My cat died

She was nearly 12 years old.

Sooty 2005-2017

The fact that I am calling her "my cat" is quite an achievement. My wife persuaded me that we should get a cat in 2005. I was quite reluctant. There is a joke that goes:

Women love cats; men say they love cats; when women aren't looking, men kick cats.

And whilst I never actually kicked the cat, I wasn't all that keen on it for the first year or two. Note the "it" there.

Time changes people though. And she was a very sweet cat. She would often come and sit on my lap... and she hardly ever scratched me, badly.

Cats become one of those constants in your life, like the Queen. They are always there and they change so slowly that you don't notice. We had a lot of bad things happen to us, and Sooty was always a reminder of better times.

That became abundantly clear to me in 2011 when my wife died. After that, Sooty was a walking reminder of her. It was a dark time, and Sooty helped me get through it. Maybe more so than any of my human friends. A cat never says the wrong thing.

And so here we are in 2017. It was a type of cancer called lymphoma, apparently. Which spreads quickly and is incurable. At least it was over quickly; I would have hated to see her decline and suffer over a long time. I was with her when she died.

Now it is just me.