Schrödinger aside, this title is referencing us. Dawn and I don’t have kids, we have a cat. Our agreement was that if we ever divorced, the person who asked for it would have to take custody of the cat. We kid, of course. We loved the little furball for all of her 21(!) years with us, even if her kidneys had been slowly failing her over the past few. Up until fairly recently she was still running and jumping and meowing, if not with the spryness of her prime years. Hey I’d like to see a human over a hundred years old (relatively) free climb or clear their own height in a standing jump, even if she’d started to sometimes miss her mark. She had always been skinny in a world of chonk, but more and more we felt her bones through her skin. She couldn’t seem to lift her tail anymore, or even sit down comfortably. Epileptic seizures had started, about once a month, and cat epilepsy is a scary thing because their brains short-circuit but they’ll still try to run. Still, it wasn’t until her latest episode that she finally seemed to go away, mentally speaking, and not really ever come back. So with great sorrow, we made the long delayed decision to have her euthanized. Even knowing she’d had a long, good life, even with the long forewarning that she was on her way out, onions were being cut. We had already decided that another cat would be adopted when the current one went, but not the timing or circumstance beyond that we wanted a rescue pet. After coming back from the vet, Dawn figured she’d want to wait awhile. She didn’t last a day before changing her mind. Despite all the interruptions and the fur in her oil paints and innumerable other consequences of being both artist and pet owner in a small dwelling space, she woke up the next day to a catless house and it was, in her words, “too quiet.” And then a mutual friend of a friend sent us pictures of a new kitten just out of fostering at our local humane society. We went over that very day, and long story short, came home with a new mew. He is a handful (literally and figuratively) and also absolutely adorable and probably the best possible medicine for the loss we felt, we’re just in the process of figuring out some things like, right at the moment while I type this, “no trying to go to sleep on Dawn while she’s drawing.” It was the saddest of times but also it is the best of times.The cat is dead. Long live the cat.