Farewell to a tough old broad

The first time I met my sister's cat Katie was probably in the late 1980's, on one of the rare occasions when I visited my sister in those days. She was a gorgeous cat, regal and elegant, a rare orange longhair. I took a photograph of her on a pale carpet that was one of those rare moments that one was able to capture with a Kodak Instamatic in those days that made one seem like a real photographer. Katie and Lynn butted heads in those days, and indeed did for most of Katie's life. It almost seemed that Katie took that T-shirt that reads "The Egyptians worshipped cats....cats have never forgotten this" seriously and always resented that Lynn wasn't bowing before her with tasty morsels of delicate fish served on a fine china plate.

Sometimes I think that there's something karmic in the pets we end up with. I always seem to end up with one cat who needs incessant attention and another one who wants to kick that one out of the cats' union for conduct unbecoming a feline. But for some reason, the fates deemed that Lynn should spend eighteen years with a narcissistic cat who got angry when things don't go her way.

My cats are gargantuan compared to Katie, who was always, like Gossamer the monster in the Bugs Bunny cartoons, all hair and sneakers, especially in her later years when she experienced that wasting that old cats get. And yet Lynn tells me of the time she took on a group of raccoons and scared them away. I believe it, too, because Katie had one of the greatest "shit on you" faces of all time, in a species whose natural expression tends towards "shit on you."

And yet, Katie could be very sweet, though I always had the sense that she hated herself for doing it. She knew that if she sat on your lap at TV time with crossed paws, she'd get a treat. This is something my brother-in-law Rich taught her to do. And I just knew that during the night, she'd probably be off in a corner, muttering dire things to herself about what she'd do to these silly humans if she had only been born the Bengal tiger she just knew she was meant to be.

Most of us who like cats like them because they represent the perfect blend of elegant and silly. Katie was a cat that I'm not sure you could love, but you had to respect.

For the last three years, I've been visiting my sister and as part of my goodbyes, saying to Katie, "Well, Katie, I don't know if I'll see you again, but take care." And every time, she was still there. Katie raged against time. She raged against the infirmity that made her no longer able to beat the crap out of any cat that came around. She raged against her inability to jump on the counter any longer. From what Lynn tells me, she raged a lot, mostly at night....all night...quite vociferously. But at eighteen, and as shrunken as she was, it seemed she'd be around forever, out of sheer stubbornness.

This morning Lynn e-mailed me that Katie had finally stopped eating, which I had mentioned to her would be a sign that she was ready to go. And today the vet came, and she and Lynn helped Katie on her journey across the rainbow bridge. On the other side of that bridge are Lynn's old Golden Retriever Mandy, and all the dogs we had as kids, and Oliver and Wendy -- my last generation of cats. And as Katie strode across that bridge to greet them, I know as sure as I'm sitting here exactly what she said:

"Step aside, peasants. There's a new sheriff in town."