Remembering Silas

A post about my beautiful, much missed cat and celebrating what cats teach us about life

2006.

After years of travel and rented flats, my partner and I had finally had succumbed to adulthood.

We had the steady jobs, the mortgage.

But like every peak you reach, there’s always something missing from the rosy idyll, isn’t there?

‘Everything’ is never quite enough.

Our new house needed something extra.

Someone extra.

Parenthood still frightened the shit out of me, so there was only one thing for it.

Yes, we did what many couples do.

We opted for the ‘responsibility starter pack’.

We decided to get a pet.

I’d never had cats as a child, only a dog, but when it came to choosing my first pet as an adult, it seemed an ideal choice.

After all, we both worked full time.

What a lovely life the animal could have, exploring the abundant countryside on the doorstep, a cat flap meaning he could come and go as he pleased!

My partner and I travelled to a cat rescue centre in Bradford, equipped with a wicker basket carrier that turned out to be the most useless thing I could have possibly bought.

Cats are no picnic, yet there I was, thinking my ‘chosen one’ would happily hop into this highly impractical offering, lying silently as a Famous Five afternoon tea of cherry cake, ripe pears and ginger beer.

Nope.

The place itself, reminded me of the ‘Everybody wants to be a cat’ scene in ‘The Aristocats’.

The building was teaming with feline activity - bodies stretching and contracting like furry concertinas. 

They courted attention with struts and rubs.

Burly ‘Thomas O’Malleys’ with broad ribcages, flirty eyed ‘Duchesses’ and cute as button ‘Maries’.

There were shy silver tabbies, long haired ‘Cousin It’ types and matted elderlies that drooled.

I was entranced!

Couldn’t I move in with them?

Have all of them?

Become the fabled cat lady with a sweater full of hairs and a stench of love sprayed on as proof of their ownership?

No. On second thoughts, I’d sat next to her on public transport once or twice and she wasn’t what I wanted to embody in my early thirties.

But how could I possibly choose?

My ‘dream cat’ aesthetically, was tortoiseshell but I’d decided that adopting a cat based on appearance, was shallow. I’d read that pure black or black and white cats were more difficult to home as they were usually overlooked in favour of fancier offerings.

I lived by a road so narrowed this down further to a black and white one. My logic was that the colour contrast would help drivers see him/her better and aid chances of survival.

But which one?

They were all so captivating in their own way.

In the end, I let the cat choose me. There he stood, a shiny liquorice black and white mint of a specimen. His eyes, wide saucers of absinthe and his nose, the colour of champagne rhubarb.

‘Miaow”

He called to me, nudging gently with his head. He jumped down to my feet, friendly and happy to be petted but not desperately so.

This was *the one*!

We brought him back by bus and train in that ridiculous basket, trying to stop him leaping out at bus stops. Grappling with pink paws that found every possible gap in the loose weave.

Me, reassuring him in the sing-song tones one reserves for babies and animals, ‘not to worry’, for he was going to live a wonderful life in the country with us, his new ‘parents’.

Damn, pre-child me was so nauseatingly twee!

Once home, we had to decide upon a name.

It’s always difficult to know what to name both animals and children, isn’t it?

People try and read insights into both you, and them from the name you choose, which is only really ever a marker to distinguish from another.

I liked the book ‘Silas Marner’ and the idea of him being an out of towner, a stranger making a new life somewhere. The idea of him having a mysterious past.

Yes, ‘Silas’! That was it!

Was it a bit pretentious sounding, I wondered?

A bit ‘Ken Barlow’?

I needn’t have.

“That’s the name of the villain in Danger Mouse!”

said my workmate, Tracy.

“Baron Silas Greenback”

Oh well.

Silas soon endeared himself to us with his cheeky character, bringing both mischief and mayhem into the house.

He was an accomplished hunter.

The morning he deposited a massive mole down on to the pile of Sunday papers with a proud ‘thud’ is forever etched in my mind.

As is the time I got to work, to discover a dead mouse in my handbag that he’d placed there.

Mother was not amused.

Cats are not for the squeamish, but to me that is part of their appeal. They get you to face the gore and gristle of life, to understand morality is a sentimental human concept.

Nature’s law is brutal and bloody. It takes no prisoners.

And so we begin…..

The numerous life lessons I learned as ‘cat mum’.

Silas taught me more about boundaries and self sufficiency than any person ever did.

I learned that you don’t have to fawn over people - or even give them anything - for them to like you. Authenticity is valued.

I learned that independence is attractive.

He didn’t need to be needed.

He didn’t need me.

As he squeezed into gaps he should never have fitted into and jumped from great heights, he taught me to forget my limits.

As he took leisurely dust baths on the road just seconds before a car approached, he showed me how to trust my own judgement.

His attention to self care was also inspiring.

No matter what sort of day he’d had, Silas always looked shit hot. He cleaned himself as meticulously as a teen on prom night, every night of the week.

He was fearless!

He chased squirrels and attacked rats. He once launched himself on the back of a dog that was passing by.

His ability to adapt was also noteworthy.

The way he dealt with my son’s arrival, our house being flooded and the arrival of scary sounding industrial dehumidifiers.

Silas came to mean so much than just *a pet* to me.

He was both sanctuary and sin, beauty and beast, tame and wild.

In his later years, he would lie across my full length body so his face was just inches from mine, and stare deeply into my eyes.  We had so many silent conversations that way - thoughts passing between us via dilating pupils and squints.

The purring too! It’s more than a sound. It’s vibration that makes calm come alive, a feeling that moves! It fascinated me.

His smell; so delicately animal.

The rasp of his tongue on my hand….

I could tell you even more about him.

About the time he went missing and I contacted a pet psychic to find him.

About the time I got my son’s dad to construct a cage from chicken wire and plywood to pop over our baby son’s Moses basket so he didn’t have to be excluded from the bedroom.

But of course, tales like that would paint me to be some animal obsessed eccentric…..

Hmm……

He didn’t deserve the death he got.

It was during the first lockdown in 2020.

He’d kept having urine infection after urine infection. His kidneys were failing and sadly, his spirit with it. Once upon a time, he’d have guarded his territory with all his worth. Towards the end, I would come home to find other cats inside the property, him hiding out in the wardrobe.

The vet levelled with us, the prognosis wasn’t good, he was fighting a battle he couldn’t win.

It was time to make *the decision*.

Because of ridiculous ‘Covid’ protocol with no scientific basis, my beloved cat (can’t bring myself to say ‘fur baby’) was handed over to a vet in a carpark.

Like a drug deal.

No familiar person to be with him in his final moments.

I could dwell on that.

Sometimes I do; how I despise our government for allowing that - and far worse - to take place.

But I prefer to remember him with all he filled me with.

Curiosity, courage and fun.

And most of all….

The message that someone out there will love you, just for being you, and it won’t be a chore, or even ‘just’ a joy, but rather, an absolute privilege.