My Baby is Gone

Something I haven’t shared yet with anyone other than family and close friends is that after we got home and found him, I immediately went into “What did I do wrong” -mode, and was frantically searching the house to make sure I hadn’t left something out that he could have eaten, or would have injured him (there wasn’t anything). But the way we found him, along with his litter, I deduced he had died earlier that same day. Suddenly I remembered something – we had been staying and sleeping at Matt’s aunt’s house in Minnesota, and early that same morning I woke up just before 6 am and thought I heard a cat scratching on the door, like our cats do at home, but they don’t have cats. I even used the opportunity to get up and check outside the door and asked Matt once he woke up, if he’d heard it too. He hadn’t.

I am sharing the same text I wrote on instagram below, but please click over to slide through the images of the most beautiful cat ever.

My baby is gone 💔 We were in MN over the weekend and returned to find Bishop had died while we were away. He was 17.5+ years old and yet, still just my baby kitten. Nothing was amiss, we believe it was just his time.

He was never short on being loved. I said I didn’t want a clingy cat when we painstakingly sought him, and he was anything but clingy. Instead I was clingy and could never leave him alone, to his annoyance (and Matt’s). But as soon as we weren’t showering him with affection, he would miss us and always want to be near. We always said he thought he was one of us (better, actually) and deserved to be treated as such 👑

He was simultaneously the comfiest, softest, limpest, most beautiful cat, while also being a prickly, filthy, hissy, and a huge jerk. He could play fetch and would return the item we threw, dropping it into our palms. He somehow knew when we would get home and meet us at the door with his pink nose pressed against the frosted privacy glass, even after he lost his hearing in the last couple years, so it wasn’t that he could hear or see us coming. I used to take him in the car to pick up Matt from work (not riding on the dash like in that pic though, that was parked). He spent several lives when he ate his fill of styrofoam, and then rubber foam, and had to have emergency surgeries. He fell out of a broken window screen and was lost for almost 2 months, before good samaritans helped us bring him home. We never gave up the hunt, and as long as I live I will never forget screaming his name and him coming running to us. He used to be set off by Matt’s ankles for some reason and would attack them if exposed. Also, if I laughed too loud he would also attack Matt. As much as we hoped, the cats never snuggled UNTIL last week. I had hoped it was a sign of things to come, but now I believe Fionna had intuited something we did not.

20 pictures, and all the words I could say, would never be enough. We will always have a huge Bishop shaped hole in our hearts. R.I.P. #bishopneenee