#oreokitty

Today is the one year anniversary of losing my Oreo.

I love her and I miss her so much and I hope I gave her a good life. I really hope that.

Her sister Midnight is still fine and running and jumping around at 17 and a half years old.

I just...I miss my baby. I miss her so much. Please I hope her 16 and a half years here were good, and that she had all the love she wanted.

I love you so much, and I always will.

Looking at this picture, and....I don’t get humans who deny that other species are real people whose lives have value and worth. Look in her eyes. Look in my Oreo’s eyes and tell me that she wasn’t a person, with thoughts and feelings.

Midnight has been sitting in my lap ever since I got up. I’ve gotten up a few times, and she’s been doing Oreo’s thing of getting back in my lap as soon as I sit back down.

I guess she is my lap kitty now.

We adopted Midnight and Oreo in the first week of December 2002, from a rescue group at PetSmart. They were six months old and they’d been found in a crawlspace, IIRC. We chose them because we didn’t want someone else to only take one of them and separate them. 

She ended up sitting in the reading chair next to her mother, after sniffing the towel a bit. It still has Oreo's scent on it.

The sun is still out, and as unfair and disrespectful as it feels for the weather to no longer reflect the appropriate mood, if the spousal person still wants to go to our regular restaurant for dinner tonight despite the pizza last night I may suggest walking there. I imagine walking out in the sun together will be helpful and good.

The other cats seem to all be doing okay so far. Midnight, her sister, seems to be demanding to be hand fed a little more than usual, but I don't know. It's somewhat common for her to not eat until you offer her the food in the cup of your hand.

Quasar is spending a lot of time on a stool next to the vent where Oreo would sit, but again, that's been a common hangout spot for her.

They're used to the pattern of getting treats and Oreo's leftover wet food whenever Oreo indicated a desire to eat, which was usually whenever the spousal person got up from what he was doing and walked around, so he still finds himself on the kitchen floor distributing treats. There were a few types that were just for Oreo, because they were more expensive than the usual ones but sometimes she would eat them but not the usual treats. He said that Quasar never touched the Oreo-only ones until now.

But then I don't know, because obviously he wouldn't have been offering the Oreo-only treats to anyone else until now.

Tuesday when I came home Quasar was sitting where the carrier goes. The spousal person still hasn't brought it in yet from the car. Which I understand.

I don't know. We're keeping an eye on everyone and giving them plenty of attention, and we haven't seen anything worrying so far.

And they were talking about their friends not understanding and all the things their mother would miss, and how they sometimes were bitter about people who had their parents for 50 or 60 years, and I'll admit that I thought hey man, at least you had your mother into your 20s.

Meh. I'm sure people out there whose parents died while they were infants would be like hey man, at least your father got to see you go to kindergarten and you have a few conscious memories of him.

The spousal person and I talked about how I knew Oreo for more than double the amount of time I had with my father, and he knew Oreo for more than the time he consciously knew his mother. Which I just remembered that Grace, my youngest sister-in-law, was two years younger when her mother died than I was when my father died. So yeah, she'd probably think that at least I have a few memories of my father.

But we do both still have the other parent, although his father barely ever talks to him. I've been texting my mother about Oreo.

I don't know how I'm going to live without her, but I know I have to figure it out. There's still the spousal person and all the other cats and my friends and my family, and they all matter and they're important. And I will miss her until I follow her, but the pain won't always be so sharp.

My mother says that my father was always gentle with cats and dogs and that he would drop everything if an animal needed help and care. She says that he'd go "hunting" but he could never bring himself to kill another living being.