The cats among us

 Today was a hard day:  Toby has been getting thinner and weaker, day by day.  I turned the dining room into a place for him, box near the stove,  litter box,  everything.  For the first time in 11 years he let me  pat him,  even to the point of purring.  All winter he slept by the woodstove in his own cardboard box and fluffy blanket.  

Then he started getting weaker and thinner,  and yesterday was the first day I had been able to pick him up, in eleven years.  And today we went to the vet where they gently put him to sleep.  We buried him out in the garden.  

But when I came in and went looking for Charlie,  I found him viewing me with a huge amount of distrust and serious anger.  He'd have nothing to do with me.  I had taken away his only friend, his bonded buddy.  Right now he's hiding somewhere, he'll have nothing to do with any humans.  

Charlie is one of those cats who seems to have one paw in the human world.  It's eerie.  When I came  home some years back from a kidney operation,  that first night I spent on the recliner, because adhesions.  I looked down to see Charlie marching toward me, (he loves sleeping with his human in the recliner) and I thought, oh no...he generally does the cat ballet, washing all of him and part of me, doing that kick-kick-kick thing that they do, just to get comfy.  At least twice.  But this time he just sat, and inspected the human,  and gently climbed up onto a spot just above my knees,  and slept there for six solid hours.  He knew something was different.  He is bloody psychic.  

And I realized that this was his buddy, his bath buddy, the cat that loved to be groomed, and they would curl up with each other.  In his own way, he's grieving.  I grieve with him.

sometimes all it takes is a definite push

 We have had Toby 11 years,  Charlie about ten, give or take.  For most of those 11 years Toby has been the equivalent of a  RoadRunner cartoon, leaving a wake of fear behind him as he vaults out of any room you enter.  This past winter I realized he was not doing well,  and down to a skeleton with fur.  

I wanted to get him to the vet, but he wasn't having any of THAT nonsense, nossir.  So I did the next best thing;  if I couldn't get him to the vet, I could at least make him comfortable.  Big carton with fluffy pillow, right up by the woodstove.  He liked that.  litter box in the corner of the same room.  he approved.  A new kind of food, one of those two flavor crunch and chew things.  He liked that, too.  Over the winter he  progressed from terror to startled exits when I approached the stove.  Then he just Watched Me carefully as I levered wood into it.  Heat=Human with Wood.  Must rethink.   Then he started napping through the entire process, and now and then I could reach down and scratch his ears.   muffled purring.  

Aha, I thought.  

His only reaction now is still toward the sound of the poker.  He leaves.  I  understand now just why he was the way he was.  If I could find the person who hit that cat for any reason...  

And the past few weeks, when I come down in the morning, he actually trots into the kitchen, tail high,  purring.  He spent most of yesterday on the dining room table, on a chair cushion,  not a foot from where I was working.   I don't know how long he has left,  but he's eating, he seems comfortable, and he's getting the attention he never knew he needed.  

I guess that's all anyone can hope for.