Goodbye, Calypso

This post is background for the poem, "Calypso", which I published January 18, 2007 in wordcurrents.

When a beloved pet dies a tough death, it's not the death itself that wrings your heart, it's the moments of beauty from the past that haunt you, bring you to that gulp of emotion that just about ends you. Calypso was our beautiful, graceful twelve year old Abyssinian, who died Sunday of bone marrow cancer.

We have had two cats: Circe, our fourteen year old mixed hybrid, still alive, "my" cat, who is healthy and pretty self-sufficient. Circe adopted us when she was a kitten, insisting that we take her home from our island cottage with us, when the weather started to change in the fall. She had been brought to the island as a mousing kitten, and a fabulous mouser she is, too. Calyso is the long-limbed exotic we bought two years later as a companion to Circe. For about the first year, the two cats had a tough time adjusting, until the following summer, when Calypso became marooned in a tall cedar tree at the cottage, too high for me to reach her. Finally, after several hours, Circe went up into the tree, and in two tries, showed Calypso how to use branches as a spiral staircase to descend. They were close buds thereafter.

At first, Circe was Flora's cat, Calypso mine. Calypso would ride around on my shoulders, comfortably warming my neck. Stephanie has even included that pose in one of her paintings. The two cats had very definite allegiances; for example, if we left them with Flora's sister, Circe would sleep on the undershirt I left out for her, Calypso on one Flora had left out on the bed. After one trip, at some signal that we did not notice at the time, they switched allegiances, and Circe became my cat, Calypso, Flora's.

But I still admired Calypso from afar. Every position she sat or stood in, every movement was ballet. Her breed has very large ears, very long legs and a long graceful neck. She was also one of the rare ruddy haired abbys, without the black colouring.

Her death was a tough one: we did not put her down; she chose her own time. Looking back, we can see that she was not well this summer: she did not hunt; even though she is not allowed outdoors at home, she was during the summer at the cottage, and she loved to hunt. One little guy from next door thought she was a baby couger. In my memory, she was a pistol, one really cool cat. Here's a picture taken at the cottage; I will be cleaning out the background when I have time: