Forever In Our Hearts

It’s said that the New Year is the time to celebrate a new beginning, to unfold new horizons and realize new dreams, but it's also the time to take a look back over the past years and correct injustices, if there were any. Something that’s been bothering me for

quite some time, something I feel guilty about, is that nothing has yet been written about Oset’s passing a year and a half ago. He somehow remained unfairly forgotten, as if he had never existed, as if he had been unimportant and had never been loved by anyone. But

in my heart he will live forever and I feel I owe him a huge debt of gratitude for everything he brought into my life and for all of the love he had given over the years. He deserves a loving last goodbye, a final token of appreciation, an everlasting tribute to keep his memory

alive.

Oset was found as a tiny kitten, a light pale, golden little guy with beautiful, luminous, wise eyes and a slightly sad and serene gaze. He had always looked a bit different, somehow older and more sagacious than the

other kittens, as if he knew and felt something they didn’t. Although I didn’t want to admit it, not even to myself, from the very beginning I couldn’t shake off a vague feeling of unease over his future and a strange foreboding that he would die young. There was some deep sadness in his eyes…

He appeared out of nowhere, skinny and very hungry, in the middle of summer. I guess some children from my neighborhood had found him and carried him around until

they got bored and then they left him in front of my garage. He was too friendly and much too trusting for his own good, so I took him in, knowing that outgoing and affectionate kitties usually don’t survive long on the street. He loved all of the other cats and they all loved

him back, but when Augusta arrived, just a few days after him, she became the light of his life. They were inseparable from the beginning, one soul in two bodies.

A couple of months later, Oset disappeared and was nowhere to be found.

I was looking everywhere, desperately searching the entire neighborhood and found no trace of him. Augusta was refusing to eat and just waited for him with a blank look in her eyes, wrapped in her own misery. After a few sad weeks, I got a call

from a friend who told me about her new pale ginger kitty and I knew instantly it was him, I knew Augusta’s waiting was finally over. When I brought him home, they were both sparkling with sheer happiness and the joy of their reunion was so overwhelming that

it can't be described in words. It seemed that nothing could ever separate them again. They had their whole lives ahead.

When we moved to the shelter, many kitties estranged from each other but not Oset and Augusta. Their love was

flourishing, stronger and more vibrant than ever. They were joyous and playful, cuddly and sweet. Although Oset was a bit skinny (he had always been bony and delicate), he looked perfectly healthy. The tragedy that was about to happen could not be foreseen, there

were no warning signs at all.

Fate struck right out of the blue. On a lazy summer day, when all of the kitties were just resting and enjoying the sun and the warm air seemed to shimmer, I suddenly heard a cat crying in the yard. I rushed out

of the house at breakneck speed and found Oset lying in the grass. He was breathing heavily and unable to get up, with a totally distraught, panic-stricken and almost hysterical Augusta beside him. Before I could even try to take him to the vet’s, in just a few

short minutes, everything was over. My precious pale golden boy, so loving, so young and so beautiful, was gone and gone forever.

Time is passing rapidly by, weeks turn into months and months into years but my memory of Oset is

still crystal clear and as vivid as it was at the time of his death, now a year and a half ago. But it wasn’t just Oset that died that day, something inside Augusta broke and never returned, something inside of her disappeared forever. Her love for him was larger than life and when she lost him, she lost herself. Oh yes, she is still here, she is doing more or less everything that any cat does, yet she is nothing but an empty shell of her old self. She is not interested in other cats, she is not interested in humans, she is

not interested in much of anything anymore. She doesn’t live, she just endures life. But maybe in her dreams her beloved pale golden soul mate comes to comfort her and to show her that he never really left. Maybe those dreams are what help her hold on.

You will always be missed, my beautiful golden boy. The kitties will never forget you, Augusta will never forget you, and neither will I.

“When someone you love becomes a memory, the memory becomes a treasure”.