twice daily shots.

Fuck those people.

I gave my beloved cat three more years of life, a thousand more days by giving him those shots, and I am not unhappy to tell you that he did not die of diabetes. A tumor, cancerous maybe, killed him. I am sort of glad that I didn’t know – I would have spent money I don’t have on a lost cause, because the cat died, and probably would have anyway, despite valiant medical efforts. I’m unemployed and I did spend a good bit of my savings on my cat in his last two days, so I’m selfishly glad I didn’t go into debt any farther.

I do still miss my cat very much.

Today I called Animal Control – Blacky’s pet license renewal form came today. I left a message about my cat; I kind of hope that’s enough, because I don’t want to say "my cat died" again.

Ahhh, but I will, because he did, and I will never see or feel him again.  Soon it will be two months since he died, and then a year, and time does go by, whether or not YOU are here to see it.

Some people mentioned a "rainbow bridge" where we, my cat and I, will meet again.  Blacky Cat will be there, and Hope Cat, and Lucky Cat, and Callie Cat, and Chance Cat, and….

I hope so.  I loved my pets.

 

*****