Goodbye, Buddy.

We are sad to report that Hubbard, aka the Big Acoustic Kitty, left us on Thursday afternoon. He was with us for almost 12 and a half years, and while we know that all kitties are irreplaceable, Hubb was even more 1-of-a-kind than most.

His ongoing battles with age and disease have been documented here, but in recent weeks his decline became more rapid, and it was obvious that any further medications or treatments might prolong his life, but they would do nothing to improve its quality. So last weekend we made the decision to do him the final kindness of letting him go before his condition could get any worse. We took a few days to pamper him and say our goodbyes before taking him to the vet one last time.

We discussed calling Dr. Anne (the vet who helped us when Ziggy died) for an in-home euthanasia again, but in the end we took him in to our regular vet. While he had become weaker and more confused lately, there was still some fight in him, and we worried that Dr. Anne might need more help in handling him than we would be capable of providing under the circumstances. Our vet and her techs were used to Mr. Boo and his moods, so as much as we would have liked to let him go at home, we decided that taking him to the vet was best.

Please keep us in your thoughts as we adjust to the loss of our eldest boy. He was such a special friend and companion for so many years and through so many changes in our lives that the hole he has left behind is immense. We are focusing on remembering him as he was ... cranky, feisty, demanding, handsome, curious and quietly, steadily loving. We wish him a heaven filled with sunbeams, queso dip, potato chips, catnip mice and many, many noserubs.

The Amazing Husbandini will be working on some posts about our boy over on his blog, and for now I'm going to leave that to him. I'm still working my way through all of the emotions, and it feels like there is quite a way to go before I can get to the "sharing memories" stage of things. Hubbard's care had taken up more and more time and energy as he got older, and while I don't begrudge him one single minute, without him around to care for I suddenly have this huge hole in my life. There is a lot of numbness that has yet to wear off.

But in the meantime, I'd like to share a few of my favorite photos of Hubbard through the years. He was an extremely photogenic kitty. Please enjoy.

Bracing Ourselves

It's a long story, and one I'm not really up to going into right now. Suffice it to say that Big Acoustic Kitty is in the hospital overnight for dangerously low blood sugar, and we have a feeling that we may be looking at the end of our time with him.


Prayers and/or good wishes for him would be appreciated, but please just help us ask for whatever is best for him. He's somewhere between 14 and 16-ish (it's usually a guessing game with shelter kitties) and he's had a terrific life for the 11+ years we've had him in our family. We don't want to let him go (does any animal-lover ever want that?), but we really don't want him to be scared or uncomfortable. Our prayers are that he just not suffer. If that means getting better and coming home, wonderful. If that means that he doesn't come home, or doesn't come home for very long, so be it.

Every time I drive past the emergency vet where we took Ziggy (not the same vet that BAK is tonight) I ask that everyone in there that day have nothing but "good news and happy endings". I have no way of knowing for sure, but I feel like somebody somewhere hears that prayer and does something about it. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but I have that same feeling about my current prayers for Mr. Boo. I feel like somebody's listening, and will make sure that the best happens for him. Even if the "best" happens to break our hearts.

Peace be to all the kitties out there, as well as their people. (And the doggies, birds, bunnies, hamsters ... you get the idea.) Give your fur babies a hug for us, and let them know you love them a lot.

Two Months

We lost Ziggy two months ago today. Some days I can putter along just fine, and some days I just cry all over the kitties. I won't go into a lot of detail, but it's become pretty obvious that all the emotions that had to be set aside for a while in order to get through the move and everything else that has gone on recently are now coming to the surface and need to be dealt with. It's not pretty, but in an odd way it does feel better to finally get them out.

The Electric Mayhem goes in this week for her second FIV/FeLV test. We're pretty confident that she will come up clean again, though we're still keeping our fingers crossed. At that point, we will have to decide whether to adopt again. Even in those last few days we had with Ziggy, we started to talk about adopting another cat, or even a pair of them. After he was gone, and there was such a huge void in our household, we knew that we would adopt again if the follow-up FIV tests would let us. The talk about adopting has been pretty regular over the past two months. So it's not a matter of "if" but of "when". But as the time has drawn closer, I've been feeling more and more uncertain about the whole idea of looking for another cat. This uncertainty is tied directly into where I am in the whole grief process. I won't spell out and dissect just where I am on the Kubler-Ross model (how do you do an umlaut in HTML?), but suffice it to say that I finally realized that my hesitancy to adopt is strictly emotional.

There are plenty of good reasons for us TO adopt: Ziggy was a wonderful, friendly boy who just wanted to be happy and for everyone else to be happy. He would be completely in favor of us adopting again. There are a lot of kitties out there who need homes, and we have plenty of room to take one or two of them in. The Electric Mayhem needs a companion to keep her busy. (Or maybe a minion.) The Amazing Husbandini and I are "cat people" - loving kitties is what we DO.

