let me tell you about my favorite girl in the whole entire world.

Zsa Zsa wasn’t just any ole cat. In the ways that really matter, she wasn’t a cat at all.

Queering the Burbs is a weekly-ish distillation of pop culture, politics and queerness written by Joe Erbentraut. If you like what you see, please consider subscribing (it’s free!), liking or sharing this piece.

CW: pet loss

In March 2007, I saw a live performance of the most beautiful song I’d ever heard in my life.

I was sitting in the audience at the Barrymore Theatre in Madison, and Patty Griffin had just launched into the song “Burgundy Shoes” off her then-new album Children Running Through.

My favorite part of the song is the chorus where Griffin so simply and so sweetly sings the word “sun.” Over and over. Like a mantra. Like a celebration.

At the end of the song, Griffin said it was a love song… for her dog. (She also has indicated it was written about her mom which makes this memory a bit confusing, but for the purposes of this story, let’s go with the dog angle.)

At the time, I laughed through my tears, but I didn’t really get it. How could a song doused in so much emotion and compassion be about a pet? Sure, I’d deeply loved the two cats I had growing up, but obviously it was nothing close to what I’d feel for a beloved human like a parent or a sibling or significant other.

Fifteen years later, it all makes sense now. Last Friday, my husband and I said goodbye to Zsa Zsa, our 15-year-old tortie teenager. 

I’m sure a lot of people feel this way about their pets, but Zsa Zsa was a completely singular cat. She was not just a cat at all. A whole vibe, as the kids might say. At least she was for us.

My husband brought her home about two years before we started dating, when he and a close friend spotted some kittens on a farm outside of Peoria, Illinois, and felt an immediate bond. His friend scooped one of them up and they got in the car to head back to Chicago. Some 20 minutes later, they decided to turn around and grab the second kitten who’d been left behind. That second kitten was Zsa Zsa.

Zsa Zsa never particularly liked being held by me. That was a role only my husband was allowed to play. She was his familiar.

I first met Zsa Zsa a couple of years later, when Stefin and I first started dating. She was a very particular sort of girl and didn’t immediately cozy up to me—but she tolerated me well enough to earn her stamp of approval. I knew it was hard-earned, and I never took her acceptance of my presence lightly. She lived up to every bit of her cop-punching socialite namesake.

Over the years, our bond grew. She was a constant presence in our lives, always peering around corners with intense curiosity and eyeing any human foods containing a dairy product with equally intense longing. We loved seeing her belly flap from left to right when she ran. She loved it when we scratched her neck and rubbed her back. We loved it when it snowed and she’d stare in quiet awe at the falling flakes. She hated our attempts at trimming her claws and combing out the mattes of fur she’d sometimes have. We loved how she would regularly stick her entire face into the Christmas tree to get a closer look at the twinkling lights.

In early 2016, we thought we were going to lose her. Zsa Zsa suddenly fell very ill. She had lost an amount of weight that wasn’t obvious to us at the time, but in retrospect was extremely alarming. She was very weak and suddenly uninterested in eating. Her light was flickering and dimming fast.

As it turned out, Zsa Zsa had developed diabetes. After several weeks of treatments—and countless trips back and forth to the vet, in cabs both ways—she slowly got back to the Zsa Zsa we knew. This time, however, she would require a special diet, much more attentive vet care, and twice-daily shots of insulin injected directly into her back. 

Zsa Zsa’s diabetes diagnosis meant that all of a sudden our entire lives centered around a shot that needed to be administered once at 8 a.m. and a second time at 8 p.m. in order for our cat to survive another day. And Zsa Zsa did not allow just anyone to administer her shot—after many failed attempts at hiring catsitters who were up to the task, we realized that only myself or my husband (or his twin sister) were able to pull off the task. This means that my husband and I have been on a vacation longer than two days together just once in six years.

