It’s apparently a bad year for animals here at the house.
Ten months have passed since we lost Bella, and the reality that she’s no longer sitting in the dog room throwing everyone her creepy side-glances hits me on and off.
Only a few months after that, I found myself wide awake at five in the morning during one of my rampant stretches of insomnia. While I thought about how Cheerios undoubtedly taste better in the middle of the night, I heard wild commotion outside our bedroom window followed by a bone-chilling shriek I doubted could have come from a living creature. By the time I landed at the porch door, our 18 year old anger-ball of a cat Zoet was dead on the floor.
I had affectionately nicknamed her “Church” when E and I first met, after the buried and reincarnated cat from Pet Cemetary . My first introduction to this little furball came in the dead dark of E’s apartment kitchen, where I was jolted by a wraith-like drawn out guttural attempt at a meow. I turned to find this cat standing motionless on the kitchen table boring holes in me with her completely deadpan, unflinching stare. Since she died during the winter when the soil was frozen, she was retired to a black Hefty bag in our second freezer to wait out the cold months next to a few boxes of fried rice.
Just as we dug her hole on the side of the house, our sixteen year old cat Sebastian found himself about to give up the ghost. His hopelessly obvious nickname “Fatty” came from a giant gut he swung beneath his body when he waddled anywhere and that, along with his black and white sectioned fur, led to even more obvious cow-resemblance comments.
He was also an amazingly sweet cat, so the decision to put him down when he became constantly lethargic, half immobile, and completely incontinent was expected but unbelievably sad. He’s been more “one of the dogs” than anything, and spent the evenings head-butting our golden retriever and grooming him as best he could with such a height difference. We’re thankfully a maximum one-cat-per-freezer household, so Fatty is taking up Church’s vacancy while we clear room to bury him outside next to her.
In the end there’s a bit of poetic justice, as instead of butting up against some fried rice, Fatty is surrounded by stacks of frozen Angus burgers and some gorgeously marbled strip steaks. I honestly can’t think of anything he’d want more.













