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I wept most of Sunday.

I called home in response to an email from my mother.

My cat of almost half my life, 20 years, Tomoe, had reached a point where age had defeated her in every aspect expect one. Her conversation. So I called home to talk with her one last time. To make the sounds she always responds too. Except a whistle, I could not cry and whistle both, and the crying overwhelmed me.

Today I am weeping some more. I just read to story of her last minutes. It can’t be helped. She brings up old griefs, none too well buried, and makes them fresh. I found her, and her 4 brothers, in a box in a rice paddy (dry season) next to a bus stop on Sado Island, Japan. 1992, about 7 weeks after my father had died. I’d made it home to say good bye to him, then I’d had to turn right around afterwards and return to try and live a life bereft of sense in Japan. It wasn’t working very well, and I was barely going through the motions. One of those motions was a music festival put on by the Kodo Drummers in August to which I was committed by already paid for tickets and expectations of my appearance there.

I was camping in a tent by a beach outside of the town where the festival was being held. I took a train and a ferry to get there, and traveled by bus on the island itself.

One morning early in the week long festival when I was doubting my reason for being there, I heard this high pitched meeping mewling sound as I stood waiting. I looked around, confused. I couldn’t see a thing. I followed the sound into the rice field behind me and a few metres in I found a small box from which these plaintive yet emphatic cries emanated.

I opened it, and there she was, my little warrior queen, Tomoe, having been the only one of the 5 kittens in that box with the strength on that hot day to speak against their fate as discards. She was a tiny clearly marked kitten: black, ginger, and white. A calico, therefore female, among her 4 brothers. She had a mask, half ginger, half black with a white nose and huge ears. Two brothers were black and white, the other two ginger and white. Maybe 4-5 weeks old. Eyes crusted shut. A mikke neko, 3-colour cat, in Japan is considered good luck.

And she was.

More luck than I could have imagined when I welcomed these kittens, needy and hungry, into my spiraling sad life.

I scooped them up out of the box, and slid them into a sling I made from a sarong I had with me. They nestled snugly into each other, on top of each other, against my chest and my heartbeat and fell asleep. Quietly but for a few purrs I could only feel against me.

I carried them that way for the next week of the festival. What else was I to do with them? Leave them in an increasingly hotter and hotter tent alone all day? Not likely. So I carried them with me. Content and safe, they barely stirred. I taught them how to drink by dunking their faces gently into a shallow saucer of milk, wiped tuna oil from a can of tuna on their faces so they would lick it off and learn to eat solid food, and woke in the tent well before sunrise every morning because they were already awake and leaving holes in the tent floor with their tiny sharp nails. They stuck to it loudly as they skittered around energetically, getting stuck while underway and tumbling tail over head, one teeny paw still engaged to the floor. They bumped their wet noses against my face, whiskers brushing and tickling. They mewed. And needed to pee. Hello, Mum? Gotta pee? Now? Now! Really.

So up I would get, load them into their sling against my chest, and walk down to the sand beach to release them. Closest thing to kitty litter I could find. World’s largest flush kitty litter box, really. And they would tumble about in the valleys of footsteps in the sand as I sat there a bit dumbfounded from lack of sleep and this sudden responsibility. Very few of us humans were on the beach, and certainly no one ever walked any dogs on it. Every now and then a person would walk by us, catching the attention of one or more or all of the kittens and off they would go unnoticed in a line of kittens after this big shadow on their world who must be Mum. Until I noticed their absence, by the absence of sound, for Tomoe was still talking. I’d get up and chase after them, maybe two trailing a young Japanese man up the beach and three more trailing an older woman down the beach. I’d trot after these unaware humans apologizing to them in Japanese, to collect the kittens and deposit them back at their starting point. I garnered my share of stares and smiles. This crazy half-dressed wild-haired foreigner collecting kittens from their heels. Then they’d be off again. Several hours every morning they’d chase any big shape passing by.

When I went for a stroll I’d be trailed by all 5 kittens in a row behind me, yelling at me in their tiny squeaks to slow down. Footsteps formed hills taller than themselves, and their sticky little eyes were coated and gummed with sand by the end of their morning. I’d gently clean them with water, to their greatly offended kitten dignity. Tiny wet heads shaking and sneezing and complaining.

Then I’d feed and water them again, scoop them up in their sling and they’d sleep the next 4-5 hours purring against me as I attended festival events in town.

And that’s how I healed from my father’s death. Forced out of my own headlong descent into a grief-stricken depression and anger, into the position of caretaker for 5 rambunctious little kittens, who pooled around my ankles mewing, chased after balls of tin foil, or slept nestled against me at night one per arm pit, one each per shoulder and one at my crotch. Sometimes I was lucky enough to sleep in past sunrise, but then they would collect themselves in one corner of my body and play. I was wide awake soon enough, for they played with little teeth and nails unsheathed and did not differentiate between my inner thigh or their siblings as they wrestled.

