My oldest cat, Sebastian, died early last week. I'd called my mom on the way home from work the day it happened to see if she needed me to pick up anything while I was out, and she seemed off, so I asked her if everything was okay. She told me that our neighbors had found him earlier that morning and buried him in our front yard (their back yard) for us, then asked me if I was okay. I told her I was because he was an old cat and we both knew it was coming, and because as sappy as I sometimes am, I don't tend to feel emotional extremes.
After hanging up, I visited my dad, and since I had my phone with me, made a brief update about him passing on both Facebook and Twitter. I didn't think much about him the next couple hours, but when I got home around 9:00, I went to his improvised grave and stood over it for a few minutes. It felt more real then, and I started to feel real sadness at his passing, but it wasn't until talking to some friends about it later that night that it really hit me that he was gone, and I shed a couple tears.
Sebastian had been a part of our family for most of my life, and he was the only pet of ours to last that long. We got him out of the paper when I was still in elementary school, and he came to us already named after the crab in The Little Mermaid because he was an orange tabby, and Sebastian was a red crab.
One of my earliest memories of him was watching television in the living room shortly after bringing him home, and him climbing onto my back to lick my head while I lay on my stomach facing the TV. He was always fairly affectionate for a cat, and would sleep with me most nights when I was younger. He was also an incredible mouser and left us treats at our doorstep for years.
He was with us a good fifteen years or more, and it wasn't until the past couple that he started showing his age, and he got incredibly thin and really haggard really fast. He'd also stopped using the litter box around this time, and though we put up with it for a while, my mom and I finally expelled him from the house a month or so ago. Despite being an inside/outside cat, neither of us really liked making him stay outside, and were both concerned with the possibility of keeping him out of the house when winter came, but entropy caught up with him, and I'm thankful that's not something I had to decide.
My mom currently has two glass and metal flowers on either side of his grave, but I'm going to go to a home decorating store sometime soon and see what they might have that might work as a headstone or marker. I might also burn a candle for him afterward. I've had literally dozens of pets over the years, and have never marked any of their gravesites – the house we used to live in had what amounted to a pet cemetery in the backyard, but you wouldn't know to look – but I feel compelled to commemorate him in some way. He was one of my best friends, and I am going to miss him.
After hanging up, I visited my dad, and since I had my phone with me, made a brief update about him passing on both Facebook and Twitter. I didn't think much about him the next couple hours, but when I got home around 9:00, I went to his improvised grave and stood over it for a few minutes. It felt more real then, and I started to feel real sadness at his passing, but it wasn't until talking to some friends about it later that night that it really hit me that he was gone, and I shed a couple tears.
Sebastian had been a part of our family for most of my life, and he was the only pet of ours to last that long. We got him out of the paper when I was still in elementary school, and he came to us already named after the crab in The Little Mermaid because he was an orange tabby, and Sebastian was a red crab.
One of my earliest memories of him was watching television in the living room shortly after bringing him home, and him climbing onto my back to lick my head while I lay on my stomach facing the TV. He was always fairly affectionate for a cat, and would sleep with me most nights when I was younger. He was also an incredible mouser and left us treats at our doorstep for years.
He was with us a good fifteen years or more, and it wasn't until the past couple that he started showing his age, and he got incredibly thin and really haggard really fast. He'd also stopped using the litter box around this time, and though we put up with it for a while, my mom and I finally expelled him from the house a month or so ago. Despite being an inside/outside cat, neither of us really liked making him stay outside, and were both concerned with the possibility of keeping him out of the house when winter came, but entropy caught up with him, and I'm thankful that's not something I had to decide.
My mom currently has two glass and metal flowers on either side of his grave, but I'm going to go to a home decorating store sometime soon and see what they might have that might work as a headstone or marker. I might also burn a candle for him afterward. I've had literally dozens of pets over the years, and have never marked any of their gravesites – the house we used to live in had what amounted to a pet cemetery in the backyard, but you wouldn't know to look – but I feel compelled to commemorate him in some way. He was one of my best friends, and I am going to miss him.
