My friend Griff from my old improv group wrote this amazing eulogy about his 23 year old cat, Zsa Zsa, that just passed away the other night. I found it so touching especially the part I bolded below that really captures why I got my dog.
A quick backstory on Griff – he is such an interesting guy. He’s 6’6 and slim. He has a bushy beard and wears his hair in long Native American style braided pig tails. Griff is a graphic designer who used to be a tattoo artist and he is covered in tattoos. Griff at first glance could come across of scary or intimidating but anyone who knows him isn’t surprised that he would write such a beautiful and heartfelt ode to his cat for all his the internet to read. I should also note that Griff is now a dad to a 7 month old little girl who I hope will help gill the void that losing Zsa Zsa has created.
I want to thank everyone for your kind words and sympathy. They mean so much to me in what is and will continue to be a ridiculously difficult time. If you let me take up a few more inches of your newsfeed I will write more clever and/or comical status updates shortly, but ZZ was very egotistical, as many of you may know, and it would be a disservice to not expound on her existence just a little bit more.
Zsa Zsa was more than a pet. I’m sure most of you can relate. Sometimes, a creature walks into our lives on four legs, that is as much friend and/or family as any human. You laugh with them just as easily as you would a drinking buddy and cry with them with full the confidence that they understand and are sympathetic your pain. Zsa Zsa easily met those qualifications and yet somehow managed to go a bit further. For years I tried to categorize ZZ’s relationship to me and didn’t really have success until I read Harry Potter, specifically, when Horace Slughorn teaches young Tom Riddle about Horcruxes.
“A Horcrux is the word used for an object in which a person has concealed part of their soul.”
Zsa Zsa was my Horcrux.
She was 20 pounds of my soul living outside my body and wrapped in calico fur. I don’t feel like I’m able to breathe as deeply as I could 18 hours ago. I feel slightly translucent like Marty McFly playing guitar helplessly as Biff dances with his mother at prom.
I feel so mortal.
This is something I say that not to express how shitty I feel now but I say it so that you understand how amazing I felt while she was here.
Zsa Zsa gave me about a decade more than any cat should have to give. I hope she knew that I loved her as much as a man could love a cat. I hope I gave her a good life.
As I laid my head on her weak body and listened to her heart give its last beat and feel the last gasp of air exit her. I was flooded with the memory of why I wanted her in the first place. I got Zsa Zsa because I wanted to take care of something. Many times when that dreaded feeling of numbness and escape would fall over me, Z would be there. She would need me to feel and in that moment, I would need her too, because she was the only one that could make me feel anything. That was her job. Her job was to let me take care of her. Her job was to sit there and be lovely.
No one has ever done a job as perfectly as Zsa Zsa did hers.
One last time, on a keyboard soaked in my tears, I want to thank you for reading this eulogy I write for a very small creature that was such a large part of my life.
R.I.P. Zsa Zsa Speck. You are missed.
