Thank you all for your kind words yesterday. I feel a little better this morning, a little more accepting. Still hurting, though. I miss her. But I realize that I miss the healthy Lucy. The one who would plant her butt firmly on my keyboard when I was in the middle of typing an email or a LJ entry. The one who would stick her nose all the way into my mouth until she was satisfied that she learned what I had for dinner. The one who would wake me up at 2am because she had decided to pull my hair for whatever reason. The Little Lucy who wanted to get pet and darn it, she was GOING to get pet no matter what I was doing that I thought was so important.

I have never lost a major pet before. I always had fish and hamsters, and although I was sad that they left, it wasn’t like this. I had a dog in high school. Darby the Dog. He ran away while I was away at school, and although deep down I know that he probably didn’t survive, I like to believe that someone saw how awesome he was and took him in.

Lucy hadn’t been doing well ever since she moved here. At first, I thought it was stress from the move, that she needed a bit of space and would come out when she was ready; that was how she’d done big changes in the past. But this time she never really bounced back. Instead, she started eating less and less, drinking less and less, and then she wasn’t eating or drinking at all. She was always a little cat, but she was down to 4.5 pounds. She could barely walk without collapsing. Her liver had basically shut down, and she was dehydrated. It would have taken a week in the hospital to MAYBE get her better, and there is no way she could have handled that. She was always a delicate little thing, nervous and skittish. Even if it was just the two of us, any sudden movement would send her running to hide under the bed or behind the toilet. The stay in the hospital would have been far too traumatic for her. The vet said that given how sick she was, this was something that had going on for a while, and the stress from the move might have helped trigger it.

I’m slowly coming to terms with having made the decision to put her down yesterday. It was one of the hardest choices I’ve ever made. But when I held her in that office for one last time, and she was looking away, I knew that she had already said good-bye.

I feel so many things right now. Heartbreak, grief, emptiness, guilt. I knew that one day I would lose her, but I honestly expected at least six more years with her. To have her gone so suddenly is a shock.

I miss my little Lucy.

(Originally published at Anywhere Is…)

In Loving Memory….
Little Lucy
August 2001 – May 2008

(Originally published at Anywhere Is…)