Before I went off to college, my friend’s mom advised me to bring a photo of my cat.

“I missed my cat so much when I went to school,” she said. “You’ll be glad to have a picture.”

So I hung a photo of my cat on my dorm room’s closet door as part of a sort of anti-homesickness mini-collage.

I wasn’t even all that fond of the feline, truth be told. We’d gotten her as a kitten a couple years prior and she was a fairly skittish little thing, as cats tend to be: She’d occasionally grace you with a lap-sit when the house was cold, but the minute you shifted your weight, she’d leap off you with alacrity, not to be seen for another several hours. She wasn’t especially friendly or personable or special in any way. Cute, to be sure, but sorta nondescript.

Damned if I didn’t enjoy that picture of her, though. That friend’s mom was right. And in a way I think the old “absence makes the heart grow fonder” truism applied here. My affection for Azrael the orange Maine Coon grew while I was away—aided by the time-mellowed attitude and increasing warmness I’d noticed in her during my visits home.

That’s not to say she turned entirely friendly. She had an abiding hatred for my brother, and a well-earned one, at that. He had once put her in a bag and spun the bag around by the handles—a real dick move—and she’d never forgiven him. Even hated his wife, presumably for being associated with the offender.

And she never cared for my friend Alex, either. The origins of that animosity were decidedly unknown (no bag spinning or anything of that nature), but the depths were palpable. She’d hiss and bat at him if he got near and on one particularly memorable occasion, she’d bounded out of my mother’s bedroom without warning, set straight for the chair on which Alex was lounging, sprung from the floor, used his lap as a launching pad, and, in one fluid motion, turned her body 90 degrees, mashed his face with her ribcage, landed on the floor, and took off in another direction. His Lucille Bluth–style “Aaaaaah!” is burned in my brain.

Which is to say this cat could be prickly.

After college I worked abroad for a year and during this same time period my mother sold her house and set out on a job that had her traveling the country in an RV with my father and two large dogs. (Long story.) So Azrael was about to be homeless. My mom wanted to give her to a shelter, but I objected. For all my ambivalence, I had grown to love the cat and it seemed wrong to give her away because of bad timing. Somehow, my mom convinced a family friend to house Az until I got back home.

From there, the cat was my steady companion. I did all the typical post-grad stuff—home-hopping, job-hopping, cohabitating, betrothing, marrying, parenting. Before I knew it, Az was 18 years old and she and I were sharing an apartment with my wife, dog, and daughter.

She’d become an entirely different being by this time. My wife had forced her to be cuddly—and had the battle scars to prove it. Instead of leaping off your lap at the first sign of any twitch, the cat had now taken to hunkering down, riding the storm out as you completely readjusted your positioning. After a rough year or so with the shelter pup we adopted, Az had come to grudgingly accept this lumbering, friendly dufus in her home and had even begun to sniff and occasionally lick the dog while she snoozed.

I’d gotten this cat when I was 15 years old. This was before September 11, before Enron. Some of the most seminal events in my life hadn’t yet happened: the deaths, the surgeries, the traumatic relationships.

Which is to say that when I got this cat I wasn’t yet me.

There’s a lot to be said for longevity, for steady companionship. As I experienced all those seminal moments and as my life continued apace, Azrael could always be counted on. Lounging in the background of photos. Taking center stage on rare occasions, such as our “Meowry Christmas, Bitches!” holiday card. Snoozing in the windowsill, her hair poking out of the screen and her girth threatening to break it. Delighting neighbor kids with her steady window presence (“That’s my friend!” one proudly told his mother, pointing at Az). Greeting us with some peeved meows and a few spite-turds when we came home from weekend trips.

By the time she reached age 18 earlier this year, she was in declining health, so when we came home from one of those weekend trips a couple months ago, it wasn’t an especially unforeseen shock to find her dead, her eyes half-closed and her tongue lolling out of her mouth a bit.

She’d gone into our 1-year-old daughter’s room and lay on the rug—something that neither my wife nor I ever recalled her doing before, but that made a certain amount of sense. When my wife was pregnant, Az had taken to lying on her growing belly like a hen incubating an egg. When we brought our newborn home from the hospital, Az had marched right up to the car seat and acted as a sort of hairy orange welcoming committee. The cat would curl up next to the napping baby on the sofa and would even tolerate tail- and hair-pulls as the kid grew into a toddler. There was always a palpable protectiveness to their relationship.

“Sleeping!” our daughter exclaimed when she saw Az on the rug and then, through a sucked thumb after we explained to her that the cat had gotten sick and died, “Sick. Yeah.”

I put Azrael’s towel-wrapped body in a box and brought the box to the dog so she could get in one last goodbye—lots of nosing and sniffing and snorting—and then for the first time in 18 years, I didn’t have a cat.

I thought I saw her the other day on our bed. There was a pile of laundry there waiting to be folded and it was in just the spot where she would hop up and lounge, looking to get away from the on-the-floor chaos of the dog-and-toddler show. It was just one of those corner-of-my-eye things that was so commonplace for so many years that it would barely register—like noticing where you’d left the remote.

For a little while our daughter would continue saying “See Az!” when we were heading home from someplace, but she’s stopped that now. In our family picture book, when she sees Az’s photo she now just says “Cat” instead of her name.

I didn’t tell too many people because, honestly, nobody really cares that your cat died. And I was a little embarrassed by how upset her death had made me. For all the platitudes that people can espouse—I get it; she was a part of the family—it ends up seeming kinda silly to mourn something as commonplace as the death of a pet.

I get up and go to work and go grocery shopping and see friends. The apartment has less hair and there’s no annoying litter strewn across the floor.

Which is to say that life continues apace and nothing has appreciably changed.

But if I’m being honest, I was, and remain, quite devastated. I don’t plan to get another cat. I don’t even particularly like cats, really; I just liked Az. And I’m settling into the likely reality that I’m going to miss her every day for the rest of my life.