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Mourning Mrs. Douglas

“What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.”

Melissa Firman
6 min readFeb 23, 2020
Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

“What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.”

Helen Keller

On Thursday night, at the end of National Love Your Pet Day (and, ironically, because this is how my life works, the 35th anniversary of my dad’s passing) we said a sad goodbye to our beloved cat, Mrs. Douglas. She was 11. Maybe 12. We were never quite sure.

Back in August 2009, we were ready for a new cat after losing our previous kitty nearly a year earlier. We wanted a slightly older cat than a kitten because I was commuting an average of 3 hours each day to work, we had a gorgeous brand new two-year-old house, The Husband had a stressful soul-sucking job, and The Boy and The Girl were 7. We needed this cat to live a good long time, I remember us saying, “well into high school, maybe even into college.”

The Girl and I browsed listings of adoptable cats for several weeks until this one popped up on the Delaware Humane Associations website:

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Melissa Firman
Melissa Firman

Written by Melissa Firman

Writes about books, GenX, politics, life. Currently working on a memoir. www.melissafirman.com

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