And I mean that in the literal sense of the final-and only, I think- cat posting. But this is my one chance now to get in on all that Friday cat-blogging. My little pal/muse/cat-daughter Burma passed away Wednesday in the wee morning hours. I was lucky that I got up to go to the bathroom at 3 am. where she had taken herself, following that instinct animals have to go away by themselves to die. In my bleary state I was confused for a moment by the odd panting, then realized it was the shallow breath that comes at the end. I picked her up and brought her into bed where she warmed up for a bit, and if I put my ear against her side I could hear a faint purr. She had been through a bad spell a couple of weeks ago and then came out of it, which I thought meant her thyroid medicine was kicking in. Now it’s clear that it was one of those bursts of life many animals and people get right before the end, that I suppose is your body giving you a chance to run around and wrap things up. She spent that last couple of weeks doing what she normally would, poking around outside and picking different beds to sleep on. And then Tuesday she went down all at once. After a little while of lying there with me, she was gone.

I went ahead and showered and dressed, because I sure wasn’t going back to sleep, and thought about things I wanted to write about her. My thoughts went back to college when I took my first fiction writing course with Bill Hallberg (who would also teach my next writing class). Our very first short-episode exercise was to write about something of a personal nature, and one of the topics he suggested was the death of a pet. And the cat I’d had since I was five had just been put to sleep, so I went for that. As he knew, such a subject would definitely have a direction because it’s something I would have opinions on. But I didn’t have any ability yet to pull back and be objective, the exercise was pure catharsis for me, lashing out at one of the vets who didn’t seem sympathetic enough, the universe, and so on. It was a horrible piece of writing, but terrific therapy. I felt so much better after I turned it in. Afterwards Hallberg suggested another route I could have taken, such as where the narrator gripes about all the failings of the pet in such a way that it’s clearly veiled affection. And that would have been a good approach, but I wasn’t that good and I was still happy with just purging myself. I went on to turn in more wincers in his classes. I got some payback for that in Graduate School when I was the editor of the Arts and Literature magazine and had to read submissions for our fiction contest. But shortly before that, right at the end of my undergrad studies, I got Burma.

She was born in my apartment in a litter of three. Her mother was the community cat, and had already had a previous litter in our place. I had easily found that batch homes thanks to my position at the school paper, where I could write as much descriptive text as I wanted in the Classifieds without paying. A few adjectives will put three cats quickly in hands while “Free Kittens” may only insure that you end up with three cats. I stumbled in on a Friday night from investigating bar life downtown to find that the mom cat had squeezed out a little calico first. I immediately picked the sewn-eyes kitten up and held it for a bit before going to bed. Over the next few weeks my roommate Dave and I had fun with the place full of little monsters. I woke up one night to find that the mom had dragged a live bird in through our bathroom window and put it down before her brood to teach them about hunting. The kittens jumped around wildly trying to figure out what this was all about while I tried to figure out a way to kill the injured bird with as little pain as possible. This is a recurring theme with me, that I have to make decisions in the middle of the night while half asleep.

When we moved out after graduation, Dave kept the black kitty, I kept Burma, and described away the grey one to a newspaper reader (that one could never get the hang of litter boxes and was the noisiest, as it happens). Readers of Caniff and Sickle’s classic Terry and the Pirates will know where Burma’s name came from. She followed me everywhere else I went, always happy to lie on artwork no matter where I put it, hanging out nearby as I worked late into nights. She worked her way into my comics work often, most noticeably appearing as herself in The Interman. At some point almost every friend I’ve had has cat-sat her. When I first moved out to Los Angeles for work, she stayed with my Mom for most of a year, and I always felt grateful- to Mom sure, but mostly to Burma for keeping her company. After that Burma came to California, and eventually Oregon. Everywhere she lived she became the community cat like her mother had, hanging out in the houses and apartments of people I didn’t even know during the day. When we lived in Hermosa Beach, she spent quality time on the porch of my next door neighbor, actor Donald Moffat, who you may remember as playing the President in almost everything. Despite having eaten with strangers, she’d still demand her regular feedings from me. She was noisy about this, too. Every call for food was loud and frantic as if she’d been lost in the woods for a week.

I’m going to write a lot of memories of her in my own private post, but one that just popped in my head was during a big rabies scare in Chapel Hill. Burma had gotten in a scrape with something in our rental house that backed up to the forest, and the vet noted that it looked like a raccoon bite. The next day County Animal Control showed up at my door asking to quarantine my cat. Terrified that they would try to put her down, I bargained to be able to quarantine her myself, and built an enormous wood and wire cage in my living room that had a cushy chair inside and a sliding door-accessed feeding section in the event Burma went mad with hydrophobia. I only kept her in it about a day and then felt it was unlikely she was going to start frothing. During that time writer Dan Mishkin was in town visiting and came by. Naturally he was fascinated by this contraption that took up so much of my place. Burma seemed to like it and I left it up for a while so she could go in there and sit on the chair. Cats generally like any structure or plant that offers them protection and a good view at the same time. I wonder when the first window was created how long it took a cat to jump up there and sit in it.

When my daughter was born I was very happy that Burma had stuck around long enough to welcome her with the highest honor, sharing nap space. A year and half later my son came along, and Burma seemed a little more put out as if one was okay, but she hadn’t authorized two children. Still, she was always supremely tolerant, and no matter how clumsily the kids mauled her in what they thought was “petting,” Burma never scratched either of them. I wouldn’t have minded if she had, because I’d hoped they’d learn about that possibility before meeting a rougher animal. On that last day when Burma went down so fast, Jill called me to look in the bathroom where Allie was sitting with her for a long time, gently stroking her fur.

Thursday I dug a hole besides the massive pine tree in front of our house, and looked for a box to put Burma in. I ended up using the box this Powerbook laptop came in, which seems somehow appropriate though I can’t verbalize why. The kids gathered flowers and we had a little ceremony where we wrote things about her on the box and told some Burma stories. We let Allie look at her body, which was in a nice curled position, eyes open, and tried our best to explain death. The kids helped fill the grave with dirt, and I think Allie already got the concept of zombies when she said “I think her head is going to pop up out of the ground.” I thought about how different things would be now after eighteen years of the noisy little calico. When any of us deal with death we focus on things that will force more tears, but inevitably try to build ourselves up with some positives, and no one should ever feel bad about that. When my first (white long-haired) cat died I couldn’t help but think that I could wear black shirts now. And I couldn’t avoid that impulse again, even that night while I held Burma’s cold little body. Dear lord, my days of cleaning boxes of shit are over.

It’s tough to lose a beloved pet, but unless we bring home a Macaw or Giant Tortoise, we always enter into this understanding we’ll be outliving them. And it’s certainly easier for me to write this than if you asked me to write about either of my parents’ deaths. Instead I’ll keep processing those for years and they’ll inform my writing in a less direct fashion. But there it is, Hallberg- it took me almost twenty years, and still comes off as subjective, but I think I’ve finally finished the assignment. Thanks for everything, you noisy little cat.