The Cat of a Thousand Names

This wonderful thug of a cat joined our little family almost 16 years ago.  In retrospect, he was too young – about 6 weeks old – and that’s probably why he imprinted so well on my daughter.  He practically glued himself to her, and that never changed.  He was handsome and sweet and had the best blue eyes...

For about the first half of his rather long life, he really was a thug.  A pirate cat, if you will.  He went through an interesting phase during which he stole pizza crusts and stored them for later… in our sneakers.  We found out about this peculiar predilection when I found him hunched over on the landing, looking like a chubby, furry vulture… and growling.  It was really weird, and it seemed as if he was guarding something.  My first thought was that he’d cornered a mouse… ugh!  I didn’t want to deal with that, but of course, if there was a mouse, we needed to know.  So I nudged him out of the way and grabbed the sneaker he was guarding.  He was not impressed, and watched me through slitted blue eyes… With great trepidation, I shook the sneaker, and sure enough, something thudded softly onto the ground.  Oh no!  It was a … um… a pizza crust?!  What kind of cat hunts and traps pizza crusts?! Well, as it turned out, this cat…

It might be that Sacha didn't consider himself a cat, which is why we found it interesting that he would occasionally not only tolerate but actually snuggle with another feline resident.  In retrospect, he might just have appreciated the body heat, as he is wedged in above with Dinah.  He was also a bit of an escape artist… once he got a first taste of the outdoors, he decided it was worth investigating, with or without his people.  We discovered this when I woke up one morning and heard him meowing but couldn’t find him anywhere.  Loud though he was, he was nowhere to be seen.  Until I looked out the window.  And saw him on the roof outside the living room window. We lived in a great little flat then, in a funky little place, so the roof on which he was standing there screaming for attention was also the ceiling of our downstairs neighbor.  In order to get him back inside, we had to take off the window screen (thankfully, the windows had recently been replaced, so we could actually do that… and then coax him in (because we weren’t about to go out on that roof ourselves!)  What we couldn’t figure out is how he got out there.  Initially, we thought he must’ve gotten out somehow while the door was open, so we resolved to be extra-careful… but one day, it happened again.  And AGAIN!  Did we live with a Houdini cat??  Finally, we figured it out.  He was hopping on the heater in the kitchen, and wedging his furry little body between the screen and the window frame, much the way that a hamster will sometimes escape between the bars of its cage.  Having figured that out, it was easy enough to remedy, thankfully (but if I’m honest, we only figured it out because my daughter caught him in the act!)

It was in this same funky little flat that I blame him for trying to kill me – picture it.  There was a single step down from our living room to a tiny landing.  Then a single step up to the bathroom.  So there I am, one day, heading to the bathroom, just as Sacha was heading downstairs.  Obviously, I didn’t want to step on him, so I tried to step over him – just go into the bathroom without stepping on the landing at all.  That’s when he moved, and if I had kept doing what I had started to do, I definitely would’ve stomped on him.  So I flailed around, trying not to kill the cat, and wound up slamming into the door frame, which is how I broke my ribs!  (I took him out of the will at that point.)

He would steal food from you – while you were actu.ally eating it.  I was sitting at the table one day, and I had a forkful of food paused in midair, as I was saying something.  Then, to my right, this little grey paw reached up (he had been sitting on a chair at the end of the table, hitherto unnoticed), wrapped around my hand, and veeeeeeeery gently pulled my hand towards himself.  I just sat there I shock, and yet laughing.  The chutzpah of this cat!

And he had medical issues.  As many male cats do, he developed urinary tract crystals.  They very nearly killed him.  But in the end, thanks to good vet care, they didn’t.  He didn’t much approve of other cats and was often unkind to them.  He felt the same way about small dogs.  He managed quite well with big dogs, like Wylie & Ben, the Bernese Mountain Dogs….as long as they understood that he was boss.  For a time, there were red flags – literally! – on his file at the vet, because he did not care to go there.  In fact, it made him angry and very aggressive.  The vet techs would put on gloves, and put a cone on his head just to bring him in to be examined.  It was somewhat embarrassing, but thankfully, when he was around 8 or 9, he calmed down a bit.

It seemed to take a while for him to warm up to Lennox - he certainly missed Wylie and Ben when they were gone, but when Lennox came home, he wasn't too sure of her.  He did warm up to her, though, and they actually spent quite a lot of time snuggled together, frequently grooming one another.  

He was most unlike what you may have heard about Siamese – he really wasn’t aloof.  He was a furry ball of love to his people – and if he counted you among his people, you felt blessed.  He purred so loudly that you could hear him from across the room.  Or over a long-distance phone call, as I often did when I was in Quebec, and Sacha (a Bluenoser through and through) stayed put with his girl. He had a special song that everyone who knew him well could sing to him (and often did, though none so often as Bronwyn).  He never met a sunbeam that he didn’t love, and as he got older could be found sitting not just near, but on heating vents, radiators, wherever he felt most warmth (and he had the singed whiskers to prove it!).

There are a thousand things I could tell you about Sacha, but the most important thing is that he loved and was loved.  He comforted and was himself a comfort.  He was a funny, infuriating, absolutely wonderful cat, and today, we had to say goodbye to him.  There wasn’t much time – just over a week ago, we learned that he wasn’t just an old man with a questionable medical history that had actually left him rather fragile.  Sacha had cancer, and in that last week, he declined much more quickly than we ever anticipated he could.  So today was the last trip to the vet, and I’m so glad I could be there with Bronwyn – this isn’t something that a person should do alone, for one thing.  But also, Sacha had long since lodged himself into my heart, and I am so very grateful I got a chance to tell him one more time what a great cat he was, how handsome he was, how much he was loved. 

Just one more look at a cat and his girl... a girl and her cat... It would have been impossible for him to have loved her more.