When my father died, in 1998, my wife, Ginny, and I inherited a beautiful set of silver flatware with a cursive letter “N” engraved on every knife, spoon, and fork. It was the silverware I had grown up with. My father, a jeweller, had purchased it from a walk-in customer before I was born. The “N” remained a mystery—a disembodied initial without a name.

Not long after the silverware came into our possession, we added a tiny, bow-legged Abyssinian kitten to our household. Over dinner, while he slept in Ginny’s lap and Suwannee, our already-cat, sniffed suspiciously from under the table, we discussed what we should call the new arrival.

“I’m thinking that he could be the only cat on the planet with his own set of silver flatware,” my wife said.

We named him Nigel.

Nigel died last week, at the age of seventeen—an impressively long life for an Abyssinian, I am told, but nowhere near long enough for me. Our apartment seems terribly empty now. I keep expecting to see him stretched out by the window, admiring our view of the Brooklyn Bridge, or to feel him beside me on the couch—a soft, sleek, thermal purring machine jammed up against my thigh. The grief one feels when a pet dies has a curious awkwardness about it. It’s just a cat, after all. How can my loss of a cat compare with the losses people have been experiencing all around me the past few years—friends losing parents, friends losing siblings, friends losing friends, a good friend recently dying suddenly in his fifties, Ginny’s mother dying last month, just a couple of weeks before Nigel? And, yet, I really miss the lad.

For much of my life, I was unlucky with pets—or, more accurately perhaps, pets were unlucky with me. According to my mother’s “Our Baby” scrapbook, the very first word out of my mouth was “dog,” and as soon as I could put a sentence together I began begging her to let me have one. To no avail; as far as my mother was concerned, it was “criminal” to keep a dog cooped up in an apartment in the middle of New York City. A dog needs somewhere to run around, like woods or a back yard. Furthermore, a dog should be able to go to the bathroom whenever it wants; it shouldn’t have to sit around the apartment holding it in until somebody’s mother is ready to interrupt her busy day or her relaxing evening in order to schlep downstairs in the elevator so she can drag the dog up and down the block in all kinds of weather until it makes up its mind to do its business.

“Speaking of which,” my mother would add, “the sidewalk in front of our building is already a farshtunken, germ-filled minefield.” (This was pre-pooper-scooper era.) “The last thing West Seventy-ninth Street needs is another dog adding its business to all the business already sitting out there, just waiting for you to step in it.”

“I could take care of the dog,” I would protest. “I could take him for walks. I could make him happy.”

“You’re six years old.”

“What about Rupert? Rupert lives in an apartment and he is happy.” Rupert was the adorable frankfurter of a dachshund who resided across the hall in 12B.

“Happy? That dog is a mental case,” she replied. It was true. Rupert was a nervous wreck who couldn’t sit still if his life depended on it. “The last thing I need is another mental case in this apartment.”

I was not getting a dog. Case closed. If I wanted a pet, it would have to be something low maintenance. “You can have a parakeet, for example,” she offered. “As long as you don’t lose it, like with the turtle.”

The turtle was my first pet. And I didn’t lose it—not exactly. My Uncle Frank carried it back in a little square terrarium from his vacation in Hawaii and gave it to me on my fifth birthday. I immediately named him Rupert. Not much bigger than an Oreo cookie, Rupert had the word “Hawaii” painted on his shell, above a picture of a palm tree. I carried the terrarium into my room and placed it on the dresser near the window so Rupert could enjoy the view of the treetops in Planetarium Park, across the street. To keep him company, I arranged a couple of G.I. Joes on the rubber island in the terrarium, along with a toy replica of Tonto on a pony. When I fed Rupert his first meal of turtle-food pellets, I watched with fascination as he chewed with leisurely relish and gazed blankly out the window, as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

About a week after Rupert’s arrival, my mother went shopping in the afternoon and left my sister and me in the care of the cleaning lady. My sister was six years older and had never been terribly happy about my addition to the family. At the time, she was going through what my father was always assuring my mother was “just a phase.”

“Five years is some long phase,” my mother would sigh.

My sister came into my room while I was playing with Rupert and showed me a very old book of engravings that my father had purchased from an estate sale. The engravings were a series of fantastic images of an imaginary “China,” drawn in the seventeenth century by an armchair traveller, priest, and polymath. But that afternoon my sister convinced me that the images were of a real place, and that that place was Hawaii, not China, since several of them depicted palm trees, just like the one on Rupert’s shell. Along with the palm trees, there were pictures of giant fruits, fierce sea monsters, weird pointed towers, scary dragons, and, on one page, flying turtles.

“You see,” said my sister, “turtles can fly.” When I objected that turtles don’t have wings, she answered, “They don’t need them—they use their flippers.”

I was still dubious. “Look,” she said, “it’s right there in the picture. Why would they make a picture of them flying if it wasn’t true?”

I guess that convinced me. Maybe they’re jet-propelled, I thought.

I positioned Rupert on the edge of the dresser. “Fly!” I commanded him. He gave me a skeptical side glance and pulled his head into his shell.

“You have to throw him in the air, like a paper airplane,” my sister said. I did this, and he landed across the room on his back. “Try again,” she instructed. This time he crashed into the radiator. “He probably needs fresh air to fly,” she suggested. “Open the window.”

I opened the window.

“Now, throw him. Harder.”

I threw. Out went Rupert.

“Whoops,” said my sister.

That was how I “lost” the turtle.

When I started to cry, my sister said, “If you tell Mommy, you’ll be in big trouble. After all, it was_ you _who murdered him.”

It took my mother a full day to notice Rupert’s absence. I told her he must have gotten lost. Her theory was that he had crawled under the bed or the dresser and the cleaning lady had sucked him up in the vacuum cleaner. She scolded me for being so careless and letting him “run wild.” For days afterward I avoided looking down when we walked out of our building, for fear I would see Rupert’s tiny body smashed to bits on the sidewalk.

The parakeet didn’t last long, either. My mother picked him out at the pet store. He was green and yellow and had a brown kidney-bean-shaped protrusion on the top of his head that looked like a beret. I named him Frenchie. For two weeks he sat in his cage, dazed and lethargic, barely uttering a peep, moving around only to eat a few seeds, take a drink of water, or peck at a slab of cuttlebone that came to us gratis from our good friend and upstairs neighbor, who was known as the Cuttlebone King of New York. Then Frenchie dropped dead right in front of me. My mother decided that the beret had been a brain tumor. She put him in a shoebox, and we carried him together to the pet store so that she could demand her money back. I can’t remember whether she was successful. Next we carried him to Planetarium Park, and I buried him near the back wall of the Natural History Museum while my mother admonished me not to step in anything.