In Memory of Widget

Widget, my cat of 16 years, finally departed for that sunny windowsill in the sky this morning. She lived about six months longer than anyone expected. Late last October she was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease. A week or so later she took a sharp turn for the worse and we all (i.e. me, Tracie, and the vet) thought that she wouldn’t last through the weekend. She rebounded, much to everyone’s surprise, and was in reasonably good health for the next several months, all things considered. We really didn’t expect her to last until our trip to Japan in April, but she did. Hence she enjoyed a little vacation of her own, staying at the vet’s office, where she was waited upon by the techs and the vets. All of this was a prelude to the inevitable, of course. She slowed down over the last few weeks, declined sharply a couple of days ago, and now she is with us no more.

I named her Widget not because of the use of the term in user-interface programming but because of its more general sense of a small object of indeterminate use and application. She was usually addressed as Widgie, Widge, Wingnut or (less frequently) The FurThing. She had the softest, silkiest coat I’ve ever encountered on a cat, which meant that her fur stuck to clothing and furniture with remarkable tenacity.

She was quite vocal and had the strangest vocabulary I’ve heard used by a cat. When she was young she beeped and clicked rather than meowing. There was at least one occasion during a phone conversation when the person on the other end of the line heard her in the background and asked whether I had a bird. Later in life she switched over to a more catlike screeching, a sound which Tracie described on numerous occasions as “not at all a nice noise”, particularly when one happened to have a migraine and Widge was using it to request breakfast.

She’d been in my life since my late 20s, so she spanned about half of my adult years. She was a fixture through major changes in my life–jobs, dwellings, relationships, and so on. She wasn’t the easiest cat to live with, but she was always there. Now I regret all of the times that she wanted to sit in my lap or play and I ignored her because I thought I had something more important to do at the time. Maybe I was doing something important, maybe I wasn’t, but she didn’t know the difference. She just knew that my attention was important to her. I hope that she had some sense for how important she was to me, nonetheless.

I have many, many photos of her but for some reason this one came to mind:

I suppose you have to be into music gear to appreciate it fully, but I know that at least some of the people reading this will recognize the name and model number on the boxes. I think it captures both her innocently irreverent nature and my willingness to indulge her.

Once again, a big thank-you goes out to the doctors and staff at Foothills Animal Clinic. Without them Widge would have lived a shorter and less happy life.