Lessons from mourning an old man cat:

Fifteen years ago, a kitten bounded into our lives with ears as big as his face and green eyes that sometimes crossed. He quickly imprinted on our hearts. I kissed him on the forehead and talked to him like he spoke English. David brushed him daily and helped him exercise his instincts to hunt birds. In return, he greeted us at the door with dog-like devotion, protested our packing by sitting in our suitcases, and purred on our laps or shoulders whenever he found them available.

Saying goodbye to my friend of the last fifteen years has put some things in perspective.

I miss the annoyances. I cried realizing I no longer needed to leave one of our small spoons in the sink, to be used to scoop out his wet food several times each day as he meowed insistently to be fed yet again. And my stomach sank packing for a trip and realizing I didn’t need to stash my bag out of the way anymore to avoid his upset. The grey hairs left at his favorite resting spots now feel too precious to lint roll away.

What used to be inconvenient now breaks my heart.

I miss the mess. After trying multiple contraptions to get our finicky cat to drink water and stave off kidney disease, we resorted to turning on faucets all over the house on demand. This meant tiny splatters everywhere from the lapping of his pink tongue. He also liked to take bits of food and move them to the outside of his dish. Eighty percent of the time, they were left uneaten for unknown reasons.

I feel this, and in a flash, I see my daughter Noa grown up. A day will come when I miss the trinkets covering her bedroom floor despite my sing-song requests to “clean up pick up put away.” Toys she played with for years will be in other hands. The bed she comes home to occasionally will live in a constant state of being made up. The stuffed moosies she couldn’t live without will be tucked in a closet shelf way up high. And I will ache for the mess.

A few great loves. Cats have a few great loves. They don’t need a hundred people to scatter their ashes. Our cat made friends selectively; his true loves were few. But how those few miss him.

A friend sent a beautiful book about pet loss called The Invisible Leash by Patrice Karst, and after reading it, Noa has kept feeling our kitty tugging on her chest. “Do you feel that too, mama? It makes my heart hurt because he’s tugging so hard.”

It’s the same for most of us humans, really. We roam farther and collect more people, but we have a few great loves. These are the people who will sit beside us when we die, if we’re lucky. The ones who would be ripped apart to lose us.

These great loves are the ones who know our mess and our annoyances and love us not despite them, but because of them. They are more than enough.