Our first cat, Munro, was euthanized today, and I'm so incredibly sad. We named her Munro after a trip through Scotland in 1998 where we hiked up one of the many small mountains which are called "Munros" after a guy that surveyed them all.
A stray kitten we picked up at the shelter, we had her for almost 13 years. We picked the name before the cat, and figured it still suited her just fine, regardless of her gender. Just lately she'd suddenly developed some breathing problems and they quickly worsened over a period of days. The diagnosis was finally cancer and we put her to sleep at the vets today.
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| A June 2011 pic of our Munro |
Just a pet I keep telling myself, but everything here reminds me of her and the time we spent together. It's remembering the silly little things that hurts now - opening the blinds together in the morning, her climbing into the sink to curl up when you went into the bathroom. Her love of brushing her cheeks on the plastic nail brush, her adept leap up into the silly cat hammock thing I built for her.
I can rationalize all I like, it's just a cat, and how many never have the comfortable happy home life that she had? In some ways though, it's worse than losing a human. A person can understand that something is happening and what the causes are, regardless of how unfair. For a pet there's no explaining, no preparation for the end, just the stressful car ride to the vet.
She loved cardboard, so we made a perfect little cardboard box for her and buried her ashes with some silly things she loved - an old facecloth and a piece of string - under a bit of the garden in the back yard. As we said goodbye, we had glass of our best single malt Scotch and toasted her. Our own little ritual burial goods and ceremony.
A little purring bit of fluff and a little chunk of our lives are gone. Yet, it punches a hole in my heart like through a flimsy cardboard box in which she would have loved to curl up.