Tomoe was always the most vocal. A never ending conversationalist, who narrated every moment of her waking life up until her death yesterday. Her brothers talked, but she commented, entreated, welcomed, discussed and emoted. If she was awake, she was most likely telling you what she was doing, from heading downstairs to the toilet, to speaking with her mouth full, to greeting my middle of the night loud farts. I could sleep through my own farts, but not her inquisitive reaction to them, thinking I was awake and had spoken to her. Or just complaining that I woke her again with one of my blasts.

I brought her with me when I left Japan, her and one of her black and white brothers, Sirius (for his dog-like behaviour). Many of my friends were simply appalled by the sounds she made, and asked my mother if I had possibly brought an INFANT home with me from Japan. But she filled the house with her chatter, she communicated every thought and emotion. Much of the time it was answered by Sirius, and his perpetual morning voice, gruff and cracked.

Until he died, on my 30th birthday, while chasing a squirrel across the street. My 47th birthday is in two days, on November 10th.

Then Tomoe upped her volume, looking for him. Loud enough to wake the dead, if not communicate with Sirius. She remained louder the rest of her life, 17 more years.

She was softer than other cats, her fur more mink than feline. Her wide-eyed face and big ears, typical of the Japanese Bobtail breed she mostly was, was perpetually kittenish looking. She never gained that jowly wide-face look most cats get when they grow out of kittenhood. And her tail. Well, she was not a purebred Bobtail by any means, because her tail was not bobbed, nor a tiny pompom off her ass as is ideal for that breed.

She had a hook, a pretzel, a jumbo shrimp. It looked, all furry, like a bunch of fluff, but when you felt the bone beneath the fur you found many distinct knobs or bends on it. With a tiny tip of her tail wrapped around by the rest of it. It was not broken. She could talk with her tail too. It looked a bit like a shrimp or a grasping hand when she moved it, opening and closing.

She spent a lot of time in my arms being introduced to Americans who did not believe her tail, so while she’d get the initial head pat, she’d soon be flipped around for the obligatory gentle tail grope. I think she may have thought Americans odd for the rest of her days.

Her tail had its drawbacks. When she and Sirius dashed madly after each other through the house, any plugged in lamp or answering machine or alarm clock whose cord hung down loosely would be caught in her tail, and get whipped off the table top. Which produced a great crash bang behind her, and a declaration of shock and pain, since she was often still attached to whichever item she’d just hauled off a table in her wake.

I brought her home from Japan, but I left her mostly with my mother. I went off to college and lived on campus, and left her behind. I lived in a tiny apartment that allowed no pets in New York City, and sneaking her in was not an option. Everyone would know she was there. She was so vocal at home, that if she was sitting on the roof of the porch up in the tree line, at squirrel height, talking to everyone who walked by on the sidewalk, it was not unlikely someone would call in the fire department to rescue her. She didn’t need rescuing. The neighbourhood soon learned her quirks, and the 911 folks soon learned our address and discounted any Oh My Gawd That Poor Trapped Cat calls.

And I left her again each time I came to the Ice.

She became my mother’s companion, largely. But she knew my voice and my heartbeat, and the way I kissed her head and bumped my chin against her face when she sought my neck to nuzzle. I called home to talk to my mother and always, Mum put her on the phone for me to talk to her and hear her voice. And she knew me. She would lick the receiver, right up to our last conversation on the phone this weekend, she knew me, even through my weeping.

Now I am at Pole, and she is gone. My mother is at home in a house that echoes emptily, a house that no longer contains a cat who greets you whenever you come home. There is no longer a cat to talk back to, with whom to have conversations, to respond to your queries, with whom to discuss the day’s events. She is no longer there, and there is emptier than you can even imagine, if you never met her.

I was not there to hold her in her last moments, my mother did that. And wept. When it was over, her vet of almost her whole life hugged my weeping mother, who had just lost her dearest companion.

Tomoe is gone, after 20 years. 20 years after my father died, leaving me bereft, but with sudden kittens to steal and heal my heart. She was truly my child. My only child.

And here I sit at the South Pole, weeping and red-eyed in that unattractive redheaded way, feeling all the old griefs of losing her and my father and her brother Sirius, and cats and people past and loved and gone.

I will always miss her, her affection, her volume, her perpetual kittenish expression, her soft pelt. I will miss her boney loose-skinned toothless old age, her middle of the night hollers, her bad breath, the perpetual spoken narrative of her every thought and feeling, her ability to dumbfound callers and visitors alike when they first heard her, the pleasure she got when I drummed her up one side and down the other, purring and squirming on the bed under my gentle pounding, protesting when I stopped. I will miss the sounds she made as she spoke through her food, as she chewed, swallowed and licked her face in full voice. I will miss picking her up from the vet and having her recognize my voice from the front office and start yelling “Mum? Mum! Get me out of here!”, setting off all the animals in the place. The looks on the faces of cats who heard her, the confusion of the dogs she ignored, and the enchantment of my almost 4 year old niece who knows her better than she does me.

Goodbye my darling warrior queen, my unique little precious one who knew my heartbeat and recognized it as the sound of Mum, no matter how long or how many times I left her behind. She knew me.

Ma petite Tomoechan, urusai nekochan, goodbye sweet pea.