A Eulogy For My Fatty Cat

Those of you who have been following my blog from its original conception know that I have a cat named Fatty. He was an old cat and he was ailing not so long ago. He experienced a brief recovery when I switched his food but in the last few weeks his health has been declining again. This morning when I got up to feed him he wasn’t waiting by his food bowl. That was a very bad sign. There are a lot of things Fatty is willing to skip out on but a meal is not one of them. I found him in my backyard under a tree barely moving. I immediately understood what that meant. I gave him a bowl of water which he didn’t touch. I know that animals (including humans) lose their appetites during their last hours of life but I offered Fatty a bowl of his favorite cat food anyway. True to form he mustered up his last bit of energy to lift his head and then dropped it right into his food which he proceeded to consume with a surprising amount of enthusiasm. When the food was almost gone he staggered to his feet in order to get himself in to a better position to lap up the last few bites and then dropped back down again with an appreciative grunt.

It’s cliché to say that you never know how much something means to you until it’s gone but it’s also completely true. I found myself crying mournful tears over the loss of my pet. I loved that dumb animal.

And he was dumb. When you start reading Sex, Murder And A Double Latte you’ll meet Sophie’s friend Mary Ann. Fatty was kind of the Mary Ann of the cat world, sweet, loving, tolerant and totally clueless. Day after day I would come home to find him sitting smack-dab in the middle of my driveway. I would slow my car to a crawl assuming that the cat would understand the danger and move. That rarely happened. So I would stop and beep my horn at which point he would lift his head and blink at me as if to say “Yeah, I hear you honking. What’s your point?”

Eventually one of two things would happen.:

1) He would decide to move. If that was the case he would leisurely stroll to the left of the driveway, pause and then change his mind and stroll to the right while I waited for him to make up his mind.
2) I would get out of the car and move his kitty-butt out of the way (this always seemed to surprise him).

But he was sweet. If you so much as smiled at Fatty he would break into a loud purr. Actually it wasn’t so much a purr as it was a coo like a dove. And he was so patient with my son. I can’t tell you all the ways my child has tormented that cat in the past. He tried to clean him with detergent, play ball with him and encase his little paws in socks and through it all Fatty would just sit there and coo. Again, not the smartest beast in the jungle but incredibly sweet.

I’ll miss his cuddling up with me while I lose myself in a book. I’ll miss waiting for him to move while I’m trying to park my car.

I guess I’ll just miss him period.

Kyra Davis
www.kyradavis.com
Sex, Murder And A Double Latte available on Barnes & Noble.com now!