good bye big cat

The big anxious tabby died this afternoon.  He'd become old and thin in recent months, the way elderly cats do, and struggled to keep his fur knot free, while refusing to let us do it for him, but he seemed happy enough.  He spent a lot of his time dozing in front of the Aga, but as recently as Sunday afternoon he went for a potter about the garden, and he ate some breakfast this morning, though his feet were swollen and I knew the end wasn't far off.  By lunchtime he was looking distressed, and we both knew that the time had come to ring the vet.  I was hoping they could make a house visit, to save the cat the final trip in the cat basket, but we'd missed the chance of a house call today, and I had to make an appointment at the surgery.  They promised us we could wait in the nurse's room and not the public waiting room with all the strange people and the dogs, but half an hour before we'd have had to leave the house, the cat died.

There was just enough time before it got dark to bury him, shrouded in an old pillow case, a good eighteen inches down under the lawn by the rose bank, with a slab on his grave to help discourage foxes from digging him up.  Neither of us are particularly fussed about graves, but if you are going to have one it should be decent.

I am glad he was able to spend his last hour quietly in the house where he felt safe, and not in a cat basket sitting in rush hour traffic, then the vet's surgery.  He was fifteen and a half, a good age for a Maine Coon.  He was a lovely cat, and we shall miss him, probably more poignantly in a few weeks and months time as the immediate impression of his rather draggled state in his last days fades, and we remember him as he was in his pomp, when he weighed a full stone, could stand on his hind legs and rest his chin comfortably on the dining table, and used to follow me around the house like a dog.  And that is really all I want to say on the subject at the moment.