Goodbye, Library Cat

As some of you know, we put our elder cat, Samantha, to sleep on Wednesday, October 29, 2014. She had fought a long battle with old age, but her various complications caught up with her and she was suffering. It was a very difficult decision to let her go.

At the time, I couldn't write about it or even talk about it much. It's still not easy, but today I pay tribute to our Library Cat.

Samantha was by far the smartest cat I've ever met. Zak claims this is because when she was young, in the lead-up to our move to St Albert, she spent a lot of time sleeping on our Encarta English Dictionary and various other reference books. She also had a life-long affinity for books.

If I were reading a book, Sam would rub her cheeks against the top of the spine and the corners of the covers (preferably while someone scratched her). We came to refer to this beahviour as cataloguing, and it was part of Samantha's night-time ritual for years and years. In fact, one of the ways we knew she was losing herself was that she stopped cataloguing, then stopped jumping up for night-time scratches altogether.

Here's a picture of Sam in Griesbach, with the compact OED in the background. Goodbye, Library Cat. I miss you every day.