Abbey Cat died of cancer Friday July 3 around 5 pm. She was buried in a private garden in Potomac Sunday July 5 around 11 am. She is and will be sorely missed.

She was born in August or September 1987 and so lived to be nearly 22 years old. She'd been a healthy 8 pounds her entire life; no one who saw her believed at any time that she was as old as she was. She was extremely smart, alert and gentle, knowing her own mind but loyal and unafraid of things like thunder, a lovely brown and orange and gray striped domestic short hair with beautiful, intelligent green eyes. In her last 5 or 6 years, she'd become quite sociable, having been more standoffish in her first decade and a runner and a jumper as a youngster, knocking everything off the tops of cabinets and tables for fun at age 2. In her last year, she guarded this new apartment we moved to in April 2008 by going to the door whenever a stranger knocked to check him out.

My mother adopted Abbey in December 1988 from the New York Avenue Animal Shelter. She made herself known to us when we bent down to look at a pretty, white, longhaired cat in the same cage by batting that cat in the head, as if to say, Not that cat but me, I'm the one who's going home with you. When my mother picked her up from the cage, she snuggled up against her shoulder as if she'd always had a home there. So we adopted her and took her home to my mother's apartment.

Abbey moved in with me in 1998 while my mother resided in assisted living, having had two strokes, the second one preventing her from continuing on alone. Abbey always walked me to the door on my way to work every morning and was there at the door waiting for me when I came home. She had a type of nervous breakdown one year when I stayed at work many nights very late one month to complete a complex report, so I adjusted my schedule to something more routine, and she happily recovered. When I worked at home on the computer, in Abbey's early years she sat next to it on a little cushion on the top of the desk, walking across the keyboard when she decided we'd both had enough. In her later years, when she wanted me to shut down computer work in the night, she'd stand on the edge of the bed, staring and meowing at me until we prepared ourselves for sleep.

Her cancer was first diagnosed as chronic kidney disease, but as she lost weight and had more difficulty walking, we took her to a kidney specialist, hoping to go forward with a kidney transplant that might have given her up to 5 more years to live, although with much medical attention. We weren't decided yet that she would be strong enough to support this procedure. The specialist, treating Abbey with extreme gentleness, as if she were her own cat, recommended the ultrasound that showed Abbey's kidneys still healthy as ever but with one severely damaged by cancer.

Abbey lived her last 3 months of life valiantly. She may have had pain but, as with most cats, I'm told, she did not show this. She retreated for most hours of the day to a carpeted spot under a quiet window that gave her sunshine during the day but protection from all the daily activity in our apartment, with my disabled mother living with us now and her 7-day-a-week health aide and her other friends coming weekly to read or do physical exercises. Abbey ate and drank as normally as she felt she could, and from time to time she'd climb up her three stairs at the foot of our high bed (which she'd slept on with me during her last year) to look briefly out the door to the rest of the apartment or to ask for a munchy treat or fresh water or to just say hello.

When she was young, she liked to eat my mother's house plants indiscriminately. Thinking this was not good all around, we soon discovered she was just as happy chewing on live chives, so for the rest of her life we kept her supplied with several little pots on the window sill, where she'd pick the choicest ones to munch on several times a week. I've planted five pots of chives at her grave, one for each home she's had: the shelter on New York Avenue, my mother's apartment, the apartment I lived in when Abbey came to live with me, this new one we've had about a year, and her final place in the garden. I read these lines for her, from Christopher Smart's "Jubilate Agno," the section called "For Jeoffrey My Cat":

"For there is nothing sweeter than [her] peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than [her] life when in motion...
For God has blessed [her] in the variety of [her] movements."

And I will remember her forever as the brave, sweet, little, smart, lovely soul she was. I hope you will say a small prayer for her as she goes to the other side of the rainbow.