We said goodbye to our sweet baby Pong today. It was gentle and peaceful, and our hearts are broken.
Pong was a street cat in Harlem who was picked up by a TNR program and deemed just socialized enough to be adopted out. We met him in 2019 at the Union Square Petco, where he was brought in under the name Alex; he’d been named for the parking attendant who fed him.
We chose the name Pong as a shortened version of Pangur Ban. He was named after an old Irish poem about a monk and his cat, Pangur Ban, who both work hard at their individual pursuits. Ironically, Pong hated paper, and only liked to use books as beds.
He was always idiosyncratic; it was clear from his insatiable appetite, the scar on his ear, and his little kinked tail that the years on the street weren’t kind to him. It took him a couple years to warm to me, in particular. But the first time I got covid, in 2021, he spent 10 days standing guard over me. After that, he was more ready to cuddle than he had been before.
We used to joke that he only showed affection under the cover of darkness, but as he got older, he got softer, too. During the pandemic, he and Dana established a “boy time” routine — each night, I’d go to bed, and the two of them would snuggle on the couch while watching tv. Pong would usually get a little ice cream out of it, too.
In the terrible time when we waited for the end to come, I read my friend
@lorewilbert book The Understory, and this passage in particular brought me a lot of comfort:
“What makes a liminal space so important is that it is a place where we find peace within the dissonance. We know we have found one of these spaces when we can hold two competing truths in one hand, or when we can feel both profound grief and profound hope at the same time time, or when we can face a truth we’ve tried to ignore in fear and it brings relief, not horror.”
Thank you also to
@tendercreaturemusic for this deeply affecting cover of “Our House,” which I’ve been thinking about all day.
We love you, Pongy. Thank you for making us a family.
