Ghost Cat

Ghost Cat - fact Summary

Inspired by a Real Cat

Margaret Atwood’s "Ghost Cat" describes a housecat’s dementia through a close observer’s voice. The poem traces the animal’s confused nighttime wandering, loss of recognition, and frantic attempts to rejoin the household. It frames the cat’s decline as both poignant and unsettling, ending with a direct, cautionary address: if the speaker were similarly diminished, the request is to be shut out rather than allowed to cling in error. This reflects Atwood’s personal experience with her cat’s dementia.

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Cats suffer from dementia too. Did you know that? Ours did. Not the black one, smart enough to be neurotic and evade the vet. The other one, the furrier’s muff, the piece of fluff. She’d writhe around on the sidewalk for chance pedestrians, whisker their trousers, though not when she started losing what might have been her mind. She’d prowl the night kitchen, taking a bite from a tomato here, a ripe peach there, a crumpet, a softening pear. Is this what I’m supposed to eat? Guess not. But what? But where? Then up the stairs she’d come, moth-footed, owl-eyed, wailing like a tiny, fuzzy steam train: Ar-woo! Ar-woo! So witless and erased. O, who? Clawing at the bedroom door shut tight against her. Let me in, enclose me, tell me who I was. No good. No purring. No contentment. Out into the darkened cave of the dining room, then in, then out, forlorn. And when I go that way, grow fur, start howling, scratch at your airwaves: no matter who I claim I am or how I love you, turn the key. Bar the window.