The Privilege

The loss of Little Cat, the bundle of fur and whiskers who has been my companion for nearly fourteen years, is harder to navigate than I imagined. She wasn’t my first feline loss, being the last of four strong-minded individuals who ruled the household for over twenty-five years. But it’s been just her and me for a while now, and her absence echoes around the place.

My first cats were two elderly sisters the kids and I adopted from the RSPCA, having gone looking for two kittens, or at the very least young cats. We saw Margarita and Jezebel curled up together in a basket, and that was that. They weren’t called Margarita and Jezebel then. They were Wallace and Gromit. The kids didn’t think that was dignified enough for dowagers, so I said it was OK to rename them. That’ll teach me.

They both made it to a ripe old age, and Jezebel outlived her sister by a year. It was a further year before we felt able to contemplate having another cat. Delilah (otherwise known simply as Cat) was six weeks old when she joined us. It was far too early to leave her mum, but the people who hadn’t bothered to get her mum spayed rapidly got fed up with a houseful of kittens. She was beautiful, had the most gorgeous golden eyes, and was the noisiest mog in the universe.

We’d had her about a year and a half when I heard about a six-month-old who needed rescuing from a thoroughly unsuitable environment. Enter: Little Cat.

My son had left home by then, but my daughter requested a change of official name for the newcomer because apparently Little Cat wasn’t a Ponyo. I was quite surprised, because the animated film ‘Ponyo’ was one of daughter’s favourites, but in a moment of weakness I agreed.

“Zsa Zsa,” said daughter.

“Really? How come you know about Ms Gabor, a glamorous and much-husbanded Hungarian actress from decades before you were born?”

She looked at me blankly. Apparently it was a character in EastEnders.

No-one at the vet’s had heard of either a Hungarian actress or an EastEnders character, so it was puzzled looks and requests for spelling at every contact. At one visit for annual jabs the receptionist joked that we must be great Star Wars fans. I was completely mystified, and she looked embarrassed. Only on the way home did I realise she didn’t know how to spell Jar Jar Binks, one of the least appealing characters in the Star Wars universe.

There was rarely a dull moment with our two very different but equally gorgeous girls. Delilah was definitely Top Cat, but Zsa Zsa didn’t seem to mind much. I had a decent sized garden then, and she loved sitting on the garden bench in the evening, silently contemplating whatever, ears pricking at every sound. She was the quiet one, and the cuddly one. Woe betide anybody who tried to pick up Delilah, but Zsa Zsa was happy to snuggle at any time.

It took her a little while, after Delilah died, to realise that she was now the Only Cat. But when she did, there was no doubt at all who ran life in our household. Daughter had flown the nest at this point, so there was just me to boss around. And so things proceeded for the next seven years. I knew my place.

Then, the sudden unexplained weight loss, the lack of vitality, and the eventual diagnosis of kidney disease. 

It’s the stillness that feels so strange, and the day-to-day habits that had become instinctive. I get up in the morning, and I can make a cup of coffee without first having to dole out cat food, replace water and clear the litter tray. I still automatically cover or remove a half-eaten plate of my own food if I have to leave the table for some reason, because I still expect it to be sniffed, licked, nibbled or gobbled in my absence. There’s the realisation that I can, if I want, put breakable things on a lower shelf. (Some aspects of having a cat are like having a toddler: where is it and what the hell is it up to?) I never thought I’d wish I could still hoover up a cushion’s worth of cat hair off the sofa.

Above all else, I miss the sheer wonder of knowing that a being who saw, heard, smelled and felt the world entirely differently from the way I do, and whose mind I could never really hope to understand, honoured me with her absolute trust. That has been a precious privilege, and is something to treasure in this strange stillness.