The 2010s are coming to an end, and with it, so are the lives of many of the famous pets this decade’s unique capacity for internet virality jumped to fame. Lil Bub, a cat who first rose to internet fame via Reddit and Tumblr back in 2011, passed on Monday.
“We lost the purest, kindest and most magical living force on our planet,” the cat’s owner, Mike Bridavsky, wrote in an Instagram post announcing Lil Bub’s death. The cat had struggled with various health conditions since her youth and had been battling “a persistent and aggressive bone infection” before her death. “Even knowing this, we weren’t expecting her to pass so soon or so abruptly without warning,” Bridavsky wrote.
As the Washington Post noted, Lil Bub isn’t the first internet-famous pet to pass away recently. The famous feline of the Grumpy Cat memes that were nearly inescapable throughout much of the early part of the decade also passed earlier this year, while an orange tabby known as Keyboard Cat died last year of liver cancer.
These internet celebrity pet deaths never fail to attract an outpouring of online grief from fans, not unlike the mass mourning that tends to accompany the death of any other celebrity. Lil Bub’s death was trending on Twitter within minutes of Bridavsky’s announcement, with mourning fans taking to the platform to type out their respects.
In the past, many of the most famous pets in our lives were fictional and, therefore, immortal. We lost Charles Schulz, but we’ll never lose Snoopy; there will always be Lassie reruns and we’re living in the time of a Lady and the Tramp live-action remake. At the end of the first decade in which could love and follow the lives of other people’s pets as our own, however, we’ve found ourselves unprepared to face the reality of their mortality.
As the Post‘s Abby Ohlheiser put it, “Watching the lives of other people’s pets has become a part of the Internet experience, and now so has mourning their deaths.”
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