Twenty years is a long life for a feline.
But that doesn’t mean that twenty years feels like enough, or that “goodbye” at the end of twenty years feels anything like okay. So it is with sorrow and surprise that we bid farewell to one of Tabby’s Place’s beloved elder statescats, the extraordinary Nickey.
Occasionally, a well-meaning person-who-hasn’t-really-known-a-cat will ask, “do cats really notice when somebody dies?”
I am convinced that cats mourn as deeply, and in nearly as many different ways, as we do. Some bounce back from change and loss fairly quickly, while others react in quiet ways we can recognize if we only pay attention. But, for some cats, the loss of a friend brings a deep and soul-wrenching, world-shaking grief after which nothing can ever be the same.
So it was for Webster.
You know how it goes.
You’ve spent hours working on a 5,000-piece picture puzzle, painstakingly matching up colors and patterns and shapes until a beautiful portrait comes together. About 4,950 pieces in, you’re on a roll and know it’s a shoo-in that you’ll finish it now. But just as you’re ready to pop in that last triumphant piece…where is that last piece? It’s just one stupid little piece of cardboard, but without it, the whole thing is woefully, all-too-obviously incomplete.
And so it was with our own Puzzle.
It’s almost as true as the law of gravity.
Mention anything about a cat having issues with her bowels or colon, and 99% of adopters will flee in terror. Add the words inflammatory or mega to those bowel/colon conondrums, and you lose most of your last 1%.
Most, but not all. Besides, a cat doesn’t need 1% of adopters…she just needs the right one.
There’s a certain wall you need to build when you love as many cats as we do at Tabby’s Place.
It can’t keep you from loving them, and it doesn’t keep your heart from breaking a thousand times when they leave you. It’s good for just one, very necessary thing: keeping you from adopting them all.
But, however well-built your wall may be, sometimes one of them still gets through.
You are currently browsing the Felis Catus blog archives for November, 2009.
(6)
(26)
(251)