But none of that matters anymore. Our Zsa Zsa is gone. Last Wednesday, she abruptly began vomiting repeatedly. On Thursday morning, we brought her to the vet for a check-up. She got better, at first, but then she got much worse. On Friday morning, she was unable to walk or stand and she refused to eat. We returned to the vet and we were told there was nothing we could do. It was time to say goodbye. Her light was dimmed then, within minutes, it was extinguished. 

Zsa Zsa’s passing was both abrupt and anticipated. A year ago, just after Thanksgiving, we were told following a checkup that in addition to her diabetes, she had also developed kidney failure. Our vet told us that any kidney treatments that would be performed would aggravate her diabetes. We were told that “by this time next year, I’d be shocked if she was still with us.”

Zsa Zsa came so close to proving our vet wrong and I’m so proud of how long she fought. She gave us almost another full year of love and companionship, sleeping in our bed every night, softly pawing at my arm for breakfast every morning. We were so lucky and I am so grateful.

Before I had met Zsa Zsa, I had always wondered if I had what it took to take care of another living thing. At the time, I could barely take care of myself. I didn’t know how to cook a single thing. My bed didn’t even have a frame or headboard. Not a single piece of my “art” was framed—it was just concert flyers and protest signs taped or tacked directly to the wall. I like to call this my feral era.

But there is nothing like a cat diabetes diagnosis to domesticate you in a real hurry. She taught me so much and I will miss her forever. I’ll miss the way she begged for her favorite people foods—French fries and turkey meat. I’ll miss the way she always wanted to sit directly on top of the book I was reading at any given time. I’ll miss the way she would bask so regally in a sun spot on our front porch, often while curled up right next to you on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Heck, I’ll even miss the way she often peed directly out of her litter box on the floor so that I could clean up after her, sometimes while staring directly at me.

Is it weird to tear up a little bit thinking about how you’ll never clean up after your accident-prone senior cat’s latest mess? What I would give for one more puddle to spray and wipe down.

Somewhere along the line of our time with her, we developed an elaborate backstory for Zsa Zsa to explain how someone so glamorous would wind up in an 1860s house in west suburban Batavia. As the story went, Zsa Zsa was a Hungarian queen who had been forced into exile because “the Bolsheviks” had come to power. In this narrative, Zsa Zsa was a socially conservative heiress with a Swiss bank account she always promised she’d one day give us access to. We joked that she was housed with a queer couple because it’s the last place the Bolsheviks would look. We told her we’d always keep her safe.

We kept her safe, and she kept us sane. Life without her feels deeply weird. When I logged onto my employer’s HR portal to retroactively log the Friday that I was offline after we put Zsa Zsa down as PTO the other day, I was forced to select the reason for PTO. Bereavement was one, but a quick glance at our PTO policies revealed that likely only applied to human family losses. But is this loss any less than that? Right now it sure doesn’t feel that way.

Pay extra close attention to those blonde peets of hers in the upper right corner.

I wasn’t sure if I’d share this essay after I wrote it. Whenever I’d stumble across a piece like this on social media, I’d often scroll right past it, knowing I couldn’t bear the thought of losing one of my girls. There was something just too raw and maybe even a little cringey about it. And after all, pet loss is not an uncommon experience, though I think it’s a commonly misunderstood one. My hope in sharing it is that it might help anyone who has gone through this already, or who might do so in the future. I hope you’ll know your pain is valid and understood. For many of us, our pets are our children. They are our royal pains in the ass. They are our safety and joy. They are our home.

I want to heal, but I also never want to forget her. For now, I guess I’m just my own mess to clean up. 

There must be something about grieving that brings out my inner Patty Griffin stan but there is a second song of hers that is coming forward for me at this moment.

On “Shine a Different Way,” Griffin sings about letting go of our human compulsion to control things, and giving way instead to the cycles of life and nature. A quiet, radical acceptance of the levers we cannot pull, because tomorrow might not be better or worse—just different, and sometimes different is good enough.

I love you, Zsa Zsa. I’ll love you forever. Sleep well and rest now, my fearless one. Thank you.

I’m gonna let the dream tell me

What it has always known

The moonlight and the glistening waves