Farewell to Sophie Thompson (the Cat, not the Actress!)

My almost-fifteen cat, Sophie, had to be euthanized a couple of weeks ago to save her from a lingering death (probably from starvation) as the result of what the vet called either cancer or kidney disease. To get a precise diagnosis of which one would have required more tests and several days and more suffering for the cat, and as regardless of which one it was, it would have killed her, I didn’t see any point. So the question will remain forever unanswered—though my last cat, Pippin, died of cancer of the kidneys, so it’s possible that it was both rather than one or the other. I find myself missing Sophie more and feeling sadder about her death than I did for Pippin—not because I didn’t love Pippin and find her loss quite distressing, but, let’s face it, Pippin was a crabby cat who did not like to be picked up and who would hide under the bed and smack you with her paw as you walked by, while Sophie was an affectionate little beastie who followed us around and demanded to be petted.

For many years, Tim has scoffed at me for naming Sophie before I ever saw her, and perhaps that does seem silly (though Pippin, too, had a name, from Julia, before I ever saw her, and that worked out fine), but I named Sophie after Emma Thompson’s younger sister, also an actress, who I had seen play Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well at Stratford-Upon-Avon the previous summer, and who had visited our class for a discussion session and charmed the lot of us. Sophie, in any case, is an innocuous name that could fit any female cat, and, as it turned out, the more specific association of the cat with the woman turned out to be fine, too. Sophie Thompson the actress is a charming and talented character actress who plays mostly bit parts consisting of finely-drawn, idiosyncratic characters, and Sophie Thompson the cat turned out to have her own repertoire of roles, equally charming, though fundamentally different, of course. No one would be hiring Sophie the Cat for the movies. She wasn’t bright enough to remember any lines or even walk where you wanted her to walk on demand.

We always said that Sophie wasn’t really very smart. Well, to be honest, we always said that she was dumb as a box of rocks. Among her myriad nicknames were: Little No-Brain and Dorky Cat. We witnessed her falling of furniture and running into walls. She couldn’t seem to find her water without putting her paws in it first (though it eventually occurred to me that maybe she just didn’t see very well, and so I bought her one of those fancified running-water cat fountains, and most of the time she drank out of that without fishing in it first. Most of the time.) From time to time, however, it occurred to us, watching her, that Sophie was just as smart as she needed to be. Certainly she seemed to get everything she wanted, when she wanted it. I was gradually trained to buying certain brands and flavors of cat food, and she could pretty much arrange to be combed, petted, scratched, picked up, let out in the garage, or given catnip at will. One simple expediency, a universal, it would seem, in the cat universe, was to get up on the desk. It is extremely difficult to work, and to ignore a cat, when the cat is standing on the keyboard, blocking the screen, and purring.


Still, despite a lack of talent for complex training, Sophie had her share of goofy adventures, in which she displayed this tendency to quixotic personality and for which she will be forever remembered. Once, in an exploration of the attic (an endeavor to which she committed herself whenever the opportunity arose. This wasn’t often, but if Tim or I failed to close the door of the guest bedroom behind us while we went up the stairs into the nether reaches of the house, we could count on the cat to appear in the attic, lickety-split behind us) she managed to attach herself, inadvertently, to a sticky trap by means of swishing her tail too close to it. That would have been one thing, but she then managed to attach the other end of the sticky trap to the lid of a shoebox. The experience of suddenly finding herself elongated by an extra foot or so upset her a great deal, and she embarked on a virtuoso display of rippety-roaring about the house, trailing her little boxcar appendage behind her. We don’t know how she eventually got it off. This adventure, I might add, did not stop her zipping up to the attic the next time she got a chance.


On another, equally memorable occasion, Sophie met my pet ferret (Shrdni Vashtar, after Saki’s literary ferret), with equally rippety-roaring consequences. The ferret, a one-pound fearless female, was exploring in the bedroom, hiding things under the dresser, when the cat came wandering in. Out came the ferret head from under the dresser, then out came the entire ferret, then whoosh, the entire ferret went barreling toward Sophie to investigate. Sophie, evidently bemused at the sight, simply stood still, and the ferret (none too bright herself, I guess!), went full-tilt into Sophie’s chest and bounced off. That, despite the fact that the cat outweighed the cat eight-to one, was the last we saw of her for the rest of the afternoon. The ferret was left standing in her wake, wondering what become of her new potential friend.

More recently, there was the “Sherlock Holmes Affair.” I was reading the Annotated Sherlock Holmes, a massive book that has at least as much text in the notations as in the stories themselves, when I came across a section of notes having to do with the problems of trying to represent the Cockney accent in print. There was a section of phonetically spelled Cockney, which I started reading out loud to see if it sounded better than, say, Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, when the cat, who was sleeping on the cedar chest at the time, leapt up and started meowing. Right pronto she jumped down of the cedar chest and up to the bed, climbed on my chest, and peered over the top of the book, meowing all the while. It would seem that she either hated or loved the Cockney. In the true spirit of science, we waited until she went back to her post and repeated the experiment, with the same result. What do you make of a cat—an American-born cat, mind you, who yowls in response to Cockney? This was an animal with distinct opinions and tastes.

