Image courtesy Cristi Russo

A map of Lord Byron’s roamings from lordbyron.pet

The King of Cat-paw-tol Hill is dead. A memorial grows at 20th and Denny to mark his passing.

Lord Byron, whose years of exploring and making this corner of the city his own earned the orange tabby a place among neighborhood royalty, was 8.

“The best thing about LB was the way he brought people together,” his family tells CHS about the cat’s passing. “It’s what we ❤️ about Capitol Hill and Seattle.”

“Also, he would want everyone to vote,” they added.

Lord Byron, it is true, often had the community and its snacks and soft couches and excellent chin scratches in mind. And Lord Byron always had an angle.

Sporting a Tile tracker and a lordbyron.pet website to log sightings, Lord Byron’s legend grew on the streets of Capitol Hill between 15th Ave E’s somewhat sleepy commercial strip and the sleepier 19th Ave E below. In classic feline fashion, Lord Byron sightings outsripped his actual wanderings as the cat seemed to be everywhere at once. Maybe that orange tabby was the King. Maybe it was not.

There were also times when Lord Byron seemed to be nowhere. He once disappeared for 11 months, his family says, only to turn up having been living with another family in a nearby apartment building.

Nobody really owned Lord Byron the cat. And everybody did.

“We all thought he was only spending time at our places,” Cristi Russo of the Lord Byron Facebook Group says. “And then when we got busted as ‘The Sister Wives of Lord Byron’ we set up the page to see who else he was frequenting. It’s brought me hundreds of hours of joy since then.”

Sharing interactions and sightings of Lord Byron seemed to be part of a rite of passage for life around the neighborhood he roamed. His appearance in your life, if you wanted it to be, could be a sign of good fortune and the neighborhood’s embrace.

Not every merchant along 15th Ave E would agree. “I personally tried to cart his ass away from inevitable fights he’d pick with dogs near Ladro and to this day, I’ve carried around two extra Churus in my purse in the event I need to do that again,” Russo said.

For others who did not know the creature, Russo said there was the unavoidable debate about letting a cat live an outside life in the city.

“Inevitably people would suggest that LB was neglected in some way, wasn’t being treated for fleas, etc,” Russo said. “That just wasn’t ever the case. He was a Hillebrity even at the vet.”

Image courtesy Amy

From the In Memory Of: Lord Byron Facebook Group

From the In Memory Of: Lord Byron Facebook Group

Image courtesy Crystal

Image courtesy Cristi Russo

In the end, Lord Byron pulled one last disappearing trick. Word spread over the weekend that the cat had gone missing. A neighbor who saw one of the social media posts about the disappearance had terrible news. A Lord Byron friend went to check out the report. Someone had placed his body in an empty neighborhood compost bin. Lord Byron’s tracker was found nearby. There were no obvious signs of trauma. It looked like the cat was asleep.

Lord Byron, the neighborhood friend and explorer, was dead.

Russo says she sees Lord Byron’s life in terms any good city living soul can understand.

There was an assumed risk for a cat you just couldn’t keep indoors. Lord Byron had “a home with a great family, extremely attentive medical care, a cat brother and all the food he could possibly want.” Lord Byron was happiest when he was outside.

“I just saw him two weeks ago, around 1 AM, standing on a wall on 15th, staring at the street and out into the night like a badass,” Russo said. “It was magnificent.”

Image courtesy Ian

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