Two years ago, on Good Friday 2013, I lost my sweet Roscoe kitty. Roscoe, a tuxedo tomcat, was fifteen when he died: fourteen years after I brought him home from the shelter, thirteen months beyond the vets’ predictions for his lifespan, and one month and five days after I met my now-fiancé Steve.

The timing, I’ve long felt, was no accident.

Meeting Cute

Roscoe had been my buddy since January 1998, when he adopted me at Cat Welfare, a no-kill cat shelter in Columbus, Ohio. I’d lost my cat Tiko to mouth cancer in December, and though I was buoyed through the holidays by travel and the presence of family, when I returned to the Midwest winter and an empty apartment, the loneliness was all-encompassing. I’d thought I might wait a while longer to find a new feline, but I was bereft.

Tiko had been solid black, and I knew it would be too hard to have another black cat; he’d been older when I took him in, too, and losing him after only six years broke my heart. So the plan was to find a kitten, black-and-white. When I arrived at Cat Welfare, they didn’t have any kittens. Some cats there roamed freely, having earned their floor privileges, while the newer additions resided in cages. I visited with most every black-and-white cat I saw, but I really wanted a kitten. As I readied to leave, thinking I’d try the Humane Society, the woman at the front desk asked if I’d seen the tuxedo cat in the second room. I hadn’t—he was sound asleep, curled up in the back of his cage. Oh, he’s a sweetheart, she said, and only about a year or year-and-half old. He’d been caught in one of their traps—sometimes, when the shelter was full, people dropped animals off outside anyway, hoping the shelter would find and take them in. This tuxedo kitty had been so lucky.

She pulled the sleepy cat from his cage and put him in my arms. Almost immediately, he rolled back into the crook of my left elbow so that I held him like a baby. He wore a slightly askew black mask and had a soft white belly, his clear green eyes framed by white whiskers. The pads of his paws were multi-toned, some gray, some pink. He began purring and gave me a long, slow blink, then reached his chin up and rubbed my chin with his.

Oh, boy. Continue reading →

for Eliza Jane 2002-2015

I have a blog calendar, and I typically plan my posts, or at least my topics, well in advance. I’ve had the “cats and weddings” topic from Tuesday on the calendar for at least several months (you can actually see the post-it on the calendar in “(Not Too) Much A-Do About Being”), even though I wasn’t sure exactly what direction the post would take until I worked it up last week. The timing, as it turns out, was either terribly perfect or perfectly terrible, because today, I lost my beautiful Eliza Jane.

I’d planned to write about something else for today’s post. And I cannot, at this juncture, be anything approaching eloquent on the subject of her loss. But to post about anything else feels disingenuous, and she taught me so much about love and life that writing seems the best way to honor her.

My Liza

Eliza Jane is the only cat I raised from a kitten. She came to me under coercion: a stray calico took up residence in my parents’ storage shed and gave birth to a litter. Eliza was the only black-and-white kitten, and I already had tuxedo cat Roscoe. My mother informed me Roscoe needed a friend, so the Holstein kitten with the half-mustache and perpetually startled expression would be mine.

Eliza snuggling Roscoe after a biopsy in 2009

Roscoe adapted pretty quickly. Eliza loved to snuggle with him, even after she grew too big for both of them to fit comfortably in one bed. As a tiny kitten she would hang out on my shoulder for short stretches, but she was never much for being held. She’d sit next to me, on rare occasions in my lap, but she was always more aloof and independent than her big brother. And feisty—she earned herself a star on her chart at the vet, and it was not for good behavior.

Eliza was the only cat I’ve ever known who played fetch. It was almost unbearably cute to watch after my mom bought her a kitty toy football. Touchdown! Continue reading →