Look, it’s not really my intention to drive all of our friends and family away from our blog by constantly recounting the pain we endured with the recent loss of our last cat. After all, something along the lines of 55 million human-type people died last year of natural causes alone, and I’m sure at least a few of them were great folks, nearly as nice as our cats. 😉

We’re not sitting around poaching in our own bitter tears, honestly we’re not. And I truly hope that this isn’t getting just horrendously old to y’all. But something happened today that was so amusing and yet so heartbreaking that I just had to jot it down.

It all started at dinner. We decided to have tuna melts: you know, tuna salad on toasted bread with cheese melted over it. We haven’t had tuna melts in—Christ, six months, maybe as long as a year?—so it seemed high time to have them again.

Only as Margaret was preparing the tuna salad, dumping the briny water from the last can into the sink, it suddenly struck us: no one came to investigate. We weren’t treated to the deafening thunder of tiny hooves on the linoleum. No one stropped our ankles, hitting us up for a shot of that good stuff. For the first time in over fifteen years there were no cats to interrupt our dinner preparations with demands that we share our piscean bounty. This made us both suddenly and terribly sad.

Then a wonderful idea struck me. I trundled downstairs and returned with a fresh can of tuna. I opened it up, but kept the lid on and the liquid inside. I then led Margaret out back to the rose arbor she had erected on the site where we had buried Scamper last year, planting a rose bush to mark his grave. There, giggling and crying and holding each other, we squeezed the tuna water out of the can and onto the ground underneath the rose arbor, tipping a six, as it were, to our family members who could not be with us that day.

Good kitties.