darkemeralds. Goodbye to Graydie (Reply)

April 4 2009 was the first time I posted on here under the tag "Sam and Dean the stray cats". I thought they were brothers, and Sam was theone that was coming inside my house a month later.

Eventually I figured out that Sam was a female, and that "Dean" was probably her son. Dean never did come indoors. He led a hard life, and by the time my neighbors Wally and Nick adopted him, he was sickly and didn't live very long.

Meanwhile, one day at least a year after Sam adopted me, her former human knocked on my door. He was trying to learn the fate of his cat Graydie, now my cat Sam. He and his mom, evicted from a nearby rental house, had been forced to move to a place that didn't allow pets. Graydie had disappeared at moving time. He had come around for weeks calling for her, leaving food out, trying to find her.

Finally, he traced her to my house. He couldn't take her back, but he was ready to pay for cat food and veterinary care. I told him she was doing well, even coming indoors sometimes at night and in bad weather. I never heard from him again.

Graydie lived with me for almost thirteen years. She sat in my lap exactly once, for 20 seconds, but she always liked to be near me. She would follow me when I left the house on foot, sometimes all the way to the busy street where I caught my morning bus. She would go out for a walks with me around the block.

Over the years, she slowed down, of course. She stopped going all the way around the block with me, then stopped following me. After a while, she couldn't jump up on the bed anymore, and slept on a heated rug under my desk. Walking became harder and harder.

She stopped eating sometime in December, and a few days before Christmas she died.

She was quiet, and she was beautiful, and once in a while she purred. I think she was happy here.

Young Graydie when she first adopted me: