Sleep well, little cat

Tim and I went to The Ark, an animal rescue and homing centre in Ashbourne, to go to their open day. Him to poke through the second-hand books for his antiquarian bookshop, and me to look at the animals. Just look. And then we met RubyCat. A little five-month-old scrap of tortoiseshell kittenhood. And obviously we fell in love. We weren’t living together at this point, but I was due to go away to the US for work, and so Tim moved in for a couple of weeks to settle her in while I was away. And from that point on, they were inseparable. I always said that the shortest amount of recorded time was between Tim sitting down and Ruby leaping onto his lap

Ruby triumphantly outlived the two resident cats, sleek black-and-white Dizzy and black housepanther Satchmo, and strutted around the house proclaiming her couch, her food bowl, her humans

After Tim’s sudden death, Ruby was my comfort and my sidekick. She’d never been allowed into the bedroom at night before, but now when I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep she was curled up on me or at my back, and her purring soothed me.
 
When Dee and her cat and dogs moved in, Ruby lived in my upstairs office during the day, sitting on my desk supervising, and tapping my hand when I didn’t pay her enough attention, and continued to sleep on me at night.

Over the last few months she started to lose weight, become wobbly, and sleep even more, but she still ate and purred and jumped onto the bed. When she couldn’t jump onto my lap any more and started to fall over, and when the purr started to dim, I knew I had to be brave for both of us. I took her to the vet for the last time. I stroked her as she slipped away, and Dee held onto me. We will plant a ruby-coloured rose in the garden that Ruby looked out on from the high point of my office windowsill.
 
RubyCat’s loss is doubly hard, because it feels like I’m losing one of the last living links to Tim. I’m not sure that I believe in an afterlife, but if I do, I know that she will be leaping onto his lap the moment he sits down. Sleep well, little cat.