Leia was my princess, my angel, my baby. I know exactly how sappy that sounds, but if you weren’t expecting some sappiness, what are you doing reading a blog called KnitKitten, anyway?

I had always wanted a cat, but my parents weren’t cat people (especially not my father), so they wouldn’t let me get one. The summer after my first year of university, though, I really wanted a kitten, and one day I cut out a newspaper picture of an adorable kitten at the SPCA who was waiting to be adopted, and I left it on my dad’s pillow. Since I was severely depressed at the time, my parents decided I could get a kitten, because they hoped it would cheer me up. They told me I had to take her with me when I moved into an apartment, though, because they didn’t want to take care of her forever. This seemed like a no-brainer to me — I was the one who wanted the cat.

My mother and I went to the SPCA and asked for the kitten that was in the newspaper, but they said that they didn’t do it like that; we’d have to go pick a kitten out ourselves. So we went to the cages and I picked my favourite kitten. I didn’t realize until later, when I compared her to the picture, that she actually was the one from the newspaper.

My mom has often asked me, “But how did you know she was the best kitten out of all of the ones there? How did you know she would be as loving as she is?”

The only thing I can tell her is that it was always completely obvious.

I brought my kitten home the day before Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace was released, and I named her Leia.

She was a lot better than the movie.

Leia was a cat, but she thought she was a dog. It’s pretty obvious that she was part Maine Coon. She was longhaired, with a huge, fluffy tail, a ruff around her neck, and tufts of fur in her ears and between her toes. She followed us around like a dog, she didn’t mind water, and she always wanted somebody to watch her eat. (She would whap me in the face with her paw at six in the morning — “Mom, watch me eat. Watch me eat, Mom.” — until I would get up and stand over her at her food dish while she had breakfast.) Leia never meowed. Instead, she chirped like a bird. She also seemed to have a mild case of hip dysplasia, so mild that it never caused her any discomfort, just gave her a hip-swinging sort of walk. We called it her “sexy walk.”

She was best friends with the family dog, but she hated cats, so she barely tolerated Wednesday, the cat my brother and I got a few years ago. See, here she’s looking up at Wednesday and saying, “What the hell are you doing here?”

Leia didn’t go outside. Ever. She was terrified of the Great Outdoors. She never felt grass under her paws in her life. (My mom brought some snow inside on a baking sheet once, though, and got Leia to stand on it. She hated it. Unlike the dog, who loves nothing better than to run outside and purposely stick her entire head in a snowbank.) Since she never wanted to go out, we didn’t have to worry about the fact that she refused to wear a collar. If you put a collar on her, she would just manage to take it off. Smart girl.

Despite not being cat people, when I did move into an apartment, my parents did not want Leia to go with me. They loved my wonderful catlet, of course. Although I wished I could take her, I knew she’d be happier if she stayed, since moving would be traumatic for a cat who hated leaving the house and besides, she and the dog would miss each other. I missed her, but at least I got to see her when I visited.

I couldn’t visit much lately, because I didn’t have enough time to take the bus, but I didn’t have enough money to take a plane, either. I would have visited more anyway, though, if I had known Leia was going to get cancer. There’s nothing that would have been more worthwhile to spend my money or my time on than Leia. She’s the only pet I ever had that was all my own (except those two guppies, and I still feel guilty about what happened to them — sorry, Edmund and Lucy.) She was my daughter.

Last week, I got to be with Leia for her last few days. She ran to the door to greet me, and she slept in my arms at night. On Friday, I had to have her put to sleep.

She was only nine years old.

I miss my baby so much.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 16th, 2008 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Kitties. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.