Requiem for Hitler the Cat

To hell with the DNC, our old cat died. That's more significant, dammit!

Our 17 year old cat passed away in her sleep this morning. She was named Kelly when we got her from the animal shelter some 16 years ago, but quickly earned the nickname Hitler.

She was a small black and white cat, no mustache, but when she wanted to go outside, she’d stretch up towards the doorknob with one paw outstretched, turn her head and loudly meow in a tone that sounded more like now! She really did resemble Hitler then, and we started saying Seig Heil! whenever she did that.

After awhile, sometimes if we said Sieg Heil! she’d run over to the door and do her Sieg Heil thing. She clearly had some Siamese cat ancestry, for that loud meow would wake the dead.

It certainly woke our neighbors one winter night for, at 3am, the cops pounded on the door and asked if this cat that had been howling, in an incredibly loud and persistent manner, for over an hour under their bedroom window was ours.

Who has ever had the cops called on them for a cat making too much noise?

That said, she was the most annoying cat we’ve ever had. She expressed her devotion to her person of the moment(she only seemed to like one of us at a time) by urinating over anything of theirs they left on the floor, and was the only cat I was never able to cure of that nasty habit.

For years, whenever my wife and I went for a walk, Hitler would follow us yowling for us to return home the entire way. We called this Stalinizing behavior, and before long she answered to Stalin as well as Kelly and Hitler.

She was also an alky. If you left a mixed drink untended for more than a couple of minutes that cat would drink it. Joe Stalin would have approved.

Like all cats, she was convinced that we could control the weather outside as well as the climate inside, and didn’t like winter, so she was especially loud in her chastisement of us then. She was also in the habit of howling in the middle of the night when she was inside the house. Eventually, it just became one of the normal night noises around here.

But she was gentle to people, never scratched or bit without being seriously provoked, and was quite the huntress of birds and small rodents in her younger days.

Seventeen years is a good long life for a cat. I must say Kelly did enjoy herself most of the time, and she didn’t seem to be in much pain in her final days. The only thing really weird for the last couple of weeks was that she was quiet, so we knew the end was near. Annoying as she could be, she was unique, and we will miss her.

Even one of our two younger(they’re both 9 or 10 now) cats, never accepted by Kelly, who watched while I buried Kelly in one of her favorite sunny spots in the back garden while my wife played a bagpipe version of Amazing Grace, seems a little sad today.

But she’s a large black cat named Angel, so of course she is.

Thank you for letting me mourn in writing for my cat, good day or night, and good luck as always.