Kitty

I haven’t written about this yet as it has just been a bit too hard.  On Dec 20th I had to put my 15 year old cat down.

My sister got her for me from a farm.  Funny story actually, she had called to ask if I wanted a kitten.  She had a friend who had  kittens and was going to have to put them down if they could not find homes for them.  I was living on my own in a little apartment at the time so with some reluctance I said yes.  When she arrived there was no cat, they had already gotten rid of them all.  I, started to cry, who knew, I didn’t know I wanted a cat that badly but apparently I did.  So my sister found an ad in the paper for free kittens on got her for me, bless her heart.

So Kitty and I settled in to my apartment, just her and I.  I tried other names, for over a month I tried so think of something good, something creative, something suitable, something that would stick but after a month and the only name that I consistently used was Kitty, I gave in.  So she was Kitty.

She definitely was a one person cat and I was her person.  She made it very apparent that Ed was not welcome, and she really did not warm up to anyone.  But me she loved, she would come on my lap, reach her arms around my neck and start to purr.  She slept across my neck at night and followed me around the house and talked to me.  It was comforting. 

When the kids came she really took a back seat in our family.  And really she did pretty well with the kids.  Adam just ignored her and she him and they got along fine.  Isla on the other hand just wanted to love her, and she got bit a few times enough to make her a bit more cautious.  Kitty always gave you lots of warning of when she had had enough and Isla learned this and they got a long fine.  In the last few years they had even struck up a cautious friendship. 

This fall I really noticed that she had slowed down, she didn’t always come upstairs to bed, and she started to cough.  A weird cough that made me worry.  I knew I needed to take her to the vet but i suspected that I was not going to get good news so I waited. Isla would say to me every time she coughed that I really needed to take her to the vet.   But just before Christmas it was getting worse and I knew we were going away for Christmas and I did not want something to happen to her while we were away so I finally took her in.

It was much harder to say goodbye than I thought it would be.  It was so hard to come home without her.  The empty house was, well, empty and quiet.  She always waited for me outside the shower, not having her there was hard.

So I really just wanted to get a kitten to fill up my house again but I decided to wait.  We talked about it often with the kids.  Ed has always really wanted a dog and with Kitty that was not possible, she was just too ornery.  So this opened up that door too.  We kept saying not yet, it isn’t time yet.

Then,  today was adopt a cat weekend.  Yep, we went to the SPCA and guess what we are getting, not one but two cats!  I will introduce you tomorrow.  I can’t wipe the big grin off of my face!