dark days

I'm on a bit of a countdown. I'm going to hit the two month mark on the 15th of this month. I said a final goodbye to my Bird - grey cat par excellence - in the early evening of October 15th and I can't even start to write about it without crying. Even now, with nearly two months gone.

Now Bird had a heart murmur - he was diagnosed about 4 years ago and even though the vet said that it was something we just had to monitor and it was pretty typical for boy-cats I knew that this was what was going to get him in the end. We'd seen it with Gumpy - my mother's cat - where there would be a sudden decline as the heart went into failure and then you'd just have to say goodbye. But Birdy was such a big presence that it never really sunk in. I was distressed but it didn't linger because the Bird had decided it was time to go home and lie on the couch - so we did.

The Bird was a big believer in the couch as a place to be. When we lived on Sorauren, just the two of us, there was the side of the couch that was mine and the side that was his. Occasionally, he would come and sit on my lap but mostly he was very convivial and curled up beside me, gently snoring.

When we moved to Dovercourt, that specific couch had to go live at my parent's house as it wouldn't fit up the very narrow staircase. In it's place we got a futon - which didn't divide as neatly in two as the previous couch. So Bird decided that if I was going to lie on the couch he was going to lie on me. We spent many a weekend morning that way - me watching television and very carefully drinking tea and him with his head tucked up under my chin snoozing. Even the advent of the terrible orange kitten didn't change that.

With this last move, the old couch returned due to wider doorways but there were more cats and more people so we didn't fall back into the my side/his side pattern of before. And there were fewer mornings with just the two of us watching tv and drinking tea. But he was happy. He had a whole new set of people and cats to rule over and the occasional different lap.

It all started to go downhill when he woke me up one morning at about 6, panting heavily and generally miserable. He was like that when I got up for real at 8 too. So we popped him in the car and took him to the vet. After a week of being sick to my stomach and daily phone calls from the vet we finally had a concrete diagnosis. He was in heart failure. And while we couldn't fix that we could get set him up with heart meds and a special diet and see where that went.

Sadly, where it went was kidney failure and a week after we'd had him home he stopped eating and we had to take him back to the vet where it became clear that we really had very few options.

So my mom took me up and we said goodbye. And now, nearly two months later I still can't stop crying and it hasn't really sunk in. So there we are.

Dark days indeed.