Fur-Baby

My fur-baby, Karli, has been sick for several months now. We've suspected diabetes but don't have the funding to run tests and/or treat. So, we have had to watch her get thinner and thinner over the past six months or so. She was quite a healthy-looking obese cat for years. Rolly-polly and roughly about 20 pounds. Upon taking her to see a vet yesterday, she weighed just over 9 pounds.

We got Karli about 8 years ago as a gift. Her kitty family had been abandoned and a nice human family rescued her mom and all the babies. The human family wasn't able to look after so many baby kitties, so were looking for some help in adopting. We gladly took the little bundle of fur.

Karli means "covered with snow" in some language or other. I think I may have taken liberties with the spelling when I named her. She looked to me like a tabby cat that had just popped out of the snow, covered almost completely in the white stuff.

Karli was always the lap cat and she only wanted me. She'd claw her way up my pant legs just so that I would hold her. I was always amazed that she never actually got her claws into my flesh but climbed up my pants quite easily. (Until she got too chubby, that is.)

Back when we got Karli, we were still struggling to have our own babies, so our cats sortof satisfied our need for children in the house. Once Audrey came along, we didn't have as much time to lavish on our cats, which I still regret a bit. They got rather spoiled on our attention and I'm not sure they've gotten used to our switch in focus. In fact, after Audrey was born, we took almost no pictures of the cats at all. The last picture that we took of Karli was on Christmas Day this year. All she wanted was to be with me.

I've known several cats who have become ill or injured. Their human families have done what they could for the cats, sometimes very expensively. It has always struck me when an animal has become so ill that it can barely take care of itself and seems miserable. Some of those human families have continued to try to take care of that cat and some have decided that it was time to let that cat go. I have no wisdom as to which is better for families and their pets. All I knew was that I never wanted to be responsible for any of my own pets' suffering.

So, as Karli continued to get worse and worse, I had to contemplate our options for her. I put it off for a while because it was so unpleasant to think about. We finally decided that there was nothing we could do for her and that we were allowing her to get to the point where she would start to really suffer. I wasn't quite sure that putting her to sleep was the best option because it seemed like such a cop-out. I didn't want to give up!

When we took Karli to the vet yesterday, it was with brave faces on, firmly fixed in our decision to put her to sleep. While we waited in the examining room for the vet, we wondered what we would do if the vet refused to put her down on the grounds that she wasn't "sick enough". When the vet came in, he asked a few questions and examined Karli for about 10 seconds. That was all it took to satisfy him that she really was that bad off. I think that shocked me the most. I was expecting to have to tell him all the terrible things that were happening with her and that we really felt it was best, but in the end, he convinced me. She really was that sick.

Ben buried her in the Sandia foothills. He picked a spot that he felt was beautiful and peaceful.

We've agreed that the most difficult part was not deciding to let her go. It was that we HAD to let her go at all that was hard. After so many years, she really was part of our family and I know that there will be an empty place where she was, maybe forever. I won't be sad forever, but I won't forget her.
I also know that our other fur-babies will miss her too. Johnny has already come to me with that questioning meow and his routine is quite thrown off. It's as if he doesn't know what to do without her, and I can't say I feel much different. I performed a classic double-take on Patches when she poked her little white nose around the couch this morning.

What makes me feel okay about it all is that she isn't suffering anymore. That was the greatest thing I could do for her at that point in her life.

The romantic in me believes that she's Home, waiting for us; perhaps with our other fur-babies that we've had to give up for one reason or another. Why not? It couldn't possibly be heaven without the souls we love, human or not.

Tiger Lily

We suffered a loss in our family yesterday. We had to take Lily, our #3 cat, to the city pound. No sniggering all you cats-are-just-pets people, she was a member of our family and it was a difficult decision to let her go. What with a new baby coming and the phenomenal amount of food and cat litter our cats go through, we had to make a choice about one of them.

We finally fixed on Lily because Johnny and Karli have been in our family for many, many years and Patches, although she is the youngest, is the most like a normal cat we have ever had and that's really saying something. Lily has, especially in the last few years, been very withdrawn and "spooky" around us. We see her once a day if we are lucky. So, though she is a beautiful cat, as well as a gift from one of Ben's brothers, we determined that she wasn't adding enough to our family in comparison to the other cats. It was a very difficult choice and caused Ben, especially, considerable consternation.

We got Lily from Ben's brother, Joe, about 3 years ago. He owns Yarona (affectionately called Yoyo) who is the amazingly beautiful matriarch of a rather wonderful family of cats. I can't remember how many litters Yarona had before she was fixed but if I recall correctly, Lily's mother was in her first. Lily's mother was named Nosferatu but was always called Nossy. Unfortunately, she was dropped on her head as a kitten and ever after suffered from a very nervous disposition (and rightly so!). We also used to joke that it made her a little bit stupid too.

Lily's litter was born in spring of 2005. We were impressed with Lily right away because she seemed to be very adventurous and curious about everything. She was completely white except for a calico patch on the top of her head in somewhat of a flower shape. I thought the name Tiger Lily was very appropriate, but we ended up calling her Lily more often than not.

She was a very exuberant little kitten, exploring everything and just being a rather amusing little thing. She even decided to explore the fireplace in one of our apartments and after being scolded and bathed, she went right back in there to mess around again.

Somewhere along the line she suddenly became fiercely frightened of ceiling fans and would not enter a room when one was turned on. Heaven forbid we ever pick her up in said room, as we would always end up with large, bleeding scratches on our arms and sometimes our necks and backs as she scrambled to get away.

She seemed to have inherited her mother's nervousness and this continued on until the last moments we had her. This contributed to our decision to give her away because as annoying getting scratched was, we didn't want our children to suffer from such a temperamental attitude.

When I was pregnant with Audrey, we talked quite a lot about getting rid of one of the cats simply because the idea of 4 cats and a baby all under one roof was a little incomprehensible. We could never agree on what we should do about it and so it was left alone. Upon finding out that we were expecting again, Ben firmly stated that we needed to revisit the topic. We talked with a lot of people, trying to find out if anyone knew anyone that would take in a cat. We preferred to have her go straight into a home, rather than risk her getting put down at the pound. We couldn't find anyone who was willing or able.

Ben took Lily to the city pound yesterday afternoon. She seemed to know that something was up and yowled loudly as Ben took her carrier to the van. Ben, especially, felt terrible about it after he got home, fearing that he had sentenced his cat to death in the pound.

I think the most difficult thing about it all is even though we know that we did the right thing for our family, we can't help but feel that we have given her very poor chances of finding a good family and we can only hope at this point that she will touch someone's heart. If not, we can only hope that she understands on some level why we made this choice and forgives us.

Our picture-purrfect pretty girl.