In late 2015 I was living contentedly at my house in Austin with my housemate Robby and two pets, a dog named Lola and a cat we just called Cat. Then one day, my friend Cat Drago made a plea on social media: her father could no longer care for his cat, and he (the cat, not the dad) needed a new home in short order. 

Like my existing fur-babies he was an indoor-outdoor cat, a key selling point in that I wouldn’t be adding a litter box to my operation. Without thinking about it much further—hey, two cats isn’t much different than one—I volunteered. Cat gushed her thanks and a couple of weeks later arranged to bring over the new resident. She’d never actually mentioned his name at any point, but her last text before arriving said: “by the way his name is Cat.”

Yes, thanks to my friend Cat, I now owned two cats named Cat. I don’t even need to think of a joke here.

Cat 2, as we called him, settled in nicely. He was a HUGE boy, 15 or 20 pounds, whom I would pick up and bounce in my arms while chanting “Big! Fat! Cat!  Big! Fat! Cat!” His size was most evident when he affectionately rested his full body weight on my chest. It was much like a heart attack accompanied by a comforting purr. 

He had an adorably broken meow and a habit of sleeping on his back, legs splayed, which I dutifully shared on Instagram with the hashtag #deadcat. 

Robby and I had no issue with the “Cat 1” and “Cat 2” names. Bachelors are low-effort like that. Our friend Billy eventually decided Cat 1 should be named Suitcase, and then at a party awhile later, one of my Latino friends declared of Cat 2: “His name is Sábado. Because he’s Gigante.” (Link, if you don’t get the reference.)

He was an impressive mouser, able to move his giant body with superhero speed when one of the rats around the chicken coop came within range. (He once brought a rat he’d caught into the house. Not cool!) He got along well with the chickens—one time, two chicks imprinted on him and followed him around the yard.

For most of 2020 I was plotting my big move to Amsterdam. It was always part of the plan for Sabado to join me on the flight, with our friends Cortney & Jonathan fostering Suitcase for a few months. I bought the travel carrier and collected the right paperwork, but fate had other plans: Sabado abruptly lost a bunch of weight and was diagnosed with liver disease. Desperate for him to eat, I bought every kind of cat treat they sold at HEB, working out what ones he’d still stomach. Something he loved was cooked chicken breast, which Kiki would have delivered constantly from a nearby restaurant, surely a memorably strange order for them. As you’d expect, this made him permanently spoiled. 

It made no sense to move a sick cat across an ocean, and so on impossibly short notice—I think it was a week or less—Cortney & Jonathan agreed to foster a second, very ill, cat. Fortunately for everyone involved, the foster parents *loved* their new charges, and when we gently floated the idea of keeping the cats permanently in Texas, their first response was relief at not giving them up.

Sabado kept on trucking for another THREE YEARS—ironically it was Suitcase who crossed the rainbow bridge first. His faulty liver finally and suddenly gave up the ghost, and on Wednesday morning Kiki and I woke up to the sad news that he was in kitty heaven. Eleven years is too short a life for any cat (my preference would be infinity years) but he lived his best life in three different households, and I was lucky that one of the three was mine.