ratbones

My cat, Cora, died yesterday. It was very sudden and I had no cause to expect it any time soon. She was her usual self at 1 PM when she attended my lunchtime by finding a basket of cat toys I'd absent-mindedly left on the table and scattering them around a bit, and then she went upstairs to nap as she does, and when I went in search of her for some affection a bit before 3 she was dead. It looked utterly senseless and causeless, like she'd just been switched off in the middle of her daily rounds. My assumption is that it was something like a blood clot or hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. The vet once detected a slight heart murmur, when she was ill with a fever years ago.

That cat was my heart. I had let my heart out to run around on four soft little paws. And pardon my abuse of cliche here but I think she'd put hers into me, too, because I feel like my ribcage has been cracked open and something's been ripped out of my thoracic cavity with a pair of pliers. A rush job of an extraction. Her death tableau might have been strangely clean, but I'm a gory crime scene. I'm gutted.

There is some urge to eulogize Cora and extol her virtues, but I'm not sure it's in keeping with our relationship to do so publicly. I'll just choose one secret to share: any time I wake up in the middle of the night, I can expect her to come and look me in the face carefully, knead the pillow a bit, and settle into a tighter cuddle, like she can pin me down and force me into restful sleep whether I want it or not. Last night, I was restless, and there was nobody there to notice.

Cora sitting in a sunbeam, looking beautiful