katster | Their lives are all too short… (Reply)

Stormy Samantha Purrmeow Templeton
September 1993 – May 13, 2011

She came to us out of the blue one day — on the porch in a storm, and then just hung around and was friendly to my sister. And eventually Jill asked if she could keep the cat and have it be all her own. There’s where the story starts, and how Stormy-cat came to enter our lives.

We couldn’t believe it — who would want to abandon such a beautiful kittycat? She was a calico, and she knew she was gorgeous. The thing is, the guy upstairs had so much fun designing her beauty that he forgot the brains. She amused us the first few weeks by running behind the door to go out. Nope, not quite the sharpest tool in the shed. But she was agreeable, she loved my sister, and when Autumn (our other cat at the time) threw a hissyfit, Stormy just looked at her to say “And what’s your problem?”

When I was in college, I used to tweak Jill by putting Stormy in my bag and telling her that I was all packed and ready to go back to school. Now, Jill knew damn good and well I couldn’t have a cat in my dorm room, but it never failed to get a reaction out of her. And Stormy? Well, Stormy just liked the attention. One time, we even imagined Stormy patiently waiting by the elevator in my dorm for somebody to pick her up.

Of course, she had to be helpful when we were packing to move. Much like the days when I went to college, she was in and out of boxes. More to the point, she tolerated the move well, and even the trip to Grandma’s over Christmas when it was deemed dangerous to leave her at home with our houseguests at the time. It was funny, because Nanny said we should put her to sleep before we moved, so we didn’t have to stress her out. She lived for five and a half

Everybody always had a word for how beautiful Stormycat was. She knew it, and she always had an air of insufferable smugness about it. That said, she was always a friendly cat. When Ben, a friend of Jill’s, came over for the first time, Stormy gravitated to him and proceeded to give him lots of love and attention. From that point on, Stormy was referred to as “Ben’s girlfriend”.

She’d begun a bit of a downward slide in the last year and a half — first her thyroid acted up, and we were about to put her down when a friend of Jill’s offered to pay for the blood test and the first three months worth of pills. That gave the kittycat a six month extension, but lately, she’s been peeing blood and is in so much pain the only way we can pick her up was by the scruff of her neck. It was time. It never makes it any easier, but it’s still hard.

She was a good cat, and I’ll miss her.

Mirrored from retstak.org.