First entry of 2006: Warning, it's a downer.

Fear not, faithful blog-watchers, I am back. A lot can happen in two months, and while I will attempt to pace myself and break the "catch-ups" into several shorter entries, there's a lot to cram in here.

So anyway, you may want to sit back and get comfortable for this one - it promises to be quite lengthy. And as promised in this post's title, this is not going to be my typical wry witty stuff - so if depressing stuff isn't your thing, you might want to skip this one and wait for the next entry, which I promise will not be so bumming.

*takes deep breath*

Okay. As most of you know, my beloved kitty, Lepew, passed away three days before Thanksgiving. It's been a rough adjustment for me, and while I've been longing to write out my feelings about losing her, I really just hadn't had the strength until now.

As we approach what would have been her 19th birthday (February 28th - we'll never know the exact date, but that's the one I'd made up based on the vet's estimation of her age when I got her), it's starting to only now really sink in that she's gone. If you knew Lepew, you knew how she had this awesome resilient, enduring, almost magical, other-worldly quality to her - like she was going to live forever. Starting with the circumstances under which she came into my life (thrown out of a car as a malnourished and abused kitten,left for dead in a ditch outside my house, and narrowly escaping life in a shelter by a completely shocking display of sympathy by my father), she was a weird but miraculous creature (not to mention the cutest one ever). She would disappear and reappear seemingly out of nowhere, like she could walk through walls. She was strictly an indoor cat, but would escape and put me through hell trying to find her, only to turn up right behind me, looking at me as if to say, "what are you freaking out about? I've been here the whole time!" If she weren't so damn cute it would have been creepy.

One time in Chicago I spent an entire day canvassing the neighborhood with flyers and kitty treats after discovering my back door wide open and Lepew nowhere in the apartment, only to come home to a message from my upstairs neighbor telling me that he'd found her in the hallway outside his door. Mind you, this was the inside hallway, the door to which I could not recall opening at all that day. Another time when we lived in New Hampshire she got out and we found her stuck in the wall in the boiler room of our house. Just shortly before she passed away, I woke up in the middle of the night to the dog whining to go out. When I opened the door and stepped outside, I looked across the street and saw Lepew, scampering across the street like she owned it. She apparently had gotten out earlier that evening, undetected.

No matter what, when she was lost or sick or even when her age started catching up and she began developing problems with her thyroid and her kidneys, she always came through with flying colors. So when she got sick so suddenly that Sunday night in November, I just couldn't process the finality of it. It never really sunk in that it could be the end. Even as I watched her struggle to walk, as I watched the "third eye" creep over her beautiful yellow-green eyes, as I wiped the drool and snot off her face and begged her to be okay, I just couldn't believe it. I just kept thinking it was going to be okay, she was going to get better. I was going to wake up the next day and she'd be yowling for food, climbing on my head, drinking from the toilet again. Even when she wasn't fine the next day, even when I called the vet and made the appointment for the following day to put her down, even as I prepared myself by shutting all the doors in the house so that if she needed to die at home she wouldn't crawl off and hide to do it, I just kept thinking it wasn't going to happen. I was going to come home from work that night, and everything would be fine. Alas, it was not to be.

She died while I was at work, something I felt so terrible about, because I'd wanted to be with her in her last moments - the only consolation I was deriving from deciding to put her to sleep was that it would allow me to do so, in fact. She just couldn't hold out, though, and died in front of the fireplace in the living room. She was not alone, I kept telling myself. She was in the company of Alex, her canine companion of more than 13 years. I'm sure that her old canine companion, Digger, and her Cousin Tootsie came to get her and showed her the way over the "Rainbow Bridge," (that special place, for those of you who may not be familiar, where our pets go when they leave us).

Even still, nearly three months later, I expect to see her sitting on the toilet seat when I open the shower curtain. I reach up to pet her when I'm lying on the sofa. I still, in my half-awake state every morning, instinctively try to be careful to not trip over her as I make my way to the kitchen, where it still invokes a sense of slight discombobulation when I don't see her bowls on the floor or her food on top of the refrigerator. I still call out for her sometimes, like I'm expecting that she'll just come walking through the wall when she's good and ready to come out . . .

And you know, maybe that's because she really is still here -- I just can't see her. She really was a weird little cat. :-)