For the last three weeks, I had been hospitalised due to pancreatitis again, only coming home last Friday. Through all this time, my dear feline Overlord, Maurizio, was once more a source of home sickness and a shining beacon to look forward to, and he meowed to me on the telephone and, as my mother tells me, caressed that thing where my voice had been imprisoned in.

He held out for me, but then, the last of his nine lives was spent. This morning, I saw him lying at a certain spot on the garden-path. At first, I thought he was just lying there. but then, I noticed that he did not react. And my fears were confirmed - he was completely motionless, slack-jawed, vacantly starring, cold. Dead.

For nineteen years, Mauri had been our ever beloved and loving companion. He was the light through such terrible times of darkness, such as the phase during his cancer where he would take him on a walk around the street late at night to find enough peace of mind to sleep - a custom that I would practice myself at several points since - or when I spent over a hundred day in intensive care, where a photo of him adorned my wall, proving to be a great conversation starter.

It is true that Mauri had fallen far from his pinnacle of vigour, rarely going outside and growing apathetic to mice when in his youth he had laid titanic rats under my bed several times (one time, it turned out to be still alive, until my mother slew it in a heroic fight). For the last years, he had been on medication, and he was starting to have trouble controlling his claws and climbing on furniture. In some moments, there were some concerning moments of frailty, but never for too long. All in all, it seemed to be doing not too badly, certainly not anywhere as bad as to consider euthanasia.

Nineteen years. A legendarily long, and certainly highly fulfilled, life for a cat. But still so short to a human, and a loss so painful no matter the time.

My pharaoh now lies buried under the shadow of the pear tree we planted in memory of my father in a cardboard sarcophagus, shrouded in a dear old yet faded and moth-damaged pillowcase of mine adorned with two curious wild kittens, covered in flower leaves and with catnip as his burial gift, arranged as if he were holding it in his hands as if sniffing it.
May he ascend to the realm of Bastet, the land of endless boxes, of rivers of milk and endless fields of catnip and valerian, where salmons and doves fly into one's maw already flavoured like gyros!

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