As a head's up, this email is going to discuss the death of a household pet, if that's not something you're in a space to deal with, maybe give this one a pass.
Hello, Friends.
My cat died this weekend. It's hard to even type that. It's also why this newsletter is coming to you on a Sunday afternoon instead of our regularly scheduled time of whenever I wake up and remember to hit send.
One of the hurricane stories I didn't tell you in last weeks newsletter was the one about our cat, Felicity. In the weeks leading up to the hurricane, she had greatly slowed her intake of food. We thought she might just have become a picky eater so we tried a variety of different foods for her and she would eat each new food for a little bit, then stop eating that one too. Thursday before the hurricane hit we scheduled an appointment for her at our vet for the following week.
Then the hurricane hit. Among all the devastation, our vet was utterly destroyed. We didn't know that at first, because we spent nearly a week before we could even leave our neighborhood. When we did finally get her out to an emergency vet they ran a sonogram and determined she likely had lymphoma. There wasn't anything we could do but give her drugs to make her comfortable for as long as we could and wait for her to tell us when it was time.
We got longer than I expected. We originally thought she wouldn't survive the immediate aftermath of the storm, but she was always stubborn and wouldn't let her tragedy get overshadowed by some water from the sky. The drugs perked her up a bit and she even started eating some, but we knew it was only a reprieve. Yesterday morning she made it was clear that it was time. The specifics of how aren't important, but if you've gone through this as a pet owner, you already know.
We called a vet service that specializes in euthanasia at home, and we were able to have them out early yesterday afternoon. The doctor who arrived for the procedure was incredibly caring, and made a very difficult process a little bit easier. Amy's dad is a recreational woodworker and surprised us with a very nice box for her remains. Last week, when we had a guy out with a backhoe to replace our culvert (Thanks, Helene) he also was kind enough to dig a hole for her. We buried her, and because sometimes the writing is just a little too on the nose, there was a peal of thunder and it started raining just after we started filling her grave. It was the first rain since the hurricane. We're going to plant wildflowers on her grave, and I can see i from my office window, which is both very nice and very difficult right now.
I'm sticking mostly to the facts here, because I don't know that I have the words for how I feel. I'll miss her, I miss her already. Hopefully she's brought you a little joy in the years I've been publishing this newsletter, as she is most often the cat at the end. I know I've had complaints the few times I forgot her photo. I've got about four thousand photos of her on my phone and computer, and I could keep putting them in without interruption for a very long time. But I don't know if I can bring myself to do that. I'm not actually sure that it will feel alright even writing this newsletter without her, but I'll have to find out.
I'm going to take a week off next week, because this Friday Amy and I are going to grab a hotel room in the nearest big city that wasn't hit by the hurricane and order takeout all weekend. I'll see how I feel about it after that.
Here's the very first picture I ever took of Felicity. It's not a great photo, but it'll do. This was when she was just a cat we found at our door, and I was trying to get photos for lost and found posts if we needed them. We eventually got her to her home, but circumstances conspired that made it clear her real home was with us. I'm glad we could give her a good one.
