A Writer's Notebook, One-Thousand-Eight-Hundred-And-Fifty-Nine

It is the anniversary of the day when Melissa and I adopted our cat Ulysses back in 2015.  We drove all the way up to Georgia to a shelter that was being run out of some woman's house because they had a litter of Siberian kittens they had rescued.  My mom is allergic to cats, but Siberians don't trigger her reaction (my brother's cat was a Siberian and mom never had a reaction even when that cat was living in her home).  It is funny, but the effort we took driving to get Ulysses is kind of symbolic of how difficult it was caring for him, in some ways, as had some severe medical issues that required a lot of attention.  We gave him special medicine several times a day, even getting up in the middle of the night and early in the morning, and we were glad to do it for him.  He died in 2019, literally a week before what we had been told was his birthday.  I know that some folks would find it strange or at least extreme that I am still mourning a cat after so many years.  Maybe that is just an assumption.  It certainly feels like a larger grief than I would have expected from missing a pet, but I think a lot of that is because of the labor that went in to our care for him.  After my experience, I have come to think that the more you do for someone you love, the more that feeling expands inside you.

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