I had a cat that lived to be 21, too. My sympathies; I remember how hard it was to lose him.

Whenever one of my cats has died, I always end up thinking of a passage from May Sarton’s The Fur Person:

“They did not love him for his glossy tiger coat, nor his white shirt front and white paws, nor his great green eyes, no, not even for the white tip to his tail. They loved him because he was himself.”