Today, Tuesday, July 15th, our cat, Elijah. Um… Who is 20 plus years old, 21 or 22, I can’t quite remember, um… died this morning. He has been on a downward turn for at least a year, where he, uh, first lost eyesight in one eye, and then eventually started to lose some hearing, and then he lost eyesight in his other eye, and then he seemed to have lost complete hearing, uh, but he’s been functioning pretty much normally as, quote, “King of the Castle” over our other cat and our dog. Um, but in the last couple weeks it’s been… uh, thoughts of him… dying.
Uh, so, last night or yesterday afternoon, uh, he cried out, which he has not done in a long, long, long, long, long, long, long time. So, he cried out. So, my husband and I scooped him up, put him in a bundle of, uh, towels, and a blanket. Uh. He felt — seemed cold. I held him close to me. We slept with him in between us in the night. Um. And then, he, uh, exerted his last breath at about 10:30-ish or so this morning. He is currently wrapped up in blankets. A blanket. And a towel in my office — home office here. We are taking him to our vet this afternoon for him to be… memorialized. He’ll be cremated and put in a… delightful, wonderful… um, box. A wood box that’s polished with little paw prints. And we’ll have his, uh, front paws, smushed into clay, um, or something, with his name on it and he will live on a shelf along with a great photograph of him and he’ll sit beside our dog, Abigail who died about six years ago, our cat, Jerry, who died about five years ago? And now him.
When we got Elijah the cat, he was a teeny teeny tiny little kitten rescued from the Detroit Humane Society. He could fit in the palm of your hand. And this is, uh… the end of a chapter for our family. Eli was the last vestige of our family life when our boys were young, so… it’s sad. But I think I have cried enough.