In the wake of Sammie’s death, aside from the grief, I am swamped with guilty feelings, that I should have known something was wrong, should have noticed his decline sooner. I was responsible, and he died on my watch.

My mother would say, oh, for crying out loud, it was just a cat. Then I remembered an incident when I was 12 or 13, when I came home from school and noticed my pet chicken was not in her pen. Now this chicken was named Gemma, my name, because her feathers were the same auburn color as my hair. I’d had her since she was a tiny ball of yellow fluff, when I was, I think, about five. Unlike my first cat pet, Pinkie Tiptoes, who broke my heart when he couldn’t be found when we moved from Ft. Smith to Miami, Gemma had been crated up with a couple of other hens, and joined us in our new home. I don’t remember her accommodations at the first two rent houses where we lived that first year in Miami (4^th and part of 5^th grade) but at the last rent house on “B Northwest,” the pen was about 10’ x 12’ and the ‘barn’ was an upside-down enamel washing machine tub propped up on one side so the hens could get inside.

I would sit in the sunshine with Gemma, stroking her warm smooth feathers, making chicken noises just to be friendly. She knew me, would come to me and huddle next to my legs. I imagined she was lonely and bored in that tiny pen without a blade of grass left standing. Now she was gone.

After growing increasingly panicked in my fruitless search for Gemma, I raced inside the house to ask my mother. She confirmed that she hadn’t seen Gemma and said I should look for her, that maybe she got out of the pen. She stated further that maybe I hadn’t given her water and that was the reason she got out of the pen.

I spent an hour wandering the neighborhood, especially the overgrown vacant lot across the street, swallowing down tears and calling “Here, chickey chickey chickey” until I was hoarse.

I don’t remember anything further from that day, but the guilt assigned to me by my mother has remained part of my psyche. It was years before I thought about that and asked my mother if she knew what had happened to Gemma. She had no memory of the event, only faintly remembered the chicken.

But I know what happened. My mother lied to me. She knew that Gemma had died and had been part of the parental decision to remove the dead body. I doubt my dad would have made up some story about her escaping her pen, much less assigning blame on me for her disappearance. But Mom never missed a chance to assign blame. For her, life was about assigning blame; this is still her default reaction to anything she judges to be problematic. Someone must be blamed.

It’s useless for me to attempt any further discussion of the issue with her, as her memory by now has disintegrated into a five-second attention span, if that. Now I mostly feel sorry for her, that her life as the middle child of nine had been so fraught that she could only adopt her mother’s habit of judging and negativity. I think I understand—to a mother or a child of the Depression, a person couldn’t afford to invest much emotion into the welfare of an animal when deprivation constantly lurked at the kitchen door.

What’s left for me to do is always remember, especially with my pets now, that I must go out of my way to take care of them—cats, primarily, as my medium and spirit animal. What happened to Sammie was a function of undiagnosed feline leukemia and feline immunodeficiency virus (cat AIDS). How or when he was infected with those viruses I have no idea. My neighbor, who obtained Sammie from an older man down the road, who more or less fed a feral female cat and generations of her kittens without a fucking care in the world that he should have had her spayed or at least vaccinated, belatedly confirmed to me that when he got the kitten, he did not have him vaccinated for anything.

Somehow, Sammie knew early on that he wanted to be here instead of next door with the neighbor, whose immaturity meant that Sammie might or might not get fed. I first saw him here when he’d been treed by Cu and Weezy, watching me call off the dogs from his perch high in an oak tree just outside my yard fence. After that he appeared at the edge of the yard, uneasy about the dogs but clearly very hungry. I started putting out food, talking to him. It was months later that finally I asked if I could ‘adopt’ Sammie.

The neighbor agreed, even though I could see the young man felt affection for the cat. But he knew he wasn’t being a good pet owner and, I think, was relieved. The first thing I did was have Sammie neutered, as the evidence of his masculine pursuit of females had begun to scar his face. I should have asked about vaccinations then, but I didn’t.

Guilt.

So began a little more than two years of Sammie at my house, well fed and slowly being accepted by the existing cattery of four other cats. Hellion considered it her duty as top cat around here to run him off, while Esmerelda and Nali tolerated him, even came to play with him and respond to his polite throaty trilled greeting seeking permission to join their company. Finnegan was a different kind of adversary, being male (neutered) and seeing his duty to eliminate another male. But slowly they too settled into a benign tolerance, thanks to careful work by myself and whichever adult child of mine was spending time here as the two males often ended up in that part of the house.

It occurred to me sometime over the past summer that Sammie had not been as active as usual but I put it off to the terrible heat. About a month ago, I noticed that he wasn’t always showing up for dinner, and I put that off as maybe another neighbor was feeding him. I didn’t notice that he was losing weight; it was subtle and over a long period of time. BUT, guilt, even if I had noticed sooner that he was struggling, there was nothing I could have done. He might have had these viruses since birth.

I’m trying not to linger over my failures, as I have no clear evidence of any role I might have played in his death. I loved that damn cat. He was full of personality. A true gentleman, he never bullied the other cats, always took the submissive role, and just wanted to have a good time. Like other ginger cats, he was easy-going, a laid back cat, just wanna have fun. And eat whatever I might offer. And snuggle, get petted. His purr came readily, sometimes before a hand actually touched him.

As I watched the vet sedate him and then return a short time later with the slender hypodermic of bright pink death, I thought of so many other cats that need rescue, and tried not to cry.

But I did cry. I hardly made it out of the clinic before ugly sobs racked my throat. Hot tears ran down my cheeks and even though I’m an old woman worn with the losses in my life, I felt like my heart was breaking. I brought him home, wrapped him in a soft towel as his still-warm body lolled loosely in my arms, and laid him to rest in the hole I had already dug in my garden.

Sammie will be missed. He had a special talent for making me and my kids feel good, and that’s what pets are for. I will keep trying not to feel guilty, but when you take someone into your care, it’s part of the contract that you are responsible for his life. I’ll never escape that no matter what my mom might have said oh so many years ago.