Oracle

Hayley and I cat-sat for a grad student in my program when she had to spend the summer at home. Our cat, Fluffy, seemed to enjoy having a playmate, and so once Mr. Whiskers went back to his family, we sought out an addition to ours.

Oracle came home with us in January 2014. She was, as my wife pointed out to me, the first pet we acquired together. She was just three when we got her from the shelter; her previous owner had been an old woman. At the shelter they called her "Oreo" on account of her black-and-white coloring, but we dubbed her "Oracle"—we had been reading Birds of Prey comics at the time.

Fluffy was skeptical at first, but they eventually became friends. I don't know that they ever quite played together the way we imagined, as Fluffy began slowing down, but Oracle would even groom Fluffy... whether he liked it or not.

Oracle was a huntress and an adventuress. When we lived in our Connecticut apartment, I once heard her yowling at 2am and realized she had killed a mouse. She always wanted to go outside, and we got a cat harness for her and would let her explore the front porch of our rental. Once we moved to Florida, she loved stalking lizards in our pool enclosure... and then sometimes she would throw up and we'd find an entire lizard in their, whole.

She lived with us through a cross-country move, and became a solo cat when Fluffy passed away. We talked about getting another cat for her to play with, but things became chaotic enough around here when our first child was born. Oracle usually avoided him, but I do remember once evening where I was rocking him as he screamed and screamed and screamed, ineffectually trying to get him to calm down and Oracle ran up to me and just meowed furiously, as if to say, "Enough already! Make him be quiet!"

She never let our first son get her, but she's clearly been slowing down over the last year, as our second had consistently been able to catch her, carrying her around even. She's lost of a lot of weight, been diagnosed with hyperthyroidism and put on special food, and has been throwing up so so much. When I took her to the vet most recently, she was surprised to learn she was only eleven, and she suggested a different approach which seemed to be working...

...but still, it was not too much of a surprise when I found that she had passed peacefully in her sleep under the rocking chair a couple weeks ago. When we told Son One, he responded, "Am I dreaming? Is this a dream?"

Both boys helped us dig the hole in the backyard. There's a hole in our family now.