This site never fails to get a smile. There’s just something about kittens with bad grammar that I’m powerless to resist.

Side note: It’s a proven scientific fact that kittens make people happy. How else can you explain the episode of Scrubs where JD saves a man dying of a broken heart by emptying a box of kittens on his face?

I read a book once (it was a picture book, but it still counts) that talked about how cheetahs all look alike. I never really noticed that, because all lions look alike, and all giraffes look alike, and basically any group of animals in the wild look a lot like each other.

But then I looked more closely at the pictures of the cheetahs. They really do look alike. I mean, alike-alike. They have the same markings. Not in the way that giraffes all have spots, or tigers all have stripes, but they really have the same markings. The same dark spots near their eyes, for starters.

Plus, they’re all built the same way. You don’t have big cheetahs and little cheetahs. Fast cheetahs and slow cheetahs. Pinheaded cheetahs and cheetahs with big old noggins. Cheetahs with longer or shorter limbs, or ears, or tails, or noses, or anything. They all look the same.

And it’s no accident.

Evidently, experts think that, during one of the ice ages long ago, the cheetah population got very low, almost to extinction. And I don’t mean only a few hundred cheetahs left in the world. I mean only a few cheetahs left. Like maybe fewer than five. Maybe even two.

And then, those Adam and Eve cats reproduced, and reproduced some more, and after a long line of inbreeding that doesn’t pay to think about when using the Adam and Eve analogy, their numbers went back up to healthy levels. Cheetahs were on the brink of extinction, possibly even more brinkish than any other species, but they made it.

Of course, since they all come now from the same basic family, they’ve lost the genetic diversity that once allowed them to survive at all. In other words, they’re all the same now. If there’s another environmental catastrophe, or even a major shift in environment or climate, it’s a coin-toss whether cheetahs will survive this time. Since they’re all fundamentally the same, there won’t be any outliers to adapt to the change.

I like cheetahs. They’re fast, sneaky, and beautiful. They manage to find their own mates and offspring among countless identical cheetahs, which you know is no small feat if you’ve ever tried to find your sister, one person among thousands wearing red coats, at the Day-After-Thanksgiving sales.

She was born on September 22, 1999, so that makes her about seven and a half years old. That’s not enough time. She was a sweet kitty.

It’s weird how much I miss her, having not seen her more than once or twice a week for months. Maybe it’s not so much that I miss her, but that I know she won’t be there the next time I stick my head under the bathroom sink. She won’t ever again knead my head while I’m trying to sleep, or stand behind me silently and creep me out. I won’t ever again get to pet her plushy fur and tickle her cold little toes and kiss her on her little black nose. I won’t ever get to see the pinkness of her ears showing through her solid gray, or feel the crick at the end of her tail. Or pick her up and force her to snuggle with me while she squirms to get away.

No more sniffy tours. No more tuna yowling. No more sweet little kisses between her and Guinness or between her and Tulla.

It’s so unnerving that she was fine just this morning. My poor little baby was having seizures and in terrible pain. She went into arrest and they couldn’t revive her.

The technician brought her out on a little fuzzy blanket, and it was like she was sleeping. As I petted her body, I kept imagining that she was doing all the things she would have done if she’d just been sleeping. Like twitching her ears, flicking her tail, stretching and wiggling in happiness.

Except that one of her eyes was still open. The other was squished shut against the blanket, but her right eye was open, and it was like looking into a clear glass marble. Jose wasn’t in there anymore. At a glance, it was her, but there was something missing when I looked more deeply. I really wanted to close her eye, but I couldn’t do it for some reason, and part of me didn’t want to.

We had to decide what to do with her body. The choices were burial, cremation to keep the ashes, or group cremation. I can’t stand the thought of her little body rotting in the earth, so burial was out immediately. And keeping her ashes seems so morbid. It’s just her body, not her little spirit. I’d rather have photos to remind me of her life, not ashes to remind me of her death. So we decided on group cremation. I can’t even think about that — my little baby cat being shoveled into an incinerator with a bunch of other well-loved pets.

The horrible thing is that I kept thinking inappropriate thoughts while I was saying my good-byes to Jose. All kinds of terrible thoughts would pop into my head. Things like “One down, three to go” and “At least Guinness will be happy now.” It was terrible. I didn’t want to be thinking those things, but my mind was all over the place and weird little phrases kept drifting through.

It’s Cinco de Mayo today. We always joked that today was Jose’s holiday, because she’s Jose Cuervo, our little Mexicat. Guinness has St. Patrick’s Day, Buca has April Fools’ Day, and I guess Tulla never got a holiday.

I can’t believe my little Jose is gone. It was just so sudden. I get a phone message that she’s acting unwell and that they’re taking her to the emergency vet. I get in the car and drive to the vet. When I arrive, everyone’s outside and Chris tells me that Jose passed away. It just doesn’t make sense. She was just fine.

Almost nobody will miss her, because nobody else knew her. She was a scaredy-cat, paranoid in the extreme, and pathologically suspicious of anyone other than Chris and me. But she was so sweet. So loveable and loving and affectionate. She was a weird little ball of anxiety, but there were times when she was so relaxed and blissful that it made my heart ache.

I miss her, and I love her. She was a good kitty, and if there’s any justice in the universe, she’s in some kitty heaven rolling around in catnip, chasing a string, and eating all the tuna she can get her little teeth on.