Preparing to let go

Daisy is sleeping peacefully at the moment, pretzeled around my legs on top of the covers.  She's been dreaming; I've been trying to nap after we've both had a hard night.  She didn't seem to be eating well a few days ago, and I canceled a night away from home because she didn't seem herself.  But she rallied and then I was on the road again, and yesterday returned home to a very sick kitty.

But such a good kitty.  Together for nearly seven years now, she's helped me through some of the hardest decisions of my life, through some of the biggest challenges, and through some of the very best times.  She was a shelter kitten, found with her litter in a cardboard box at Lake Darling.  Discarded, but then rescued, she helped me come home to a lonely house, giving me hope and companionship.  She'd wait for me in the window; her silhouette reassuring in the quiet of dark nights.  Since she was a midwestern girl too, she comforted me after particularly hard days of being the odd-woman-out in this often bewildering, sometimes unforgiving place.  We were comrades, buddies, girls with derring-do.  We fit.

I wanted to take her on adventures.  I wanted her to share in the good times; I wanted her to know how much she helped me turn my life around.  But she seemed happy to play with her Design Ranch string (Iowa Citians will know what I mean), her fishing pole feather, her stuffed catnip mouse, the water in her bubbler (she dismantled the first one as a kitten), the water in the shower (she pulled up the drain to get to more).  She even worked out with me:  being particularly helpful with ab work, climbing on my tummy adding extra weight; and making tricep work a bit of an obstacle course, lest I conk her in the head with the dumbbells.  Wary of men at first (except Monte whom she loved immediately) she enjoyed having people over, warming eventually to everyone.  Usually in the middle of dinner, we'd find her near the foot of one of our guests, on her back all four white paws up in the air vibrating in synch with her purrs.

On that first trip home from the shelter, we both learned she was not a traveler.  And she's proven herself to be so spectacularly not a traveler, the vet advised me to stop driving her the hour to the office, even for vaccinations and ordinary care.  So I knew we'd have this day eventually...the day she'd be too sick to not take to the vet, but possibly too sick to survive the drive there.  That she is not drinking tells me this is serious.  So I'm trying to keep her comfortable as long as I can, waiting for the vet to call. Perhaps we can try tomorrow.