Bagheera is gone.

I break my long silence — unfortunately, with bad news. I wanted to write about this right away, but almost two weeks have already passed.

On October 6, 2025, my cat named Bagheera passed away.

We took her from an old lady who had placed an ad in the newspaper — it was sometime around 2008. There were three leopard-colored kittens to choose from, all very similar, and only she — the one completely black, like a panther.

At school, in a Belarusian language lesson in the second grade (back when there was still a good teacher, and I hadn’t yet developed a long-lasting aversion to the “mova”), we were given an assignment: to write a short story in one or two sentences. I wrote:

“I’m not afraid of troubles and misfortunes, because I have a black cat at home, and she constantly crosses my path.”