What do you think about?
For the most part, even though I miss the guys that are gone, I don’t do too much second guessing or “what ifs?” I think the last time I spent a lot of time beating myself up over the death of a pet, it was with Holly. Why?
Because Holly was our fault. And since her loss, we do our very best to keep the cats out of harm’s way. After Holly, the cats were no longer allowed “free range” because it’s just too dangerous out there for them. When I was younger, twenty-five or more years ago, free range wasn’t so bad. But with time, come more people, more cars, just more danger overall for a cat. A cat, in an urban area, is no longer safe going free range.
Holly was the last of our cats who didn’t die because of some nasty disease.
I am angry about Wally. Because I know that if we’d been here, we would have caught the problem in time, before it became life threatening. The official diagnosis was “hepatic lipodosis due to pancreatitis”. Georgie had pancreatitis earlier this year. And antibiotics got him past it. He’s doing fine now. But without us here at home, Wally didn’t have a chance, not with the numbnut who was being paid a hundred dollars a day to take care of what we consider to be our most precious “possessions”. Someone who was so cavalier about the whole thing, dismissing with a wave of the hand “Oh, I didn’t even see the cats when I was here….”
This makes me angry.
But for the rest, with the exception of Hollywood, I know we did our best, that we couldn’t have taken better care of them. What happened to them was out of our hands. The realization that no amount of money would affect the outcome helps with the grieving. We have some good friends who lost a twenty year old cat earlier this fall. He had a good life, they were as okay as possible with his passing. But last week, one of the younger cats, fourteen, passed away. It was a shock to them because they hadn’t been aware that there was something major bad wrong with her. But cats have a way of hiding things from us, until it’s too late for us to do anything about it. If we have the financial resources available, we try to hold back the inevitable, but sadly, all too often, it’s just out of our control.
I know how they feel. They have my sympathy.
But, when a cat dies because it was allowed free range and it’s hit by a car or attacked by a dog, I feel so very sorry for the cat and not a little upset with the owner. Because it’s preventable. Hollywood’s death was preventable. But we learned from it. The other cats benefitted from her loss, as have cats all over. The fence.
Anyway, I didn’t really have a point here. I was just in a rambling mood. Maybe because I just read where someone’s cat had to be put down because he’d been hit by a car. After all the death from natural causes for so many peoples’ beloved cats, to read of something like that, well, it just really bothers me.
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