Birdy

My cat Birdy died on July 24th, 2026. She was 2.2 years old.

That number is the part I keep coming back to. Two years and change is not a life, it is an introduction. She was still growing into her coat. The ear tufts had only just finished coming in.

The first thing here is a video from May 22nd, 2024, and it is two minutes of a pile of kittens on a pink blanket with their mother. That is where she starts. By the middle of June she was big enough to lose a wrestling match on the cat perch, and by the end of that month she was still small enough to sit in one hand with her eyes taking up most of her face.

She was a long-haired brown tabby, and she had the specific talents that go with that: she could find the one warm rectangle of sun on the floor before anyone else knew it was there, and she could get into any cardboard box in the house regardless of whether the box was structurally capable of holding her. She usually chose the one that was slightly too small. She slept upside down. She sat in chairs like a person at the end of a long week. When she was happy she went belly up, which was most of the time, and it is why so many of these photographs are of a cat lying on her back looking directly into the lens.

I love taking pictures and I still did not take enough of her. Nobody ever does. What I have is twenty-two frames and one video across twenty-six months, mostly phone shots, mostly taken because she had done something stupid and I wanted to keep it. That turns out to be the right reason.

The last one is from July 8th. She is asleep on a plaid blanket and there is nothing special about it, which is exactly what it was: an ordinary Wednesday with the cat asleep in the room. I did not know it was the last one. You never do.

Thank you, Birdy. Two years was not enough. Here she is.