I once owned three black cats.

Dilly, Poster and Blappy.

They couldn't have been more different. But, taken together, they were strangely three parts the same

And only in their deaths did that start to add up.

Let's start with Dilly.

Dilly was soft and kind. She had loose skin, with a belly pouch that hung like a saddlebag.
She was innocent and simple; she lived indoors, and when let out into our small suburban backyard, she’d startle at the wind or stare daftly at a bug, as if the world were both fascinating and slightly beyond her.

Dilly had a touch of escapism. Left alone, she would find a spot along the fence abutting a neighbor’s yard and paw at the dirt, digging a hole to nowhere.

Summer after summer, she pawed and pawed until the ground gave way just enough - a small, patient excavation that finally became an opening for a curious cat to squeeze through.

On the other side was the neighbor’s Rottweiler, who had been waiting with a curiosity of his own. When Dilly slipped through, he bit her in many places and tossed her in the air as if playing a game of catch with himself.

That was the end of Dilly.

Meantime, Poster began and ended as an outdoor cat.

He was born on the asphalt of our driveway as part of a litter owned by our Asian neighbors, who didn't speak a lick of English and only smiled and laughed when we motioned to take one.

And so take him we did - although maybe we failed to let him wean properly from his mother because Poster spent most of his indoor hours kneading us. That's right. He'd climb onto you and paw incessantly, his nails sharp and ragged, purring with a mix of sadness and want, searching for something to latch onto.

In the afternoons, he would arrive with a half-alive pigeon, its wings broken and battered, and take it under the porch, where he’d play with it in pieces as it died in jerky bursts, like a jack-in-the-box slowly running out of batteries.

And each night, regardless of torrential rain or the squall of a blizzard, Poster slipped back into the dark.

Nearing seventeen, we let him out one evening and he never returned. I liked to imagine he found a quiet patch of ground and worked it gently, kneading the way he always had. But it was just as likely he was swept up by a snowplow, flattened sideways into six feet of dirty, compacted snow.

Blappy wasn’t originally our cat, and she wasn’t originally named Blappy.
She was given to us by a friend who couldn’t keep her, and we seemed like the sort of people who would take a cat.

Blappy was kind and pudgy (or Rubenesque as one might call a lady of the larger variety) and anxious in a way that never seemed to settle.

She would lick - one spot, then another, then back again - as if trying to smooth a pain that would never lie flat.

She would lick, lick, lick, and we'd demand, "Blappy, stop it," and then contort her body into a new position as if this would make her forget her habit.

Over time she licked her fur off entirely in places, leaving bare, crude patches that dried and cracked and bled - then healed just enough for her to return to them.

It became obvious why she had once been named Scabby.

Eventually we had a child who was allergic to cats, and we passed Blappy along to another friend. She remained stressed and eventually lost all of the remaining fur around her eyes.
She died unceremoniously just a year or two later.

I haven't owned a cat in nearly two decades - or they haven't owned me.

But I think about Dilly, Poster and Blappy often, as if a math equation: 1 + 1 + 1 = 3

Curiosity.

Hunger.

Compulsion.

And how they each kept going. Until they just couldn't any longer.

And maybe that's all the math you need.