Zami is Home

There is a small box on our table. It’s comical almost, just how small it is. I even pulled the bag of ash out and rolled it between my fingers. It’s the smallest of the three cats to come back.

I thought of the fire and the heat and how much of my moisture it took from me in seconds. And how we harnessed the power of fire to put our loved ones to rest, and how it sucked the moisture from her corpse. My beloved cat and I fed the same elemental the oxygen hidden in our water.

She was such a large presence.

Now, nothing.

For a twenty-two year old cat who slept twenty-three hours a day, her absence is deafening. I have sunk into the busy work of rearranging the spaces in the house to reclaim them from her ghost.

She was ready to leave us. We weren’t ready for her to go. It’s Samhain and time to release her. My grief is not her burden.

I cleaned out the window seat where Zami lived. I vacuumed Zami’s dander and dust and hair and whiskers up. I fought the urge to keep the-bits-of-her-that-were-not-ash. Okay, I kept the whiskers. I have whiskers from all our cats in a jar. Ones they shed naturally. Because magic is real and sometimes I need to weave stealth into my wardrobe.

I saved her whiskers, her tools of Sensing.

I spent the rest of the morning fixing the first afghan I ever made- it’s still the only one for myself I ever finished. It’s been Zami’s treasure in her old age, full of holes from where she clawed it. I fixed the holes. Mara, our tiny tuxedo, kept trying to climb on top of it while I was doing so.

The afghan is made up of a bunch of remnant yarn balls. It was so hard to make too, because yarn was always Zami’s kryptonite. She used to lay in wait until I pulled more yarn loose and she would fly out of nowhere and grab it in her mouth and keep running. Or she would sit in the open and watch the yarn. Back and forth between my fingers. And just glaze over until it got creepy.

It’s amazing the things we miss about those we love after they are no longer with us. 

I can hold the box but I am not holding her. It is what remains of her body but it is not her body. But I will hold the box in my hands until I no longer need it as a crutch. I will hold the twenty year-long memories of her in my heart. 

To those cats who come after, I will tell them stories of her multiple feats and extreme acrobatics. I will tell them how there wasn't a closed door she couldn't get into. I will tell them how terrified she was of kittens and how she hid behind the old bread box on top of the kitchen cupboards without disturbing anything. Or how she used the counter in our first apartment as a launching pad to twist in mid-air and grab a feather off the ceiling... over and over again.

I hold the box in my hand but her stories are where she lives now.