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[+2 angst] In memory of Kitt
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04:40 pm
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( A Last Picture )
When I was 12 years old, I coaxed a feral neighborhood cat to let me feed and pet her. She later moved in with me. She did not live long; she sickened suddenly when she was around two years old, as far as I could gauge. But in the spring of 1996, while she yet lived, two kittens appeared by her side one day, wary and wide-eyed.
One of them was Kitt.
When I first tricked the kittens into the apartment with thin slices of SPAM, Kitt would sit by the door at night, crying for inability to see the sky, to breathe the New Jersey smog and run through the clipped, pesticide-treated lawns, until I'd pick her up, carry her to bed with me, and cuddle her until her purr resounded throughout the single room.
We grew up together, Kitt faster than I. She was an adult when I arrived, relieved, sad, and terrified, at my grandparents' house and began high school after being out of formal education since second grade. She followed me from room to room, just wanting to be near. She comforted me when I cried.
When I'd come home from college, she'd take charge of me. She'd be the first to let me know if I should be going to bed earlier, rubbing against my legs, sitting beside me and staring, nipping at my concentration on whatever pointless thing I was doing with her short, gruff "mrrf" of a meow. She'd tell me all of her troubles. She'd reassign my priorities from whatever I was trying to read or work on to paying her well-deserved attention for her patience.
When she came to live here two months ago, after living with my grandparents and then my mother, I could tell she was in poor health. She'd become hugely obese and developed a wheezing breath. Though the latter seemed to diminish as she lost weight, that weight loss was too rapid. She became depressed, sleeping underneath my bed most of the time, returning to that secluded place shortly after every time I removed her from it. She developed hepatic lipidosis, a fatty disease that destroyed her liver, and declined rapidly between her visit to the vet on Friday morning and her transfer to a 24-hour facility on Saturday morning. By the time she was settled in the second vet's office, she'd become nearly unresponsive. The vet made it clear that there was very little hope, and I made the decision to help her on her way with as little pain as possible. I held her for a few minutes, stroking her head and back, telling her that she was a good cat, a pretty cat, a sweet, smart, kind cat, my best girl and my beloved friend. I told her over and over that I loved her.
Then the vet came back in, and...twelve years were over so quickly.
But this is why I am glad to be human. Because we are the makers of immortality. We are the ones who remember, who keep and share what we know. And so she lives on with me, in the love I have for the next cat, for the next person, for my fellow man, because I have embraced and been embraced in the simple, unaffected love shared by a creature without words, with so little time on this Earth.
And she lives on in these words, through which I also extend that love to you. You are beautiful, shining people who can make that simple love spread even farther. So please, smile at a stranger today. Take the time to explain a difficult concept to a child kindly. Hold your tongue when you're about to say something hurtful.
And if you have a kitty, please pet them for me, and please tell them they're a good and pretty cat. |
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