Loss

Our cat, Sasha, got hit by a car last night at about 9:30. Dh heard it happen; I was upstairs reading to Josie, and Patrick was already in his room for the night, playing his ds before going to sleep. He dealt with moving her from the road into a box in the garage before coming upstairs carrying her collar to tell us. I still can hardly believe it. Her bowls are sitting in their places on the radiator, her kitty tower is waiting to be perched on near the door. Her brush still has her fur in it. How can this be? My sweet kitty, who purred constantly, even when I was trimming her nails, and who put up with all manner of indignities from young children and dogs? Who made us laugh every day, climbed up to listen to Josie play the piano, and slept under the blankets with her every night? How can she never be coming back?

An hour or so after that happened, we realized that Baci was bleeding on Josie's bed. The dogs had gotten out of the yard earlier in the day, and we thought he had had an altercation with the dog who snapped at him before down the road; we now think what actually happened was that he somehow fell onto their tiny metal garden border fence, which is about 12in high and has pointy tops. There's a puncture wound on his side about the size and depth of my pinkie finger to the first joint. So, 90min after our cat was killed, I was off to the ER vet with Baci. He hadn't been bleeding earlier; his fur, which is really thick, just looked a little roughed up like last time and he carried on like usual, so we hadn't noticed anything, but once he jumped in and out of the car on the vet trip, it started to really bleed. The poor thing was ready to come home an hour later, completely doped and disoriented on morphine, and still with an open wound, since you can't close a puncture. When we got home, he practically fell out of the car, and once in the yard he seemed to not know where he was or even, for a moment, who I was. It took me a few minutes of quiet talking to get him to let me take his collar and guide him into the house, where he just melted to the floor about five feet inside the door. I let him lay there for awhile, and then we moved his dog bed into the living room and coaxed him onto it. I "slept" on the couch last night next to him, where I assume I will be sleeping for the next week since he's not supposed to go upstairs and I don't want to leave him alone with himself.

Delilah is completely freaked out. She knows things are all wrong around here, and can smell the blood on Baci. Sigh. It's like he's walking around with an open bullet wound.

The kids are OK. They both cried pretty hard last night, and that was pretty much it for them. Kids are amazing. DH and I aren't so great. I am a mess, actually. I was doing OK until I had to bring Sasha's body to the vet for cremation, and the new woman there was completely insensitive and cold. I've never seen her before, and hope I never do again. She acted like I was making a dog chow delivery rather than bringing our poor sweet kitty meow in in a box. *That* totally made me lose my stuffing for the next hour. I hated having to leave her there, and even more with that awful woman. I don't care that it's Memorial Day weekend, and she didn't want to be at work. I care that a member of my family died, and she was asking me questions like a telemarketer. "Name? First name? Are you a patient here? You're not in the computer. Oh, yeah, sorry, I spelled your name wrong. $35. Sign here." Bitch. You're in the wroooong line of work.

We will, of course, recover. We've already talked about adopting another cat in a few weeks when we're all ready, Baci is healed, and school is out. It's not that I'm tossing Sasha's memory aside, but rather that we love her so much, and loved having her in our lives, that now there's a huge awful sad space, and the only thing that is making me feel at all better is the idea that maybe we can have something happy to look forward to instead of this emptiness.

We will never find another cat who has your appreciation for fine music.