After 12 years, we finally had to put him down this past week. I didn’t want to post about it at the time because who wants to hear that your cat has died? But since he moved out with us from Brooklyn (he was a shelter rescue from North Shore Animal League), most friends on both coasts met him at one point or another. He had an actively growing tumor for the last four or five months, and it wasn’t getting any better. We could have tried expensive, major surgery (removing half his rib cage might have helped, maybe) but we got to thinking about quality of life. He was still reasonably active, alert, and friendly around the house after the diagnosis, so we let it run its course.
Kat suggested we put him down this week while we’re still in a funk about her losing her job and everything–let’s get all the bad crap out of the way at once and rebound strong. And it wasn’t until this week that things really seemed to go south in terms of Nicky’s temperament and behavior, so I think we literally gave him as much time as we could. As we did with Bailey, I recorded his very distinctive purr on tape, so we have that. But what’s done is done, and it was right to do it. It was time.
We miss him but we had a great run–did I mention it was 12 happy years of not being a stray in New York?–and unlike when Bailey had to go, this time I was reasonably prepared. If anything, I found myself getting upset in the vet’s office from the Bailey flashbacks.
We’ve already been to shelters to see who’s waiting for a family. We’ve always been a two-cat household and Sadie needs a playmate–she’s just 2 and she’s super-active and always wanted to play even though Nicky was in no mood or shape to romp around.
We found a wild, super-aggressively-playful 5-month-old Maine Coon mix at the shelter in San Mateo, but he literally did nothing but tear around the room and attack anybody who attempted to pet him. We both liked him a lot and figured we might be the kind of family that would embrace the challenge, but we also thought that Sadie would be scared shitless, he would likely get downstairs and therefore out into the neighborhood, and he would never actually calm down enough to be a cool housecat who liked affection. So we’re still looking, with a preference toward a Himalayan, a ragdoll, or a Maine Coon. We likes us some lap cats.