Some people want to claim that the dividing line between humans and animals consists of the capacity to reason. I say phooey to that; anyone who has encountered more than one pet could tell you that they have distinct personalities, and that the personality arises largely out of the behaviors the animals exhibit—behaviors that result pretty clearly from decision-making processes, perhaps unfathomable, but exhibiting a capacity for cause-effect reasoning that defies the “animals are creatures of instinct alone” hooey. Take the Sophie-Pippin contrast, for instance:

Where Pippin hid under things and whapped passers-by, Sophie didn’t even hiss—not even when she was stepped on. Where Pippin systematically collected all the glass ornaments—five full dozen of them—off the first Christmas tree she ever experienced, chased them around the apartment and smashed them against the walls, Sophie gave the Christmas tree a wide berth. Maybe she tried climbing the first one she encountered and it prickled her—who knows? Where Pippin spent her late nights (and most of her days when we weren’t home, as far as we could tell) climbing up on furniture from which she was banned—the thud as we would approach from downstairs or outside and the residual warm spot on the chair were a dead giveaway—Sophie simply picked out spots where she would sleep, changing venues every few weeks, perhaps in an effort to keep an eye on her whole territory. She would rotate among “under the futon” to “on the edge of the rug in the front room” to “on the cedar chest” to “on the futon” on some untrackable rotational schedule of her own devising. Where Pippin seemed to spend hours while we were away devising punishments--the Christmas ornament escapade was one; it occurred on a day when I returned quite late from work; others included unraveling all the toilet paper off the roll in the bathroom, and, if she got REALLY mad, pooping on the floor where we could see her but where she was just out of reach, a short of “shit and run” maneuver—Sophie spent the first night after our return from trips licking us half to death and purring. Come to think of it, though, maybe that was her version of a punishment.

Where Pippin LOATHED every human being on earth except me and Tim (including David, whose attraction for cats is legendary. Even a cat he once put in a dresser drawer and left there all day followed him around slavishly), Sophie would eventually warm up to people who stayed in the house—even letting them pet her after a day or two. Of course, she was just as likely to have forgotten that by the next morning and would very probably run away again when she saw the person she had befriended the night before. Where Pippin was aloof and inscrutable, though very beautiful (solid black long-hair with yellow eyes), and saved her “Oh look how cute I am, pay attention to me” look for one memorable occasion when I was cleaning catfish, and Pippin evidently wanted some, Sophie was cute at all hours of the day and night, open, friendly, and leech-like in her bestowal of affection. They were both cats, but they were dramatically different personalities.

Some people want to claim that the dividing line between humans and animals consists of the capacity to reason. I say those people never had pets. Anyone who has ever had a pet is familiar with the fact that pets—and especially cats—mold the household to their liking. They exhibit likes and dislikes that establish certain completely non-negotiable rules to which the whole household adheres (I WILL drink out of that toilet, but not the other one, so leave the seat up; I will NOT sleep on that cat bed, but I will sleep on the couch; I will play with that toy, but you wasted your money on that one, and so on.) They determine when you will pay attention to them and when you will not by the simple expediency of unmerciful pestering when they want it and a complete absenting of themselves when they don’t, and they establish routines which they, and their “masters” follow—usually without the “masters” even realizing that the routines are being instituted as part of the daily household operation.

And it is these things, the little routines that Sophie herself instituted, that I find are the sources of the moments when I miss her the most: when I go out for the mail, I keep looking for her on the front porch when I come back, because she always snuck out the front door behind me so she could chew on the Wisteria leaves. When I come in from work or a day of errands, I look for her to come around the corner in the kitchen, looking for food. (I hadn’t realized until she was gone that the first thing I’ve done upon arriving home, after turning off the alarm, is feed the cat. For YEARS.) When I lock up at night, I look for her in the garage, where she had scoped out a place to lie down, just behind the left rear wheel of whatever car was in there—no matter how hot or cold it got. I pass the hallway and glance down and catch myself expecting to see the cat, mincing along with her outward turned little feet, assiduously avoiding stepping on the runner. I look for her string toy (a simple contraption consisting of a plastic stick about a foot long with a narrow two-foot length of purple and pink fabric attached to one end) to appear in odd spots near the top and bottom of the stairs, as Sophie spent a lot of her day, evidently, dragging the thing either up or down, depending on where she left it last. And most of all, I find myself expecting, when I lie down in bed at night, for her to jump up and sit on my hip—a routine she initiated several years ago. She would sit there awhile, purring, then lie down, stretching all the way to my knee (head toward knee every time) and purr some more.

(There was, however, a “two-person in the bed rule”: once Tim got into bed, down Sophie would invariably jump and head off on her nightly tour of inspection of the house. If Tim got into bed first, Sophie would get up next to him so he could rub her ear, but as soon as I turned up, off she would go, surveying her territory in every corner to which her little fog feet would let her prowl.)

I don’t believe that Sophie is “in a better place” or any of that jazz; I don’t believe that she is a little ghost lurking in the corners of the house just out of sight—if I can almost see her when I pass by the door of the living room, her last “spot,” or if I can almost hear her purring when I sit down in my office to work, that is my memory and not any external reality at work. I don’t believe that I will see Sophie again one day in some other lifetime. Rather, Thomas Hardy got it right in “Proud Songsters,” and Sophie as a cat is no more. Her material self has been returned to the earth, however, and in her next incarnation that matter that once was Sophie will be grass, or flowers, or food for birds and so will remain a small but permanent part of the lasting universe. I believe that we get one life in any given incarnation of matter and experience, and if, after it is over, that life is remembered with love and humor and perhaps a little wondering admiration, then it was a good life. It is in memory and not in physical fact that Sophie Thompson Henly, as Sophie, the affectionate, quixotic, funny, and ever-surprising cat will live on, but that is an effective memorial, properly termed, and good enough tribute for anyone.