Late one night, at the end of January, my cat Misty came downstairs, tore me away from the Horror channel with a series of unusual cries, stretched his mouth wide like a yawning lion, shivered, collapsed and died. He was a fortnight shy of his ninth birthday.
If I said that I loved him and that this sudden, wrongful loss floored me for days, drained the world of light and colour for weeks and still jabs at me now, I would be stating what any but the most exasperated pet owner would recognise as the bleeding obvious. But if I said that six months down the line I think about him more often and more painfully than I did about my mother six months after she died, at the age of 88 in 2022, I might cross a line for some of you.
Mothers are more important than cats, you would say, and I would be forced to agree – although maybe when we grieve for our cats we are also grieving for our mothers. In a more lighthearted context, I might add that it depends on the mother – or, indeed, the cat.
Anyway, I have thought a lot about this particular cat and this particular loss. I think what most pains and enrages me about it has something to do with the role Misty played in our life: a larger-than-life vibe, faux-heroic and mock-epic (and so often richly comic). He used to skid on the floor when he came into a room, like Kramer in Seinfeld. He was an agent of chaos and misrule, knocking objects off surfaces with gallumphing carelessness one day, dead-eyed precision the next. He was gormless yet prodigious, a fluffier cousin of Homer Simpson. He didn’t shyly solicit affection, as his sister does; he demanded it by right, thrusting his jaw up and out like Mussolini to accept strokes on his throat and chest.
All in all, he didn’t really have the makings of a tragic character. And he wasn’t a will-o’-the-wisp, either, on loan from another world, as most cats are. His unscheduled exit wasn’t just an emotional body blow; it was a violation of the rules of genre. We have tried to honour him in death, scattering his ashes in the most beautiful part of our local park. (They felt so pitifully light compared with his warm heft when he used to sit on your tummy, purring like an outboard motor; or with his corpse, stiff and unwieldy, when we manoeuvred him into the cat carrier for the last time and took him to the vet.) But the space is too small to hold him.
I would have liked to give him something like the Geats gave Beowulf: a pyre on a headland, poems and songs, buried torcs, plenty of keening, that sort of thing. We didn’t do too badly on the keening, I suppose; as for the rest, this will have to do. Goodbye, my hapless friend: of all the kings in the world, you were the mildest and fairest; the kindest to your people and the keenest for fame.