Letters to Delilah

My Sweet Baby Kitten, I have discovered a way to remember you, and pay loving tribute to you in a way that doesn't make me cry. But you're not going to like it. It is said that memorials aren't for the dead, but for those they leave behind. In that light I defend my actions and this new policy of mine that brings your name to our lips, but not tears to our eyes, nearly every day. Are you ready? Okay. Whenever I fart. I blame it on you. That's it, that simple. When I expel gas from my ass I say. "Kitten!" in an admonishing tone. I don't know if you were aware of it, but I would occasionally throw you under the farty bus while you were alive. Why not do it now when you cannot defend yourself. If you did we would rejoice in such a haunting... as soon as we recovered from our heart attacks. Oh come on, quit pouting. Shouldn't you be pleased to provide me with such a valuable service, if you can recall, many, many times a day. What's im...

My Dear Sweet Baby Kitten, I miss you. I miss you every day. Sometimes I see a shape on the floor and I think it's you. the other day I thought I saw a cat walk down the hallway past a door I was near. We have moved, we live in a different place now. The apartment where you grew up and spent nearly all of you life is now occupied by strangers. Sometimes I worry that somehow you will be looking for us there and find us gone. Please find us kitten. Let the light of my heart that loves you so dearly be your beacon. I don't want you to be lost and I don't want to be without you. I need your spirit here with me, at least to say hello sometimes. Mommy had a dream about you and that you spoke to her. You told her in heaven they let you do whatever you want. I like that. I like thinking you can do whatever you want. I hope, like in her dream that involves coming to see us sometimes. I hope you don't mind but we have befriended a cat. He doesn't live with us (our ho...

My Dear Sweet Baby Kitten, Our home, the only one you have ever known, the one I have lived in for the past 19 years, will no longer be ours in about 25 days. It occurs to me that since the apartment building was built in 1988 and we moved in 10 years later That we have lived there longer than anyone. Since you were almost always home and outlived all our other cats, you hold the distinction of being the living creature to have spent more hours in that apartment than any other living being. Congratulations! Maybe I'll leave a brass plaque inscribed with your auspicious honor. It'll totally be worth my security deposit. In this case, it might be better that you are no longer among us. You would not like what is about to happen, and for that matter the holders of our lease would not like you. It's in writing: "No pets!" Sorry, no offense, some property owners are just haters man. It is a smaller place, one less room. There is a garage, but you would not...

My Sweet Baby Kitten, I miss you. I miss your soft warm fur, the vibration of your purring under my hand. I miss your banshee wail when I got out the treat treats or in the middle of the night for seemingly no reason at all. I miss your bitter sweetness and your iron-clad vulnerability, in other words I miss the contradiction, the enigma that you embodied. I miss seeing you sleeping, or wondering where you're sleeping, but knowing you're there somewhere. Now I know you are not anywhere and this leaves a little hole in my life. This hole will never get smaller, but it may get less noticeable. I neither welcome this, nor fight it. It is the course of life. Some days are good, many average and unremarkable, some bad. I've hanve not had many really horrible days, but there are always some. Letsee... The day when I was around 10 that they started me on Ritalin and I had a such bad reaction I wished to be out of my body. The Day Annette Turner, a girl I was infatuated with i...

My Dearest Baby Kitten, I'm find that writing to you can bring my whole day down. Sometimes it takes me days to recover. Out of self preservation I have held off for a while, but I don't want to you think I don't think about you all the time, so I'm going to grab some tissue, buckle-in and do this thing. It's not you're fault this is hard my kitten, it's just life. We are slowly getting used to the apartment without you. Mommy goes away for a few days this week so this will be my first time alone-alone in quite a while. That might be hard. I do occasionally see something in the corner of my eye that looks like you sleeping, or a pillow will settle or fall a bit and I will think it's you, then of course a second later I remember you are gone from the the apartment and our present lives, but never from our hearts my little girl. I am suddenly aware that the Internet -those screens we are obsessed with, is almost nothing but cats! Cat's playing th...

My Dearest Baby Kitten, There will come a time when these letters are not just me trudging through my grief of losing you, but grief will be done with me when it's done. From what it feels like, that time may be a ways off. Let's reminisce a bit though to keep the mood from growing too dark. When I brought you home from Mississippi I was given a ride to the airport by the director of the movie I was working on and his girlfriend (I think), Lance and Emily. It was at least an hour's drive from Vicksburg to Jackson. While in the car, I was on the phone to Delta Airlines to find out just how I would fly with you. As it turns out they just wanted more money. In Cincinnati for my final leg home to LA they wanted a bit more for an "approved pet carrier".  I got to know them just a bit on that car ride. I hadn't had much contact with them during the shoot. They seemed pretty nice from what I remember, though my focus was almost exclusively on you and how I was g...

Dearest Baby Kitten, Today (Monday, March 14th) was a very hard day. Some background: The place where I go each day to trade time for cat food has just been sold from one group of rich people to another larger group of rich people. This means the new people wanted to meet me and find out if they still want to give me cat food for my time. Today was that meeting. I was not particularly nervous, I know my value as a cat food earner. I can earn cat food in a number of places if they decided they didn't like me, but I was also pretty sure they would like me. As you know, I'm pretty damn good at belly and neck rubs. I think they would be happy with my rubbing them and their clients. We should be clear in this case "rubbing" means making crap work so they can create TV shows. You remember the big box that sometimes showed birds or other moving things that would occasionally fascinate you for about 23 seconds. What I did not expect was that you, meaning the ashes of...