Our eldest cat, Emma, went to heaven this morning. At least, I expect that she did. She was, after all, a meek and mild cat, hardly ever mean.
Emma is in the middle between Belle (front) and Dave (back).
I think I’ve written before that Belle (in front) showed up starving and sweet-tempered. As she got stronger, she changed and ended up chasing the other cats out of the house.
Emma decided to live the back yard. Truthfully, the space has a pool with growies around it, rather than being a ‘yard’, but Emma had a very nice set-up in the shed. She loved lying in the pool chairs, moving with the sun. I think she enjoyed her 1 1/2 years of being the primary owner of the space.
About 2 weeks ago I noticed that she was very thin. We took her to the vet who ran tests but at the $400 mark the best he could say was she probably had cancer and it was a toss-up as to what he could do from there. I didn’t think that Emma was up for extensive cancer treatments so we took her home with extra-special food and did what we could to make her happy. Since Emma ‘happy’ looks like Emma napping, it was not hard to do. She was still a little perky then, looking happy to be alive.
I got home Sunday from California and Emma had lost more weight, she had not been eating at all, and she no longer looked perky. So, this morning, Steve and I took her in to have her… put to sleep? euthanized? killed? The words are tricky.
I’m not one for dressing up words for death. We all die, and that’s the word I usually use. It is to be hoped that we end up in a happy place, but that happens after we do the dying part. However, with that thought in mind, the phrase ‘passed on’ makes more sense. I’ve never particularly liked it, but that sums up what happened with Emma today. She passed on from this existence to the next.
We got a little teary-eyed but Dr. Locke assured us that we did the right thing. A mass had grown on her back in the space of a week and he said that whatever she had, he would not have been able to stop it. She never seemed to be in pain and the process went very smoothly. She seemed happy—or at least not unhappy. There are so many worse ways to go.
Emma is now planted in the front yard near Spike and Walter. I miss seeing her at the back door but she will live on in our memories.
Now it’s Dave’s who has a problem. It’s not a lethal problem, but he’s losing the hair on his face. Dr. Locke thinks it’s an allergic dermatitis. If Dave could see himself, he’d be very unhappy—but he can’t see himself! There are times when it’s nice to be blissfully unaware of circumstances you cannot change, don’t you think?
Tagged: cats, family
