my cat is gone

My parents can't find my cat, Buffy. She's been missing for 3 weeks, which is a pretty good sign that she's dead.

I got her when I was 13; she was my first cat. I named her after a camp counselor who I really liked. When I went to pick her out, my mother thought she was ugly and that I should get a different kitty, but I only had eyes for her.

She was tiny, as all kittens are. The first night she came home with me, she climbed out of the Cheerios box and curled up on my stomach. After I put her back in the Cheerios box, she climbed right back up and curled herself into my tummy, purring as loud as a lawnmower. It was an expression of unconditional love that, as a social pariah in middle school, I was unused to and ravenous for. I loved her so much--she was the one who I would hold when I was upset or depressed, which was most of the time (it was middle school, after all).

She was a very fluffy cat--so fluffy that she couldn't keep herself groomed very easily. Several years ago, there was an incident that I described on my webpage in reference to the second picture:

Here is my cat, Buffy. Before you ask, no, she is NOT named for the vampire slayer, I named her after a camp counselor I had the summer I got her (Buffy Bailey was her name, in case you're curious). The reason she looks a little funny is because she has really long fur, which she doesn't do a super job of keeping untangled. This results in me or my father attempting to cut all the knots out of her fur, which works sometimes but generally just manages to piss her off and get us scratches all over our bodies. Sometimes this results in snipping off a large chunk of Buffy's skin along with her hair so that we have to take her to the vet for stitches and a shave, which would have been easier in the first place except we're just generally too lazy to pay for it. She looked so funny that we would all start sniggering every time we saw her. Which also explains why she looks royally pissed off in this picture. But, come on, she looks really weird--she's a SHAVED CAT for chrissakes!!

She liked to lie on us as we lay on the couch watching TV--the only problem was that her purr was so loud that we often couldn't hear what we were watching.
She liked me less and less as the years went by and I moved away to go to boarding school and college. It always made me sad.

As she got older and my parents got new pets (two dogs that are spoiled rotten and chased Buffy everywhere), she started having some issues. We think maybe she was angry at me for leaving her, but whatever the reason, I came home one year from college to find that she had sprayed [urine] on some of my things. Turns out that she had recurrent urinary tract infections. My parents got her treated once, but then, a while later, she started spraying again and she started spraying other places inside the house as well--was she angry at my parents for getting dogs that got about three times more attention than she did? Of course, once she started spraying again my parents assumed it was because she had "issues" and didn't take her back to the vet. Instead, they decided not to let her come inside, which was so incredibly stupid. Firstly, it seemed obvious [to me, at least] that she needed more treatment and more attention; secondly, if the reason she's spraying is because she's sick and upset because she's not getting enough attention, then not letting her come inside is just going to upset her more and not taking her to the vet certainly isn't going to help.

The last time I saw her was at the beginning of June, right before my brother's wedding. I had forgotten how tiny she was. Her fur didn't look very good--it was clumpy. She looked old. And the weird thing was that she let me pick her up--she always used to hide. But I'm glad I picked her up. I'm glad I was able to say goodbye to her.