# something terrible happened and i'm going to tell me about it, or, a eulogy

_published Wed May 13 10:59:21 PM PDT 2026_

_be advised that this post has sad and dark things within_

For my first seventeen years I lived in the same place in the same house with the same people. For my last seventeen years I have lived in fourteen different dwellings across four different states and moved in and out of relationships both platonic and romantic. However, in this volatile period, there was one consistent throughline: my cat, Unix.

I found Unix while I was in college. My then-girlfriend and I were exiting the science building late at night in the middle of a frigid mid-western winter. We lived less than a mile away, but she had no winter clothing and drove to campus given the near zero temperatures. The next day, an ice storm was forecasted.

A sad, loud meow moaned upward from under the car. A tortoiseshell cat stepped out and looked into my face. She seemed pretty certain that I could help. She had no collar and, while adopting a cat seemed incredibly unwise, I figured she could ride out the ice storm at our house then be on her way.

She eagerly accepted a lift into the car. At home, I set her down in the yard and opened the front door. I offered her a chance to leave and proudly fend for herself if that's what she desired; she instead trotted into the house.

The ice storm came and went but this cat remained, calmly ignoring all of the opportunities I gave her to depart. I referred to her only as "cat." I thought she was very cute and I respected her serious demeanor, but I didn't feel like I knew her. I thus refused to name her and let her go about her business.

I remember the first time she jumped up on the bed with me. I felt like I had earned something from this watchful and circumspect creature. Not long after, I had a dream. A woman I knew was sitting with me and the cat in the dream. The woman had a reputation for understanding cats. Her dream version stared at me intently and said,

"Unix. Her name's Unix." I woke up knowing it was true.

Cats have a reputation for being aloof. This reputation is generally inaccurate. It is given strength by the many humans who treat pets as accessorizing objects. They are frustrated by what seems to be a defective product. It's true that some cats simply detest other living things and stubbornly seek solitude. That's true for some humans, too.

If you engage with a cat on their terms and do not attempt to force a relationship, they will relax. If you consistently display behavior they like, they'll come to appreciate you. This was the case with Unix. Before long, it was her fervent desire to seek me where I sat, occupy my lap, and knead my stomach while I read a book or attempted to operate a laptop computer.

Such treatment was never granted my housemate who treated her like a toy to be picked up, thrown about, and generally mocked and tormented. Cats, despite their foolish behavior, can have dignity.

Unix was clearly affected by her youth. She could never, for her entire life, tolerate other cats. She could also not refuse food nor tolerate its absence. When she planted herself on me, she could not be moved. She would punch me in my literal face if I tried to get out from under her. It stung a little but she was always careful to keep her claws perfectly retracted.

It was amusing to refer to her behavior in imperious terms, but I knew she was just scared. I could not watch her enter a berserk, mad, hissing rage at the mere sight of another cat without seeing the fear that consumed her.

She wanted love and security, just as I did. She possessed a deep well of internal terror, just as I did. While I was clumsily and habitually seeking an assuaging love from all the wrong humans, she had found it in me.

I have already referred publicly to my existential nadir. It was a time a few years after adopting Unix when death obsessed me and I could not bear my waking life. I felt an uncrossable gulf between myself and the human world. My veins would tingle and pulse up and down my arms: my own body seemed to be begging for an end.

I would often cry when left alone in the house. On a particular day when I had made up my mind to do a particular thing, I sobbed. I sat on an ottoman doubled over. Unix jumped onto the chair next to me and pressed one of her paws into my thigh. I let her on my lap and she stared at my face and purred and purred and purred and purred.

I have been mocked for my affection for cats. I have seen eyes rolled and heard frustrated confusion about why they mean so much to me. I hope it's clear: the affection of a creature so small can grow large enough to fill an inner universe of pain.

My life's rebuilding began in that moment on the ottoman. I was, as is often the case with serious depression, not nearly as cut off from other humans as I had convinced myself I was. I had people that were willing to help me if I could just recognize and accept it.

Raising cats can be surreal. Some of them are incessant jesters, to be sure, but cats like Unix have levels of emotional intelligence greater than many humans I have known. They can fulfill a caretaking role in a human's life even as we scoop their feces and put out the begged-for meats.

This is an intense bond: a mutual caregiving that persists, if one is lucky, for a very long time. Unix occupied a space in my emotional landscape as precious as a child but as soothing as a parent.

Given that I have already faced tremendous grief in this decade I thought, just maybe, I would be prepared for Unix's eventual death. I was wrong. Thus, it has taken me two hundred and four days to write about Unix's death from cancer at the age of seventeen in October, 2025.

Undoubtedly, I continue to grieve. I have written these words without fully breaking down, so I'm clearly making progress. I'm writing while on an airplane and have shed facial fluids sufficient only to saturate a single cocktail napkin. I have struggled to write about anything since her death. I hope that finally doing so, in a structured and public way, will help me a little further along.

My relationship with Unix taught me many things. Her lessons improved my ability to luxuriate; to make my needs known; to defend myself. But her absence has taught me a final lesson of the utmost importance: how to accept the unconditional and fervent love of those closest to me as fearlessly as a little cat accepted shelter from a winter storm.