This is my beautiful Gummers, formally Mortimer Montgomery Miaouzalot.

He was just about a month and a half past his sixteenth birthday when his sweet voice was silenced forever. 

I'm devastated. Here in our "new" house, as in the one we just moved to but is not in any way actually new, it seems the front door latch doesn't catch easily. The door was ajar long enough for the Gum to take a stroll outside--bad news because he was strictly an indoor fellow. My husband didn't realize that Gum was outside and shut the door. We missed him an hour or so later. By then, it was dark and he was nowhere to be found. We searched and searched but found no trace of him. I slept in the living room on the couch with both the front and back doors open enough for him to come in but he didn't. 

After searching for days and plastering this lovely picture all over town, the online local newspaper as well as the print edition, and Facebook lost pets page, we got a call with the worst news possible. As she was taking her kids to school, the lady had seen his little body on the street which intersects the street our house is on the morning after he had disappeared. We hoped against hope it wasn't he, but he hasn't been seen by anyone in our neighborhood or any of the surrounding neighborhoods. Neither has he been picked up by the local animal control people. 

We are forced to believe it was he indeed who met his end in a collision with a car...whose driver probably never even saw him or realized he had been hit. The little body was sighted on October 4 so it has been nearly a month since we lost him. I don't weep as often as I did at first, nor as violently, but it is difficult to bear all the same. I'm missing him desperately. It seems so odd not to have him here. Every once in a while I will see him asleep on a chair or on the couch and realize it isn't the Gummers but just a discarded sweater or my knitting or something. 

He was such a wonderful little creature, very intelligent and loving and funny. He constantly nagged us to play...he had his favorite toy which my husband would try to keep from him. He always caught it and would carry it away to his "lair" under one of the living room chairs, tail and head held high in triumph. 

Please forgive the long paean in memory of my little animal friend, nay, my beloved animal child surrogate. He was the last of our five cats and I had decided that he would be my last animal altogether. I am becoming more and more chronologically enhanced and would not like to pass on and leave a little creature wondering why he or she had been abandoned!

Thanks for listening! I just wanted to memorialize this beautiful loving little creature, hoping to work out some of my guilt and grief not only for his loss but also for the pain of knowing I failed him by not missing him sooner and failing to find him before he made the fateful decision to cross the street.  

Goodbye, Gummers. May you meet me in joy on the Rainbow Bridge in the not too distant future.