So, my cat died.

It’s a fairly nonchalant sort of statement, when you see it written down. It has the same gravity as announcing that the kettle has stopped working, or that your feet are cold. ‘My cat died’ doesn’t evoke nearly the same drama as something like, ‘my house burned down’, or, ‘I was in a plane crash’. Cats die every day, probably more often than humans, yet I feel like I have suffered a greater tragedy than plane crashes or burning houses combined. I have lost yet another member of my ever-decreasing family, and I am haunted.

Over the Australia Day long weekend, Meg disappeared. This wasn’t unusual: he would often go missing for a night or two, casually sauntering in from whatever mysterious place he visited when he was ready. But he would always come home. Mog, the other cat, was more of a homebody and she and I would welcome him back at odd hours of the night, grinning into the darkness at the familiar flop of his big body landing on my duvet. But when he still hadn’t returned on the Monday, I grew worried. Out I went, calling his name and shaking the bag of cat food like an instrument. Meg, shake, Meggy, shake, Meg, shake. I went door knocking, checked garages, asked people to unlock their sheds in case he was in there. That Monday was blisteringly hot, and by early evening a thunderstorm swirled on the horizon and fierce winds shook the big gums lining the streets. My voice was carried off in the winds like sand, wasted. Regardless, I knew the task of walking the streets was better than lying in bed, feeling useless. Every few hours through the night I went out and walked the streets, hoping he would hear me in the silence. Around 2am I noticed a strange figure a few yards from me, dressed all in black with a black cap. He was creeping through the flats next door and when I spotted him emerge out the front after me, I raced back home, spooked. Weeks later, I keep thinking about that strange man, the strange winds, the eerieness at the early hours when everyone else is asleep. The Grim Reaper in a baseball cap.

The next morning, nerves frayed, I walked Minty to daycare. After the wild winds of the night before, the day felt eerily still. The streets were strewn with leaves and branches, some trees cracked down the middle as if struck by lightening, with gaping wooden wounds. We both called Meg’s name as we walked up and down the road. By the time I was alone on the return walk home, I was sobbing. The drum inside me was getting louder and I felt, with great certainty, that something was wrong. As I turned the corner home, I felt a strong compulsion to check the cobbled alleyway that run behind our house down to the beach. I called Meg’s name, calling, calling, until I saw him. My white cotton wool cat, curled peacefully at the base of some steps. Immediately, hope. Meg! I ran over and my heart split with a great crack, a lightening strike to a tree. He was dead.

All along, he was just here, just there, waiting for me. Was he waiting for me? I crumpled to the ground and reached for him. He was so still, so heavy, so cold. Apart from the flies that crawled at his eyes and mouth, he looked like he was sleeping. He looked so perfect, so normal, but with something missing. Isn’t it extraordinary, that despite all logic and reason, how we can feel life? Or, more accurately, can feel its absence? This moment is seered into my mind, the finality, the thud of death, the knowledge there was nothing I could do. I wailed, shamelessly. People turned around to watch. On my knees, I wailed. I ran my hand over his little body, sobbing, heaving, boiling with grief. I said I was sorry. I was sorry I did this. Oh, Meg. God.

The hours that followed were a blur. Within ten minutes, a swarm of friends arrived, cars screeching as they found me bent over Meg’s body. What happened next exists only as fragments, snapshots of a day. A glass of water with a valium. Keys unlocking my door, Meg, gently placed in the basket and covered in vines and flowers, a beautiful funereal offering. A cup of tea. “No, he doesn’t look like he was injured.” A sombre walk to the vet to hand him over. A pamphlet with cremation prices and urn sizes. Washing the stench of rotting body from his blue collar. “Don’t worry about dinner, I’ve made pasta.” I floated above it all, watching myself go through the motions and knowing one, horrible thing: I would never, ever, forgive myself.

In the weeks of grief that bloomed after his death, like slow moving swirls of blood underwater, the feelings of guilt have intensified. An oily sense that this was somehow my fault slide around my brain and I tally up the victims. Mog, our other cat and Meg’s sister, still spends her day staring dead-eyed at the wall. When she found his collar drying outside, she yowled, rolling herself on it, trying to magic her brother back. It was grotesque to witness, made worse by my own guilt. Minty, on the other hand, didn’t understand it, not really, and was immediately accepting of the fact that Meg was dead. She holds this knowledge with the same emotion as hearing that it is raining outside, or that it is time to turn off the TV. She delivers deadpan statements out of the blue, unaware of the way they slice me. “Mummy, Meg is in heaven so now we only have one cat,” she says. “Poor Moggy misses her brother.” I try to smile a wonky smile as I feel my heart slither to the floor.

+++

Meg and Mog were found at just a week old in a bucket on a building site, discovered by a friend of my cousins. It was during COVID, so the vet wouldn’t accept them and they were en route to a shelter, likely to be put down. My cousin, bless her bleeding heart, was already fostering a menagerie of animals and two scrappy kittens were two too many. Bored and lonely after only recently arriving home to Australia, I hungrily accepted her offer. Kittens! How silly and wonderful. Tiny, meowling balls of fluff, we spent our first months together learning from each other. I spoonfed them milk and they disappeared in the nooks and crannies of the creaking Queenslander home we had rented for lockdown. Mog, the girl, was a flash of grey, a thin and wily streetcat who wriggled out of my grasp and had wild-eyed yellow pupils. Meg, the boy, was a puff of white fluff, like a cotton wool ball, with piercing blue eyes. My maternal instincts were immediate and fierce. The first time I took them outside I put them both on leashes, petrified I would lose them in the tropical undergrowth. Slowly but surely they grew, and I relaxed, and we found an animalistic rhythm. I knew them so well that I could pick their meow a mile away, know what they wanted, know where they were. It is a gaping grief that Meg is now gone.

