Our second oldest cat Sylvester has been missing for three days. He has a history of disappearing. About three years ago he disappeared for six weeks. He spent part of that time locked up in a neighbor’s garage. He was thirsty and hungry, but apparently none the worse for wear. He has also disappeared several times for one or two days. This time seems different, maybe because we lost another cat, Smokey, to a coyote right in our front yard, and Sylvester roams the neighborhood at night.

We have posted on Facebook, and checked around the neighborhood. The current owners of the garage he spent some time in opened their garage and looked around for us. No luck.

I have not given up hope, not completely. After all, cats do have nine lives. Or at least it seems like this cat has, or had, multiple lives. We are not sure which life he is on, but it’s surely pressing towards nine.

I wondered where the idea that cats have nine lives came from. Most people attribute it to the ancient Egyptians, who had a god called Amun-Ra, which is a composite of two gods, Amun, the creator, and Ra, the sun god. When it comes to cats and lots of lives, the story is that Amun-Ra sometimes appeared with the head of a cat, and that he somehow created eight additional gods, making a total of nine from this one (two) god(s).

This is Amun-Ra, killing a snake, which seems especially appropriate for Sylvester, since he was (maybe is still?) hell on small animals. On the morning of the night he disappeared, I found a partially-eaten small animal on our driveway. A going-away gift?

I don’t think Sylvester ever used a shiv on his prey, although I wouldn’t put it past him.

It seems that a number of other cultures, including the Chinese, had mythology of cats having more than one life, although not aways nine. We are hoping that Sylvester has at least one more life left.

Our other old cat, Chloe, is on her last life, and not doing very well. Our vet diagnosed her with lymphoma, mainly in her intestines. She shows the typical symptoms of lethargy and poor appetite. She has had a couple of steroid shots that helped with the symptoms, but her most recent shot didn’t seem to help that much.

She is an outdoor cat, living most of her life on our front porch. Leah felt sorry for her a few days ago and let her stay inside. Leah had gone to bed, but I was still up when Chloe got the walkies. She ended up in our bathroom throwing up on a rug. Then she threw up in the living room. It was mostly water.

And then she got a urinary tract infection. She used to be a small cat, but now she’s just a bony memory of herself. The vet weighed her when we took her in for treatment. She had lost a pound in about a month, which doesn’t seem too bad, but it was about 25 percent of her body weight. She might disappear before she dies. I think in either case it won’t be too long. .

We don’t want to let here suffer. Our problem is that cats don’t show their pain. We have to try to read her body language when she’s trying her best not to say anything.