Kitty Jack

I buried my cat today.  I know that doesn’t seem like a big thing, but to me it is.  Kitty Jack was 18 1/2 years old.  I found him when he was only a few weeks old, hiding under a car on a busy city street.  I was sure fate threw him in my path, so I scooped him up, hid him throughout my work day, and brought him home to a house John & I had purchased only a couple of weeks earlier.  We didn’t live in the house yet.  It was a fixer and every single night, we fixed.  So, from almost day one, Jack was a part of our home.

John is not a cat lover, but he relented and allowed the cat to stay – although he insisted that it would be an outside cat.  That lasted until winter.  Jack moved in and never looked back.  He would climb ladders with me as I stenciled walls and sleep on the floor as I painted baseboard.  After we moved in, he slept on my feet and begged for popcorn every time we watched a movie.  He became as much of a fixture in our house as the slope in the floor where he loved to sleep.  He tested my patience, and on more than one occasion I threatened to give him his freedom.  He wasn’t a particularly nice cat.  He had an attitude and he could be mean.  I will forever wear a one inch scar on my right hand – proof that bathing him was not a good idea.

I will miss him a lot.  There are certain nooks and crannys that already look empty without him.  He outlived two dogs and countless outside cats.  He weathered my pregnancy, sleeping on my lap and jumping when Ethan would kick.  He never, ever bothered Ethan when he was a baby or toddler, but somehow made his way into nearly every early photo, as if to make a statement.  He survived the big re-model and found some new favorite places after that.  He was a beautiful cat, which made watching him get old a little hard.  He died peacefully in his sleep last night, and when I found him this morning, he looked as though he was just relaxing in the sun like he had done a thousand times before.

I’ve known that he was nearing the end for quite a while and I prayed that he would go in exactly the way he went.  But as I dug the grave earlier today, I cried like a 5 year-old.  I know he was just a cat.  I know that.  But he was a part of this home for as long as it has been my home, and so today, a new chapter of my home begins.  Granted, it will be a much easier chapter to keep clean, but that’s beside the point.  The point, I suppose, is that I absolutely hate good-byes and endings of any sort.  They will never get easier for me.

I do not know if there will be animals in heaven, or if they have their own little paradise, or if I’ll even care a thousand years from now that Kitty Jack left this world on 9-11-10.  What I do know is that he was a blessing in my home for nearly 19 years.

Rest in peace, sweet kitty.

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