In July 2015, about six months after moving to a new city, a friend said she had too many cats and asked if I would like to have one. I said “Yes!” without hesitation, and a few nights later her husband brought over a beautiful male Maine Coon cross.
I decided to call him Tiberius after Captain Kirk. We bonded quickly. Tiberius was incredibly loving and followed me everywhere. He often slept at my feet or curled up on my chest. Sometimes he would climb into my lap and put his paws on my shoulder asking to be held. He would meow and meow until I picked him up. He was very curious and loved to smell new things in the house. My roommate would remark “That cat loves you more than I’ve ever seen a cat love a person.”
Tiberius was never far from me if I was at home, and if I could have, I would have taken him everywhere with me.
My favorite thing to do was to “tuck him in” to bed at night. He would lay against my back as I sat at the computer, and when I got up to go to bed, I would cover him with a blanket, give him a toy, and a kiss to say goodnight. He would usually then jump right out of the chair, but I liked that he waited until after – he always let me do my pre-bed ritual for him.
In January of 2020 I noticed Tiberius was losing weight, but the vet could not pinpoint the cause. Even after extensive tests, the results were inconclusive. I didn’t want to put him through more tests, so I was given some pills to help him, and for the next year and half he begrudgingly took his pills twice a day. I took him for checkups, and for a while he was doing fine, but the last few months he went downhill quickly. The vet said he seemed to have kidney failure, and that he had lived longer than most cats with his diagnosis did. Sadly, in October of 2021, only a few days shy of his eighth birthday, Tiberius passed away.
In the last moments being with him, as I petted him and comforted him, he nipped at my hand. Tiberius was very gentle with me, and never bit me, and I knew it was his way of saying: “I love you. Goodbye.”
Two months later I got him memorialized in a tattoo. Writing this I realize I still love him and miss him so much, and I will never stop missing him.
