“Not the least hard thing to bear when they go away from us, these quiet friends, is that they carry away with them so many years of our own lives.” — John Galsworthy
About six years ago, a fluffy gray cat showed up on our doorstop one day. She hung out for a bit, perplexing our black cat, Theo, and wandered away. A few days later, she showed up again, and we took her some food and water. After that, she was a daily presence until our kids begged us to let her in the house. She looked like a cat that knew people and that had been loved, so we took her in and set about finding her family. We named her Olive.
My wife took some pictures and loosed the Facebook community in search of Olive's owner. In short order, a young woman named Heather reached out, thrilled to have found her kitty. Turns out the cat's name was actually Sage, and she was living with Heather's parents, who turned her out most of the time.
Our kids (14 and 12 at the time) were sad to see Olive/Sage go, but Theo was most decidedly fine with it.
A few days later, Heather reached out and told my wife that she wasn't able to find a living situation that enabled her to keep Sage. She told us we seemed like nice people who loved animals, and asked if we would like to keep her on a permanent basis. As soon as the girls were made aware of the offer, the decision really wasn't hard.
And so we were a two cat family again for the first time since the previous December when our 20 year-old Mo passed on.
Sage was at once the dumbest, clumsiest, food-motivated, and people-loving cat we've ever owned. Her purr motor was exceptional, and easily revved. If people were around, she was around. She nuzzled, and flopped, and licked and loved. She immediately established herself as the alpha to Theo's perpetual beta, and a few years later when we got a dog, she told that puppy who was in charge, as well.
She went deaf a few years ago, which didn't slow her down. Several months ago, she started behaving a bit erratically in ways amusing and disgusting. To wit, she decided for a while that my office was a good place to piss. Have you ever smelled dried cat piss sprayed into a heating/cooling vent? I don't recommend it.
We took her to the vet, who recommended we add another litter box to the main level of the house. So my office went from smelling like raw cat piss to cat piss and shit mixed with litter. Honestly, it was an improvement.
Then, over the past several weeks, she declined rapidly. Her back legs started giving way, her once-prodigious appetite diminished to barely nothing, and she took to hiding away for much of the day.
That purr motor though, it remained robust.
Finally, yesterday evening, we took her to the vet, a kind, gentle man. He examined her and told us that she'd lost a great deal of muscle tone, was extremely dehydrated, and that he could feel an egg-sized mass near her bladder. Based on the clinical findings, he assumed it was cancer.
And so we made the decision that was at once the right thing to do and utterly heartbreaking.
I'll be damned if that little cat didn't keep purring while the doctor first injected a solution that rendered her unconscious and then another that stopped her heart.
We only got a little more than six years with Sage, but she filled them with a waddling, friendly cat-bravado. Pets' lives are inevitable shorter than we hope, and their deaths always sooner than we want, but they stir something in you that brings a daily joy that makes it somehow worth the pain.
Godspeed, Sagey, you wonderful oaf of a cat. You were a real one.
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