Sarah, 2001-2017

Our beloved cat Sarah died yesterday in my lap, her little face cradled in my hand. She was never a large cat, even when she fluffed out for the winter months, and she seemed especially tiny at the end. We used to call her babykins, adorababy, permakitten. She was quite talkative, and would chirp and bleep at us incessantly, to get our attention or whenever one of us made eye contact. Strands of her gray fur coat every surface, every corner, every item of clothing, but she is gone, gone. The apartment feels like it's been replaced by a stage set of itself, and we're rattling around wondering what our lines are supposed to be. We also called her our little nurse: she had an unerring knack for sensing when either of us was the least bit distressed for whatever reason and coming up and chirping and cozying up to us and purring into our bodies until we felt better. Friends, guests, apartment managers, anybody sent her into hiding under the bed, she had no trust and no time for anybody but us. There is nobody on earth who can ever know how special she was but us. Her claws were slightly too long and extended a little past her paw pads so that she ticked around the wood floors of the apartment, we called her tick tick baby as she made her restless circuit of the place at night. Her tail was foreshortened and bent, perhaps the result of a tussle as a kitten -- we got her from the SFSPCA sixteen years ago, they had found her in a feral cat colony in Golden Gate Park, she had a gouge in her neck when we got her and appeared to have had a narrow escape from some kind of predatory bird there. She played like a kitten right up to last months of her life -- one of her favorite games was to lie on her back with her legs crazily splayed as Eric would tap her on the left side and then on the right, and she would swipe crazily and belatedly in the direction of the tap, toppling from side to side, missing his hand time and time again, she could literally continue gyrating like that until Eric was too tired to keep at it. We called her caper kitty when she played her wiggle game. She had terrible eyesight and a thousand mile blank stare out the windows as she enjoyed the afternoon breezes roughling the fuzz on her face and whiskers. When she glazed out through the windows, we called that "Sarah watching her stories." Sarah was gray with a fluffy white belly and little white booties. She had an asymmetrical mustache and a tiny bald spot just beneath one of her big flappy bat ears. She was simply perfect. There has scarcely been a day in the last sixteen years when she has not spent hours and hours at a stretch nuzzled up against me, in my lap, rubbing noses with me, sleeping with her chin over my arm as I tapped away at the keyboard, sleeping between Eric's legs all night long (I toss and turn too much), eating from a saucer in my hand as we watched some silly baking competition marathon on tee vee... How I love her. How desolate everything seems without her.