Today is out 11th anniversary of coming to Canada. This is the first anniversary without Echo. For many years, we used to take selfies on that day, marking the passage of time. First with Echo, then with Echo and the kids, on the balcony of our appartement, on the deck of our house. Today was rainy and we didn’t take a picture. Somehow, without Echo it no longer makes sense.

Echo was a birthday gift from my future mother in law just a few months before our wedding. I really wanted a cat and she really wanted to give me one and my husband always maintained the story that he was not consulted on the matter and that Echo was my cat, although, let’s acknowledge that he was the one who took the most care of him.

We drove to the in laws house to pick him up – he was locked in the bathroom to prevent trouble with other animals in the house. He was tiny, less than two months old, and throughly traumatised. He was howling on the back-seat throughout the two-hour drive back home. Later, we discovered that he was fine with long road-trips, as long as he could move around in the car and settle on someone’s lap.

There were several times when I was properly scared for him: once, when we were temporarily living in Chateau de la Pascalette and he was chased by the groundkeeper’s dog, second time when he had some sort of urinary infection and I had to leave him in the hospital overnight, the third time when we came back home to find the traces of a break-in and couldn’t find Echo for a very long time – he was hiding somewhere, when we found out he had diabetes, when he disappeared for many hours, twice, while we were in chalet. When he actually disappeared for good, I wasn’t scared. I didn’t plan it this way, but I felt that it was time. I was the last person who saw him, the one who caved in to his insistent, urgent meowling and opened the door for him to go outside. I a way, I am glad that it happened the way it did. And I am grateful that I have a date to remember him – not the date of his birth, which we do not know for sure, not the date of his death that seems ephemeral, but the anniversary of the day when we landed in Montreal, carrying a four-year old cat with us.

I am wondering if letting go of Echo is a foreshadowing of other things. I am asking myself of what and who and when I will have to let go and how I will know that I am ready. I have no answers to any of these questions.

My daughter told me tonight that she thought she saw Echo in the bathroom, where he used to wait for someone to give him to drink. She thinks it was his ghost. And I felt a strange, comforting presence on my walk tonight. It may be Echo or someone else. I don’t say that I believe in ghosts, but I do not say I don’t believe in them. I believe in invisible threads that connect us to a multitude of beings in our past, present and future. Sometimes these threads pull us through, sometimes they hold us back, sometimes they simply hold us.