I wrote this yesterday.

It's not easy at all to get something like this out. You think you have the words to put down, but everytime you get down to it they slip out of your grasp.

Tomorrow me and my family are going to visit our cat one last time before we put him down. He lived a good long life at 14, though I'd always hoped he'd die of old age. We found him in 1990, a stray cat that was just slower than the rest of his kin. In hindsight, it probably wasn't the nicest thing to do but heck, it was my parents who caught him, not me.

Me and my siblings are 4-8, and in all our infinite and vast imaginations, we named him Kitty. It wasn't the most creative name, but it was the first time we actually had a cat. When he first came to join our family, he was a snarling spitfire of a cat, who spent most of the time skulking outside the apartment rather than inside. He warmed up to us soon after though, but he wouldn't hesitate to retaliate if you did him wrong.

We moved soon after to a house in a more suburban area, with a nice garden my mother could plant her flowers in. Kitty fancied himself as the guardian of our house, and used to sit on the porch every night and pick fights with the other cats in the neighbourhood. We often came downstairs in the morning to find a few wounds on him, and we'd try to shut him in the house for the night, but he always made it outside. He broke his leg in a car accident once, but being a tough bastard he made it through.

As he got older, we got another cat, Sandy, who appeared up in the rafters one day and didn't know how to come down. This was in 1998 or 1999 or so. She didn't seem to mind staying with us, but Kitty took every opportunity to be as mean as he could to her, and hissed often. He was the man of the house, and he knew it.

Even though he was tough, he was affectionate to those who loved him. Once, my dad screamed the hell out of me for getting bad grades, and Kitty curled up beside me while I slept. When my dad tried to pet him later that day, he hissed and snarled at him. I didn't know a thing though, until my parents told me.

It was recently that Kitty showed signs of getting old. He'd gotten a bad skin/fur condition and ran away to hide and die in solitude that cats seem to do. We found him, and tried to carry him home but kept struggling. After a visit to the vet, he was back to normal a few days later. He started getting slower, and less agile than before. He'd have difficulty scaling the sofa, or any height, and would climb onto it more than jump. He used to climb onto me while I was playing PS2 lying down, and settle on my stomach or my chest while I played. It didn't matter if I stroked him, or not, he purred loudly just being around.

A few days ago, he disappeared again overnight. I went out to look for him the next day, and found him in the afternoon, huddled under a drain. It took a while, but we eventually got him out, but not without some loud, plaintive, almost aggressive meowing, as if we'd robbed him of the death in solitude that he wanted. We took him back to the house and cleaned him again, because he stank. Badly. We noticed he'd lost a lot of weight, and we could feel his spine and other bones jutting out. Which we found really, really odd. Still, he ate a little and slept a lot over the next couple of days. He also had excessive saliva production, which I thought was down to him getting old.

We took him to the vet yesterday, to see if there was anything wrong with him. Before we left in the car though, he managed to piss all over my mother who was cradling him in her arms. After putting him in a cage, we set off again. My dad remarked, "Well, at least his kidneys are working."

As the vet examined our cat, she remarked with dismay that he was quite dehydrated, and that she could feel something in his belly, and that he'd have to be warded to be diagnosed, with an X-ray, and blood tests, and all that stuff. We were told it might be kidney failure, and if it was so, there was nothing much that they could do. They promised to call with the results later that night, and they did.

It was indeed kidney failure. Not only that, but he'd somehow gotten a hernia too. The decision was made, and it was thought that it was better to put him down than let him suffer. I asked if we were going to cremate him, so that we'd have something of him to remember him by, but my parents wanted to bury him as he'd always loved the outdoors. It was fitting, and maybe that is what he'd always have wanted, to stand watch over the house as he'd done for well over a decade.

24/7/2004

I just came back from the vet, and it was tough to see Kitty on a drip, with a cone around his neck. Me and my family stayed to say our goodbyes, and we stroked him, petted him and tried to comfort him in the minutes leading up to when we had to put him to sleep. He still purred, though he didn't meow in the whole time we were there, like he understood what was going to happen.

In the end only my mother and I stuck around for the act. The vet took a syringe of green liquid, and laid a cloth on the table. We were told beforehand that when they go, they might literally let go of everything in their bladder, or regurgitate whatever they had in their stomachs. Thankfully nothing like that happened, and he died very peacefully. Crying, tears rolling down my face, I stroked his head as his eyes slowly half-closed, and then he was no more.

We buried him in the front garden, with a fish and a bag of cat food that he'd never go hungry, as we said our goodbyes.

R.I.P, Kitty. You were loved. I'll miss you so much. Thanks for the companionship. I'll never have a cat like you again.