I was walking past his cage at the shelter when he reached through the bars and grabbed my shirt. Stopped me in my tracks. I looked at him and said, “Okay, I guess you’re the one.” The first night I brought him home, he purred for eight hours straight. He never really stopped after that.

He was with me through everything — my parents’ divorce, college, five different homes, heartbreak, marriage, pregnancy loss, the birth of my child. I have not existed as an adult without him. Through every version of myself he was there, right in my lap the moment things got hard, like he always knew before I did.

We spent his last day in the sun together, windows down, listening to the same Owl City CD we used to play when I was eighteen. Same car. Same music. Same us — just older. And that felt right.

We said goodbye in a garden, not a fluorescent exam room, because nothing could be more anti-Ben than that. I finally got to give him all the forehead kisses he’d spent years dodging.

I buried him in a spot that gets a lot of sun. I think he’d approve.