Ode to Zulu

We put our 17 year old cat, Zulu, to sleep this week. Frankly, we weren’t expecting to have to do that. I firmly believed that she was going to live forever yacking all over the furniture.

My husband saved Zulu when she was a few weeks old. She and four of her kitty sisters were wandering around east 17th mewling, with no owner in sight. Derek and his college buddy swooped them up and took them home to live in their bachelor pad. At one point they had at least 10 cats in that house. If those guys were women they would have been those “crazy cat ladies”. When we married we ended up with three of them.

Zulu was the quiet cat. She was sweet and patient with everyone, even when my girls were small and pulling on her tail. Not as proud and haughty as her kitty sister, Farrah (who was a beautiful princess and expected to be treated as such), and not as loud and dirty as her kitty friend Muerta (a big, fat, dirty, lovable, stinky cat). Zulu loved to sit in the sun, observe the birds, and most of all sit in Derek’s lap and purr. She was happiest there hiding her head under his arm while he stroked her back. This is how we chose to let her die. Lying in the arms she felt safest in.

As I grow older the prayers of lamenting become dearer to me. Prayers of pain can be comforting. Just knowing that others, thousands of years ago in far-away places, felt the same things that we feel.

Psalm 31:9 says,
“Be merciful to me, O LORD, for I am in distress;
my eyes grow weak with sorrow,
my soul and my body with grief.”

Grief is not an unknown in my house. In recent memory we have lost the two cats previously mentioned, a great uncle, an aunt, a grandmother and a deeply wanted pregnancy. With each loss we struggle with how to express our sense of sorrow. My youngest daughter had the truest response. Derek sat her down and told her that Zulu had died, she sobbed in his arms for a few minutes and then lifted her grief racked head and said, “Does Sissy know? Let me tell her!” A completely honest reaction. I’m suffering, but it will be better if I share my pain with my sister.

So I share my pain with you, my church family. A cat is not a grandmother or an aunt, but she was a member of our family for 17 years and we miss her.