InsaneJournal

Current location:	love seat
Current mood:	sad
Current music:	Casta Diva, from Norma

Tosca
Don't expect this to be coherent. I had to put Tosca to sleep today. She would have been 17 or 18--I've lost track--on October 31.

Tosca was a true Halloween cat, a black, orange and tan tortoise shell. She was a great mouser, had a mean temper, and generally liked to sleep on my head. Or at my feet. Or beside me on her side of the loveseat. Her side was the entire loveseat, but she let me share it with her, since I insisted. She was not a sweet little pussy cat. It was worth my life--or at least my left arm--to try to brush her, and forget giving her a bath that wasn't administered by professionals armed with drugs. Giving her pills, on the rare occasions when she needed them, was a tactical project that involved the entire family. She was never fooled by putting it into her food. She was supposed to be my daughter's kitten, a Christmas present when Sonja was six or seven. My best friend Naomi, who died this past January, met me on the train bringing Tosca home from my editor's house, because Naomi was spending Christmas with us. Upset by the long train ride and the car ride to the house, as soon as she got out of the cat carrier, she found a nice, warm, quiet place to curl up and observe--on my husband's ribs. Not his lap. His ribs. I let Sonja keep the new kitten in her bedroom that night, and of course they kept each other up all night. Tosca quickly decided that an active 6-or-7-year-old was not the person she wanted to sleep with, so the very next night, she pushed open the door to our room, and made herself comfortable on my right eye socket. Seriously. She curled up small enough to fit. Later, as she got too big to fit her whole self there, she would just rest her chin on it. Ultimately, this turned into her sleeping on my head, which she did for almost the rest of her life. Tosca's first ride in a cat-carrier featured an old red furry bathrobe of mine which I cut up to line the bottom of the carrier, to give her some place to nest. Her last one featured an old, soft wool sweater of mine, raspberry pink, which I'd just decided to discard, and thought she might find comforting in the bottom of her carrier. I don't know that she did. She made it really clear she didn't want to get into the carrier, neatly wriggling out of it the first time I thought I had her closed in. She was not pleased about the car ride, or the dogs in the waiting room. And, she apparently gave the vets a hard time when they tried to examine her. She was feisty to the end. Last night, as usual, she gave me hell until I gave her half my dinner, or, at least have of whatever meat/fish/poultry I was having for dinner. Last night was chicken, one of her favorites, next to Tuna, which she'd had the day before. I'm not sure why today I was struck with such urgency to get her to the Vet, but I was. And in some ways, that turned out to be a good thing. She had heart failure, and there really wasn't anything they could do that wasn't going to just prolong her suffering.

Knowing that she's not suffering does not make this any easier right now. It will, in time, I suppose, but right now, I'm just terribly, terribly sad.