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My cat Brutus was home. He was time. He was a friend. He was a geographic place. He was safety. He was habit. He was happiness. He was consolation. He was companion. He was comic. He was antagonist. He was from a certain time in my life. He created laughter and destroyed shoes. He was no loneliness. He was soft when things were hard. He was quiet when life was loud. He was mine. He made me happy just knowing he was alive.

He was just a cat, I guess, except to me.

I would ask my parents for Brutus updates when calling home, still trying to garner up the courage to ask my landlord if I could please have a cat. Brutus got into the butter, I’d hear, or he figured out a way to get the lid off of his food bin. They’d put the phone up to his ear and I’d talk.

He’d chew my flip flops. For a year we had to make certain the bathroom door was closed, because he would somehow shred an entire roll of toilet paper despite not having front claws. He’d crawl into bed with me at night and take up all the room, or burrow down into the blankets. If my door was closed, he’d lie on the floor and shove his paws under it to get my attention. In the mornings, he’d wait at the bottom of the stairs, ready to eat his second breakfast. If you stood up from the good chair in the computer room, and returned even a half minute later, chances are he’d taken your seat and was pretending to be asleep. For a while, he was active in trying to get the lid off of the treat jar. When he was a kitten, I would put him in a sock or a small knit hat and we’d play on the floor of my room. Every year he got two haircuts from my sister, once at Thanksgiving, and once at Easter.

Pets die.

Nubby, our childhood pony, died alone in front of the red gate in late summer, the foxtails waving in the breeze, snagging our ankles, as my sister and I stood crying, bridle in hand. Snuffly, the miniature dachshund, was put to sleep, my dad handling all the details, burying her where she would be safe. My treasured horse wandered out by the trees, knees crumpling, dying gaunt and alone. Baby, a Shetland pony, stood covered in flies, his eyes and his old soul already gone, dead by the time we got back with the gun. Shep’s life started to seep away, and dad took the awful memory so that she could go. The day-old foal died in the barn, his mother watching over him. Munchkin had a stroke one average afternoon, and I held him as he died. Jesse, the last of the childhood horses, was put down and returned to the earth. Brutus died alone at a vet clinic, only six years old, health problem undiagnosed.

When my sister called me at work last week to tell me Brutus had died two days earlier, I leaned against the mop and started to cry. ”We didn’t give him a very nice haircut,” I said through tears. “He died with a bad haircut. And I wasn’t there when he died.”

I struggle to think and write this in past tense.

Brutus had been there many times over the years when I would sit on my bed and cry about the things that words had yet to discover. It was nice to have another living thing around, because I was often lonely. It seemed wrong that I wasn’t there much these last two years of his life. Giving up treasured possessions when you don’t feel ready leaves gaping holes that need to be filled wisely.

Just a cat. But a huge, gaping hole.

His death marks yet another closing door on the past. I can’t go back. I do not like what is in front of me, but the things I want to go back to are fading, one by one. There’s nothing to go back to. Change rushes in as a flood, washing away the landmarks, leaving pillars of salt. It is the loss of a pet, a friend, and a place and time that I knew, all in one.

Brutus is buried next to Snuffly. This means a lot to me.