The cats were my first foray into motherhood. Like an omen, I fell pregnant a few months after they arrived into our home and my little life blossomed into something like a family. It is hard to separate the cats from my memories of pregnancy and early motherhood: they were as much apart of the fabric of life as my partner or the house or the city. The cats would drape themselves over my pregnant belly, listening to her underwater hiccups and feeling the soft roll as she spun herself around in utero. When she arrived, they stayed close, always. My babies, like three sausages in the bed. Meg, big and white and floppy, became my baby daughter’s favourite toy, impossibly patient as she forced him into headlocks and long, fierce hugs. People used to watch, incredulous, at his patience whilst being manhandled by a wayward toddler. He loved her, and she loved him. The last photos I have of Meg were actually taken by Minty, off-angle shots of him sitting on the beg like a sphinx, grand and unbothered by the chaos of a toddler around him.

The cats were a dyad; an unbreakable duo. One grey, one white, they would sleep curled nose to tail so they resembled the yin-yang symbol. One was never far from the other. In Queensland, I’d often find them chasing each other among the wildness of our tropical backyard, hiding behind the old bathtub that held our herbs. When I was pregnant, I would lie on the grass and watch the palm trees rustle overhead, the cats lying beside me and rolling in the thick blanket of rotting frangipanis. I wonder if I ever had the thought at that time in my life that it would be the closest thing I’d ever have to the dream: a husband, a baby, two cats, a house in the suburbs, and my family around the corner. Brick by brick, the years that followed dismantled that perfect halcyon dream life. I lost the husband, the house, the family, and now, the cat. Here now in Melbourne, miles from my family and the person I used to be, Mog and I sit on the couch, stunned. I wonder what it would be like to lose her, too? I would be, potentially at my own hand, totally and utterly alone. How does someone arrive here? And why? I hold tight the knowledge that the choices I made were right, and that for new life to emerge, we must first release the old. I just didn’t think that would include my little Meg.

In the weeks since Meg’s death, I have found myself thinking about what a gift our animals are to us. I remember the evening Minty was picked up by my ex-husband, the first of many co-custody handovers. She was only two years old, and I could hear her wailing for me, down the staircase of my apartment block and out down the street. I felt as though I was dying, lying on the floor, howling like an animal. There is nothing natural about handing over your child, nothing that eases that pain. Puffy-eyed and feeling like I had been poisoned, I spent that awful evening huddled in bed with Meg and Mog. They curled themselves into me, purring. They were the only souls I had to comfort me, and that’s what they did. Silently holding me, witnessing me, loving me. It pains me to know I wasn’t able to do that for Meg in his final hours.

I’ll probably never know what killed him. The vet said he didn’t appear to have any injuries, so wasn’t hit by a car. In recent weeks he had been hunting the small barn mice around the neighbourhood and leaving gory corpses for me by the back door. Ominous. I imagine one of them might have been poisoned. Who knows. Either way, he appeared so peaceful in his final resting spot that all I can hope is that it was quick, and painless. I have replayed that horrible weekend in my mind, over and over. What if I hadn’t gone to lunch on Sunday? What if I had chosen to walk down the alleyway to the beach, as I so often do? What if? What if? What if? I keep thinking back to the Saturday night, when Mog was harassing me, meowling with a hysterical energy. I had closed my bedroom door on her, not thinking to follow her. She was trying to tell me, perhaps, that he was there. Over and over the ghosts of the weekend haunt me, and I carry a silent shame that I failed Meg, somehow.

In and amongst the guilt, death plays its usual mind games. I keep being followed by those fluffy white flowers that float down from the plane trees in spring. White cotton wool balls. I think of being a child, cross legged on the baking school oval, picking dandelions and making a wish as we blew the white fluffy seeds to the wind. I wonder, each time the white balls dance around my feet, if it’s Meg. Coming to tell me he’s okay, that I need to forgive myself, that he’s peaceful. I feel like I’m losing my mind, embarrassed that I can’t cope with the death of a cat. Is this normal? Surely not. Today, as I finally threw out the withered flowers that a friend bought me after Meg’s death, I noticed that it had contained stalks of some kind of flower that must have bloomed without me noticing. As I heaved the bouquet into a black garbage bag, the air erupted with a plume of white, fluffy cotton balls. I started to cry.

Joan Didion said, ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live’, and I wonder if this is what she meant. The stories we write to ourselves, turning them over and over in our mind like a smooth rock, comforting ourselves. It wasn’t my fault, I think. He hated being locked inside, he had a happy life outdoors, these things happen. Gently, gently. The pain eases each day and the memory of finding his body has started to lose the gunshot effect it first had. I can hold that memory with more power, now. I can think of it without falling backwards into a ditch. The stories are working, but the guilt remains.

I’ve never lost a pet before, so I find myself wondering how long this will last. What exquisite pain. I broke a man’s heart last year and I’ll never forget his beautiful response, that the heartache was a reminder that he was alive, and for that he was grateful. So, here is the bruise to show I loved. That my boy named Meg was a jewel, a prize, a gift from the gods that saw me through the worst of times, and now returned home. In the gaping crater that he’s left, Minty, Mog, and I will exist as a new trio. For the umpteenth time over the past few years, I recalibrate. I take the hit and get back up. I am sad, but just like joy, that is the cost of being alive.