Sweet Jane and Max

It's not been a good week for me and my cats.

Earlier this week, I got an e-mail from my friends Carl and Julie that Sweet Jane (who I left with them when I moved to Korea) had been missing for over a month. I guess they've sort of given up hope. Since Jane used to be a stray cat, it's possible that she's gone off to live off the land again, but I doubt it. She'd be about 13 years old now.... I got her from the SPCA when I was in Montreal, and she moved with me to La Pocatiere, and back to Montreal, then back to La Poc again. She started as a hissing, quivering thing behind the toilet, then under the bed. She spent the first year with me attacking and biting me, and once took on a German shepherd (Susie). She ended up with the sweetest disposition, a soft meow, and 40 tons of fur that she enjoyed filling your nostrils with (she used to help me do push-ups by standing right under me). She brought me gifts of grasshoppers (that she would set loose in the apartment) and, once, a dead bird. She carried her toys around and always put them in the last place that she'd seen me -- and so there was a pile of catnip mice on the windowsill, a rubber ball on the pillow. She is the only cat in the world who could have her fur clipped just by being held - no gas to calm her.

When I was 15 years old, my Mom let me choose a kitten from my friend's cat's litter. I picked the tiniest little calico. There is a photo somewhere of me, with full-on rocker hair, black eyeliner and a jean jacket holding Max in the palm of my hand... she was 3 days old.

I wasn't that surprised to get the e-mail from my Mom today telling me that she'd had to have Max put down today. She was 19 years old.

Max would tap me when she wanted to be pet. She would sit up like a prairie dog when people came in. She slept on my pillow, stealing it completely. She put up with a constant stream of strays and SPCA rejects. She sometimes snored. She had the loveliest smelling skin and the softest rabbit fur. She had a line of aqua around the pupils of her eyes, and a heart-shaped patch of fur on her back. She knew her name from about the age of 4 months and I could call her from anywhere in the house, even when she was sleeping. At the house we lived in when I was 16, I could sneak Max into my room by looking through the upstairs banister and catching her eye where she was sitting on the living room couch. It would take less than 2 minutes for her to join me. In La Pocatiere, she would follow me outside and walk around behind me. She carried ponytail eleastics around and "talked" to them. She had 14 different meows, at least - from a "monkey call" to a tiny brrrrrroop. She's moved a lot in her life and, except for the time she squeezed herself into a space the size of a shoebox under the stove, she took it all in stride. She hunted the cockroaches in my Montreal apartment and cried at the door when I wasn't home. She fell off the 2-storey balcony of the apartment in St. Catharines and once purred so hard at the vet's that the vet couldn't check her heartbeat. She had a tumour removed from her back when she was 15 and hd the worst hairballs of any cat on the planet. When we lived at the Bed and Breakfast, we would get letters from Europe and Japan with photos of Max in people's suitcases. I honestly think that she thought people were visiting her when they entered the house. She didn't jump on counters, or knock things off shelves. She spent a lot of time "making biscuits", on you, on blankets, on her sheepskin. When I first moved to Montreal, she was literally my only friend. She wasn't finnicky when it came to food and would do anything for a Pounce treat. A cat-breeder once told me that her colouring, 5-colour calico, made her more valuable. She once tried to climb into a toothpaste box, but only got as far as one paw. She was known as Maxwell House and Blobbocat, Jabba the cat and Maxcatbabygirl.

It was so hard for me to leave her behind when I moved.

Nineteen years. Nineteen years. A whole lifetime is contained in that time. A whole friendship.