For two or three years I have nursed my old cat Grizzy through bladder stones, diabetes onset, loss of hair, skin disease, partial blindness, and Cushings Disease. I dosed and treated her through many infections and illnesses.
She was so patient and cooperative through it all, and she even got used to my bathing her, as she hunkered down to enjoy the warm water in my kitchen sink.
While she was not well, I always wanted her to be comfortable.
I knew she was beginning to suffer, and the time was coming to put an end to that suffering before it got worse.
I felt her veterinarian, Alice Lewis at Lewis Animal Hospital, loved Grizzy as much as I did, in spite of Grizzy’s health issues and her scraggly, hairless appearance.
We decided that I would take her in this morning for euthanasia.
I had tried to pamper and treat Grizzy to queenly care and cushions for a long time. I was beginning to have to clean up after her more frequently. I didn’t mind. I was happy to take care of her.
Yesterday, her last day at home with me, I fed her extra amounts of her favorite canned food, gave her last insulin shots, but held off squirting the sticky pink antibiotic into her mouth. She never liked it.
She visited me in my bedroom last night but did not stretch her arthritic limbs to pull herself onto the bed with the several other cats who had claimed their usual sleep lairs beside my pillow, and next to me. I lifted her onto my bed. I slept a deep sleep and dreamed of bathing dear little Grizzy. It was a pleasant dream.
This morning, I dressed her in the little purple fleece vest since the weather was supposed to be cooler.
When it was time to go, I placed her on a soft pillow on the car’s passenger seat, giving her the rare treat of not being cooped into a carrier. She rode, watching me and enjoying the warming sun coming into the car.
I met Alice at her office and she quietly and kindly went through the procedure of sedating, then injecting the final pentobarbital that would painlessly shut down my kitty’s systems. We talked about Grizzy’s good days and how she had beaten the odds at various intervals in her 15 years of life.
On my ride back home, the little bundle wrapped in plastic lay beside me,
Yesterday, a friend had helped to dig the grave for Grizzy. The shovel was still there in my garden cemetery near the stone-marked spot where I had previously buried another beloved kitty.
I picked up the shovel and enlarged the newly dug hole a bit, then placed my old friend gently into the ground. I patted her, then I covered her with the red clay dirt. -Pelham Lyles