Oh, sad.

In our last apartment a woman knocked on our door one night with a "missing cat" flyer. We empathized and asked about the cat and only finally got to asking how long the cat had been missing. 2 years.

The woman said she thought she had seen the cat at another neighbor's house and was sure it was her cat, but she couldn't get close enough to it to verify and it ran away.

At that point you have to think, I am sorry, but your cat has either passed away or is now thoroughly someone else's cat.

I think lots of people don't realize the intensity and depth with which some people can love a pet. The woman you met, and the owners who posted this Craigslist notice, probably go to sleep at night thinking of their poor missing animals, somewhere out there in the world. It's so sad.

I'm sure she did. But as a pet lover myself, who has done things like throw my body in front of my dog to take the oncoming car instead of him, and grieved for weeks over the death of my first cat, I understood that much of this is no longer about love for the pet, who is at the least no longer in pain and at the best happily living elsewhere. What was hard to see in this neighbor was that she was unable to see or deal with the reality - and that doesn't seem like the intensity of love, but the intensity of need. Love reconciles, accepts, and sets free; need may never do that.

It is heartbreaking - but not heartbreaking for the pet, heartbreaking for the person.

Yesterday I found an obviously lost cat at the neighboring apartments. I would say she was lost just as winter began, and she didn't weather it well. She was friendly but obviously sick, scared and hungry. I took some soft food today with the idea that if I could find her again then I could call in a rescue, although I know they would most likely put her down. The poor girl, she broke my heart.

They may not put her down right away. Our local shelter is no-kill and that's where we got one of our cats (the other was a hand-me-down). Might be better to get her a chance of a home...life on the street is risky for cats.

She had a badly infected eye that was probably already lost and her jaw had been fractured or dislocated. Frankly, she looked like someone had hit her upside the head with a baseball bat a few months back. She was in really bad shape. I can tell an abandoned cat that has adapted, and this little girl hadn't. That's why I went back to find her.

I wish I had not started to read this thread.

About ten years ago, I lived in the Martin Luther King Historic District in Atlanta. I spent a lot of time roaming the neighborhood, so I was a familiar face to a lot of people.

One day my orange cat Zoe got out of my apartment. She was a completely indoor cat, sweet and lovable and not well-equipped to make her way in the big city. I posted Lost Cat flyers and talked to everyone I could find: kids, old folks, and especially the park rangers who patrolled the neighborhood. I told them, "Orange cat, purple collar, my phone number is on the tag and there's a reward."

About a week later, I answered the door to a pair of middle-school kids with a cat carrier with someone else's orange cat with a purple collar. I gave them $20 for the effort and told them to take the cat back where they found it.

About a week after that, I got up late at night for a drink of water. My apartment had French doors that opened onto a communal deck, and I saw two little yellow eyes looking in at me. I ran for the doors, opened one, slammed my right foot against the other (breaking two toes), slid on my arse across the wooden deck in a t-shirt and panties (yes splinters) in full view of the City of Atlanta and scared the everloving shit out of my cat but eventually coaxed her into my arms and back inside the apartment. I cleaned her up, took her to the vet the next day for a checkup (she was A-OK) and we lived happily ever after.

The End.

I knew a well known ghost cat in Savannah. It would never let you touch it but it had been there for a century. Small for a Southern street cat, haunted the corner at this one square.

I've though of putting up fliers for Phil, just to declare his awesomeness and the lack of it in the world now that he is gone.

I can make a ridiculous amount of fliers at the end of this semester.

. . .

I walked around the neighborhood for a couple hours every night for weeks and weeks once after a cat disappeared. Put flyers everywhere. But I had had that dream, the one where the pet visits you (he was on my lap), the one you get that's as real as anything you've ever felt, so I pretty well knew he had passed away. The dream was so vivid that when I awoke from it I ran around my room searching for him. I still feel his spirit close to me when I think of him.