This is the tribute that my husband wrote and posted on our personal Facebook pages yesterday after the fact. I'm sharing it here, because he is way more eloquent than I am.
So today our pet cat Ferret passed away. When Sarah and I got married seventeen years ago, even before we had Ty, we decided that we wanted to adopt two cats. We had just started a small web business and we reached out to one of the animal shelters. Not only did we make their webpage (long gone now I'm sure) but they happened to have two kittens we could take. They were a brother and sister from a litter of kittens left in a bag along I40. We took both. This post is going to run a little long since I'm dedicating it to both of them. Initially, we thought to name them after Lord of the Rings characters but decided that they were just too undignified for that. We decided to name them after rodents instead. Ferret got his name because he was a little skittish but also curious. He would carefully poke around until he felt comfortable with a place. His tail was so long that when he was a kitten it would periodically tap him on the top of the head and he would startle himself. When the door got left open, all of the cats would be outside except Ferret who preferred the comfort of his home. His sister we called Squirrel because she was high-strung and a bit of a spaz. I remember watching her run head-on into a Television set because she wasn't watching where she was going. We lost Squirrel about ten years ago. She fell out of a window, ran off, and never came back. She was a sweet, fat cat. She was very affectionate and loved laps. She also kept Ferret clean because he wasn't really good at grooming himself. We like to think she found a home because she loved people and food and if anyone ever found her and fed her, should would have moved right in with them. Ferret, on the other hand, remained a constant with us throughout all of our moves, children, and life changes. He was a very calm cat unless you put him in a carrier at which point he would completely lose it. The first time we put him in one, the whole carrier shook and rattled until it broke apart. Ferret liked to head-butt you as a sign of affection. Ferret was also strong. He didn't pick fights but he would certainly end them. In one of the pictures in this post, he received a reward from Luke who, as part of a class experiment, measured all of the cats movements over an hour and determined that Ferret was the most active. We think he had a stroke last year but somehow recovered from it. All in all, an amazing survivor. Ferret and Squirrel were both important members of our family that were with Sarah and I from the very beginning of our marriage. We will cherish their memory. In the pictures, Ferret is the champaign cat and Squirrel is the grey one. You'll also see a picture of Bunny, the calico cat, whom we lost earlier this year. Ferret was 17 years old.
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