Pet Memorial

Mis(sed)-Communication By Aneesa

Not all of us are cat-lovers, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to understand them enough to help them when they need us the most. My story is of a family of cats that I miscommunicated with because of our differences as humans and cats.

We have four great cats.

Tudong was covered in white fur (mostly on his under-belly and paws), with some parts that are black like his ears and head. Though it doesn't look like an ideal head-scarf, we still call him Tudong. We know our naming sense wasn't great since the mother was called Boots, but they didn't seem to mind the names. Although, years later, I realized that they didn't dislike the name, but they also didn't like it either. From how they didn't really respond much when we called them with their christened names. Slippers and Sneakers followed their mother in the way that they were completely covered in black fur.

As weeks and months passed by, we started to have a fondness for these stray cats that chose to live in our storeroom. So we built a house just for them next to that storeroom, under the condition that they stay away from rooms that have nice couches, as the superior (our mother) of the house ordered.

Tudong liked to play with his brothers, Slippers and Sneakers, and he also loved to observe us, two-footed walkers. Either by perching near the sink outside of the house or on top of the cars; his ears and head would turn towards us as if a greeting to welcome us back home. Meanwhile, Boots liked to just sit and laze around, but she would swipe at her kittens if they went too far.

Truthfully, within my family, I was not exactly a cat-person or an animal person in general. I tried to play with the cats with any strings that I could find or with whatever stuff that I could use to play with them. But it seemed that I wasn't compatible with them as most of the attempts that I tried were non-successful, so I started to lose interest in trying to play with them. My family adored them though. However, at one point, everyone became preoccupied with their own plans in life that after several months, we didn't really play with the cats in our backyard anymore.

We didn't realize it until at first but Slippers and Sneakers loved to wander off to other places outside of our territory frequently. We hadn't considered these cats as ours that much, so we didn't think much about them wandering off. But one day, they didn't come back and we thought that they might be at one of our neighbors', and tossed the negative thoughts away to the back of our mind. However, several nights later, Boots kept calling into the night. We guessed that she might be calling for Slippers and Sneakers to come back but as a person who was unable to really understand her loss, I wanted for her to be quiet so that we all could sleep for tomorrow.

Boots and Tudong were then the only two cats left that we saw wandering around in the backyard. It didn't take long for Boots to stop her calling in the late night. Yet, I didn't realize that it was about something as important as a broken heart.

Not long after, Boots started to wander around more frequently. On some nights she didn't seem to sleep, and I notice this from her callings at night to the moon and stars. In some other times, she didn't seem to want to do anything. Then one day, from one of her wanderings, she also didn't come back.

Tudong became the only stray cat left.

He was different from the other cats, in the sense that he didn't like to wander. He was just... there.

He liked to stay under the car that was the closest to the home that we built for them. He ate what we gave him, and didn't run away when we felt like petting him. But he started to call less and less. Tudong started to become a quiet cat after a while. We didn't think too deep into it and put the worrying thoughts to the back of our minds, rationalizing that Tudong just didn't want to call out because he liked to stay quiet.

Tudong was the only cat out of his family that we found dead in our backyard a few years later. He died at the spot where he regularly laid his body on a sunny afternoon to rest.

We don't have pictures of them, because we took more pictures of ourselves. There are no toys to remember them by because we still considered them as strays that we feed once in a while, and so we didn't buy them any toys to play with too. There were no collars that we could keep to tell that they had existed and lived in our backyard at one point.

We had four great cats.

We just didn't realize it until they're gone.