Going back to an old one today for a very sad occasion.

This was written a while ago, but I’m just now publishing it because I think we’re far enough from the event now that it’s ok for me to talk about it, and I really do need to say some things.

I am not so much in the mood for japes and badinage today, because last night my brother called to tell me the news about Kitty.  Kitty is a little orange tabby that my brother and his wife adopted quite a while ago.  He has/had feline leukemia as well as some sort of birth defect that inhibits his breathing and makes his internal organs all crazycakes (I am not a vet), and he wasn’t expected to live very long.

It’s been years, and he semi-miraculously recovered from the FLV and has had a pretty good life full of adoration and catering to from his two servants, but it looks like he won’t be with them much longer.  There’s an option to try a surgery that would be very expensive, have a 10% chance of not killing him, and, even if he came through, mean pain and trauma and torture and that just isn’t fair to him.

I joke a lot about how Neurotic Owl adopting a cat can’t end well because big cat, tiny owl, carnivore instincts, but this is how every one of us who adopts a cat knows that it will eventually end — with making a decision we don’t want to make.  In the end, the only last piece of love we can give them is to not make them suffer endlessly, and it’s not enough.

Of course, since I wrote this, the end has come, as I think we knew it had to.  Kitty will be missed and remembered and loved.