The First Day of Summer

Today is the first day of summer we have had here in the Puget Sound region. I know it's not really even officially summer yet, but there is often a point some time in the spring where you have a day that is basically a summer day, and from that point forward I think of summer as having begun. If subsequent days return to more spring-like weather, I just think of it as a crappy summer, rather than a normal spring.

We were having a normal spring up through yesterday, which means rain and sun breaks, but mostly rain, and that was a shame because I had to have our cat Rosie put to sleep yesterday, and she very much would have enjoyed a few hours laying around in a warm puddle of sun before she had to go.

Rosie has been living at my parent's place in Port Hadlock since we moved aboard our boat last summer. Diagnosed with a chronic condition just as we were getting ready to move, we didn't feel right just giving her to someone else. But she had perked up quite a bit after we moved her there and didn't show any signs of moving on from her ninth and final life anytime soon.

We spent the winter with her while my folks were out traveling. She seemed to be normal, happy, and healthy, but toward the end of our stay she was sometimes forgetting to go outside to go to the bathroom, and she was sleeping a lot more than usual... pretty typical old cat behaviors.

After we left, though, she was eating less, forgetting to go outside more, and sleeping even more often. When we went back up last week for our haul-out in nearby Port Townsend, we were shocked at how skinny she had become. As long as someone remembered to put her outside in the morning and evening she would go to the bathroom out there; otherwise, she was hitting the living room carpet more often than not.

So it wasn't like there weren't signs that she was deteriorating, but she was so small that it doesn't take long for things to go downhill seriously if she hits a tipping point of some sort. After we sailed back to Seattle, she pretty much stopped eating and drinking entirely. She stopped sleeping in her favorite spots and instead camped out in a corner of the living room behind a potted plant. So, after a phone call from my mother not a week later, I drove back up on Friday to see her for myself and take care of the necessary arrangements.

We made an appointment to have someone come out and do it at home on Saturday, since she has always hated car rides and I wanted her to be in comfortable surroundings and not stressed out at the end, but once I saw her it seemed clear that wasn't going to be a factor. She was just listless and generally unaware of her surroundings, although she did purr a bit in the morning when I got there and petted her.

But she wasn't getting around well, even when she tried. When she showed some signs of interest in the water bowl, I put it right under her snout but after sniffing at it, she just lay down right there with her head on top of it. She wasn't feeling good, and I didn't want her to feel like that for another day.

Mandy kept urging me to take her outside and let her lay in the sun or play or just feel free, but it was really pretty crappy outside. It cleared up in the afternoon. In fact, it was miserable when we went into the vet, and sunny and clear when we came back out, which just seemed cruel.

She barely objected at the car ride. It was like she seemed to know that she shouldn't want to be in the car, but it turned out not to bother her once she was there. I just held her in her blanket on my lap. She meowed half-heartedly for a few seconds and then just lay there. The vet is only about two minutes away, so it wasn't much of a ride.

I was very pleased that the vet who was there happened to be a friend of my parent's, who had been at their house and knew Rosie, and she him. I think, though she was zoned out from pain meds that we gave her before we even left the house, that it helped that everyone in the room at the end were friendly people that she knew. She was a very sweet, sociable cat.

One of the assistants at the vet said that typically, calicos are the redheads of the feline world, very temperamental (I knew exactly what she meant!) but Rosie had, in the time that we had her, become very much a people cat. She liked people and they liked her. When we first brought her home from Spokane, we didn't see her for a week. She spent all her time under our bed or dresser. But gradually, she warmed up to us, and when our other cat, Hobbes (previously deceased), wasn't hogging all the attention, she would sit on us or with us wherever we happened to be.

She was also the better mouser of the pair, that being the ostensible purpose for introducing the cats to our house in the first place, quickly clearing it out. Later, she would get bored and from time to time catch a mouse or bird outside and bring it IN, which wasn't exactly what we had in mind. But she was well-behaved and good with adults and kids alike.

She loved finding a patch of sunshine and zoning out for her mid-day naps there. Which is why it is so hard, now, that this is the first day of summer. There are puddles of sunshine all over the place, but no Rosie. She was a good cat, and she deserved her sunshine. I wish I could have given her one last day of it. I don't know how her day would have been today, or her night last night, and there is some part of me woke up this morning relieved that she was not still out in her corner too weak to hold her head up. I'm glad to have spared her more of that. But I can't keep from looking around and thinking it would have been a little bit better for her if I could have found her some sun before having her put to sleep.

It would be poetic to say that I had buried her in a place with a nice patch of sunshine, but instead I picked a spot on the bluff near my parent's house (adjacent to, but not within, the previously established chicken graveyard) with a view out over the water, and some nice weeds to hide and play in. She loved to stalk. And for the past year, one of her favorite spots has been up on the back of a chair where she can look out over the bay. But there was not sunshine there, either. So I figured she would appreciate the view more. I hope so.

She was our friend.