Emma Goldman

When we were living in Cedar Park (or, as I call it, Cedar Fucking Park), there were neighbors who let their dogs out at night. Those dogs killed small dogs and cats, and a malfunctioning garage door meant that two of our cats were out while those dogs were looking for animals to kill.

We got two kittens, Winston Churchill (who ended up being more like Winston Smith) and a torby we named Emma Goldman. We are naming all our cats after anarchists from now on, because that’s what they are. (Although an argument could be made that they’re all believers in absolute monarchy but disagree as to who the absolute monarch is.) Winston brought home a virus, and it got into one of Emma’s eyes (iirc, a variety of herpes), and we were giving her eye drops and pills for I don’t even remember how long. Eventually, the vet recommended we give up and get the eye removed, so that’s what she did.

I still feel bad about this. After we did that, she changed personality. She became a loving and affectionate cat. She had obviously been in a lot of pain.

Being one-eyed had absolutely no impact on her ability to play with bits of string, correctly assess a jump, or various other activities that would seem to require stereoscopic vision. Cats are amazing.

She liked to sit in our laps while we were at our desks, or just sit on our chairs. She was not always gracious about letting us sit in our desk chairs. After a while, I discovered that having her sit in my lap while I worked hurt my back (I still don’t know why), and so I set up a basket on my desk for her. Jim continued to let her sit in his lap. She really got to like the basket, and I attribute my scholarly productivity to having a cat I could scratch while writing.

Once, she urped onto USB ports on Jim’s CPU unit that caused Jim to spend hours diving deep into the Windows registry in order not to get error messages. Personally, I suspect that she felt that the fish he had shared at dinner was over-cooked, and she was teaching him a lesson. I wouldn’t put it past her.

She was never actually a fat cat, but she had a kind of grandeur, and so the joke started about her being a Fat Cat Banker. She would have been a damn good banker. She was sensible, good at assessing choices, and she completely dominated the dogs. She was an early poster in the “cats against feminism tumblr,” arguing that she earned that chair because dogs (iirc).

We live on a busy street, near a creek that has coyotes, and so our cats are indoor cats. Jim built a catio for the cats, so that they could be outside and watch birds at a bird feeder, and Emma liked it. But our house is on clay that’s on limestone, and that means that doors suddenly don’t close the same way if there’s been the right amount of rain. One night, a door didn’t close, and Emma got out. We were frantic. Jim was walking the road, and Jacob and I were searching in the backyard, and she suddenly materialized in front of Jacob. She didn’t come running from another place, or come over the fence. She was just suddenly there.

That was her superpower. You couldn’t find her anywhere, and then, there she was. She did that in the house too.

Another time, she got out, and she got out of the backyard, and I frantically chased her. I had one of those nightmare-like slow motion experiences of watching her run toward the road while a car was coming. She hit a car. She bounced off the wheel.

After that, we would sometimes take her out in the backyard if we were going to sit and read and she was reliable. She would hang out and survey her demesne. We knew it was time when she wasn’t enjoying being in the yard.

She was a badass cat. She did what she wanted to do. She knew what she wanted, and she asked for it. She was clear on her boundaries, and enforced them without anger. I admired her. We had a rule about no cats on the dinner table, but once she hit a certain age, that became more of a guideline than a rule. She would often try to get food from me, but since I’m more vegetarian than not, that didn’t work out well for her (although it shows that she was attentive as to who was the bigger sucker). Jim, however, was a goldmine.

She was a torby, and we learned that torbies have a reputation for not putting up with shit (as Jim can say, since he had to have antibiotics for the time she bit him at a vet). Otoh, we spent the last three weeks giving her 100ml subcutaneously every day, and it was all good.

After Winston died, she would join us in the morning for snuggles. Sometimes—there was no clear pattern—she would come and sleep on someone for a while. When Clarence was in bad shape, and her kidney issues made themselves clear, she would come to the bedroom during the night and paw at the blanket till we adjusted to let her sleep under the covers with us. Friends recommended heating pads, and that helped, but she would still sometimes want to be with us. I don’t know why, but I know that she knew what she wanted, and asked for it. That’s who she always was.

She loved Pearl. She loved having Pearl boop her head. Pearl was completely intimidated by her, and so was always a little cautious about booping, which is so incredibly sweet on both their parts.

Because of social distancing, the vet put her down in the backyard she loved, in the sun. She was so weak that it took less than the vet expected. She is buried in that yard, just outside a window of the room she loved.

She was an oddly present cat. She was just always there. And so going through every room is being aware that she is not there. Even sitting in the backyard is being aware she isn’t there. She was always present in our lives for sixteen years.

A friend once said that, when someone you love dies, you never get over it, and you never stop thinking about them. It’s just that they move to a different place in your life. I admired Emma. I admired her ability to be loving, clear with boundaries, and rarely angry. I will miss her so much, and look for her in rooms for months, and I will think of her for the rest of my life. I will also keep myself from urping into Jim’s CPU, no matter how angry I am with him.