I've looked online at some of the cats available in our area, and I find that I'm most drawn to big grey/tabby boys - and I don't know if that's a sign that it's not time yet, or if it's just a good sign that I'm drawn to any of them at all. (In my defense, I've always had a huge soft spot for tabbies.) The last thing I want to do is to go into the process looking for Ziggy. I would give a lot to somehow have him come back to us, but I don't want to replace him. That would be unfair to us, and it would certainly be unfair to any potential adoptee kitty.

The Amazing Husbandini (super wonderful intelligent man that he is) has suggested just going to the shelter with no plans to adopt and just seeing how it feels. Not even go in and see if any of the cats "speak" to us, but just go and see how it feels to be in the shelter. That's probably an excellent first step. In my head, I have this image of the shelter where we adopted Ziggy - but the shelter is empty, and all I can see is the absence of Ziggy. Intellectually I know that's not how it will be - the shelter will be full of cats (it's a cage-free facility, though they do have several "cat rooms" along each side of the main space) and people and noise, and there will be a lot to focus on beside the fact that the last time we were there, we were adopting Ziggy.

Well, anyway. As you can tell from the quality of the writing today, I'm going through the messy part of all these emotions. Aside from the vet appointment later this week, I also have a trip coming up later this month to visit the parentals. So there's nothing that needs to be done until the end of the month. We're very tentatively looking at Halloween weekend for our first visit to the shelter. That's three-plus weeks away, which will be even more time to work through all these emotions. We'll see what happens.

(And I'm not discounting the possibility that I might come back from my trip with some new additions. My parents haven't adopted since we lost The 'Tude a few years back, though my mother would really like to. If the local shelters play their cards right, I might find myself hauling some Nebraska kitties back to Colorado with me. It is so very within the realm of possibility.)

Moving

I'm finding myself worrying about leaving Ziggy behind. I can see and feel him so clearly in every part of this house, and I worry about losing that when we're in the new one. Because of this, a few items originally destined for the charity pile have been reclaimed, due to their importance to our Ziggy. Regardless of the tattered and torn upholstery, the pink 1930s armchair and ottoman will be going with us to the new house - one of my projects for this winter will be to reupholster "Ziggy's Chair" with something that would have looked good against his grey coat.

I'm a firm believer that there is something after this life - though I will not claim any insight into what exactly that "something" is - and I believe that our boy will come with us if he possibly can. It's not him I'm worried about, it's me. The past little bit has been so busy, I haven't dealt with losing Ziggy as I expected to. Not that I haven't mourned and missed him, because I certainly have, but the whole situation has been so different from previous kitty losses that I feel almost like there's something wrong with how I've reacted. I feel like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Ziggy is the fourth kitty I've lost in my life, but his death was very different in many ways. The first two kitties I lost made such an impact on me that I think I've expected every time to feel the same. But those two came at times when my life was in complete upheaval, and when I had absolutely no power over the situation. The third one I lost was less agonizing because he had ceased to be "my" cat by that time. I'd had to leave him behind when I moved away to college, and in a way I'd already done my mourning for him. When he died, he'd spent the last 10 of his 15 years as Mom and Dad's cat, not mine. (Which is not to say that when I got my mom's e-mail about it I didn't leave work and go cry my eyes out in my car for an hour. Because I did.)

More about that later. In other, somewhat happier news, someone else is as ready for the move as he'll ever be:


This will make the fourth house move we've done with The Big Acoustic Kitty, and he's getting be an old hand (paw?) at it. He's not happy about it, but he's taking it in stride.

And for those of you wondering how he's getting along, he's on an every-other-day regimen of a liquid arthritis medicine that seems to be helping him quite a bit. He's been investigating all of the boxes and wandering around quite a bit more lately. I think we will have to up him to an every day dose at some point, but for now this seems to be working well.

The Electric Mayhem has resisted being photographed in something so pedestrian as a plain brown moving box. I'll get some photos of her up after she's settled into her new domain.

Forever Should Last Longer Than One Year

Friends and family who frequent this blog already know what's happened. I'm not yet up to writing about him, but this morning I needed to at least get his photo up.

For those who are new here, this is a photo of our beloved Ziggy. In previous posts, he is referred to as Mr. TBD and Cosmo. We adopted him on July 11, 2008, and he passed away on August 5, 2009. He was three years old. He died of multiple lymphomas, due to being FIV/FeLV positive. We adopted him from a shelter that tests all their cats for FIV and FeLV, but our Ziggy Bean somehow missed being diagnosed.

I will write more about him later, when I am able to do him justice. But for now I just wanted to put his photo and a brief bit of his story up online. He is deeply missed.