Friday Cat Blogging

I've avoided this blogger trend until today. Jody and I are cat people, but we're not crazy "cat people." Really.

But yesterday we had to put Lucy to "sleep." It was the hardest thing Jody or I have had to do as a couple, and one of the saddest days I hope to see for a long time.

Lucy was about 14 or so. I got her from my friend Mike shortly after I had moved out from a 3-year relationship, and Mike had re-married to a woman who made him keep the cats in the basement. Mike and the little-sister-I-never-wanted, Jill, got Lucy when they were living in Pasadena next door to a woman who had abandoned her in a locked house for a week or so. She grew up rather suspicious -- and seemingly contemptuous -- of people. She became a claw-first-and-ask-questions-later kind of kitty. Somehow she found a kindred spirit in me, and I was the only one she would allow to pet her at Mike and Jill's. Mike and Jill always sensed that Lucy and I deserved each other, and to my everlasting debt, Mike delivered her to me about a decade ago, shortly after he and Jill had both re-coupled.

We had a quiet co-existence for a number of years together, punctuated by the occasional slashed forearm (usually an unsuspecting visitor) or bisected vermin (what she thought I would do with half-a-baby-possum, I don't know, but it's the thought that counts).

Then she moved in. Jody and Lucy had a rather amusing power struggle over who could take up more room on the bed (Lucy, suprisingly) and who, in general, was going to be low-cat-on-the totem pole in our little household (I'll leave Jody to address the winner there in her own blog entry....) In the end, like an after-school-special, we were all winners, as we grew to be a happy little nuclear family.

Lucy gradually inched closer to normal-cathood, and had mostly stopped clawing friends and acquaintances. She seemed to be a pretty happy cat until Monday this week, when she threw up a few gallons in our bed, and then was dehydrated for a day or so. We took her to her vet, and she got some IV liquids, and seemed ok, but then had a seizure on Wednesday. We took her to the animal hospital, and $2k and a bunch of vague diagnoses later, it looked like she was just in a lot of misery and not likely to get better. She probably had liver cancer which had spread to her stomach and brain.

Lucy was a great cat who is in a better place now. And by "great" I mean "ornery" and by "better place" I mean the cold storage facility at the cat hospital, while Jody and I debate various taxidermy options.

There's an enormous kitty-sized hole inside both Jody and I today, and we will miss Lucy the rest of our days.