Only last week she was living up to her name, begging for bits of chicken at our kitchen table during dinner. And she was bounding about the house rather well for an old lady. She would leap upon the back of the sofa, climb over my shoulder and settle upon my collar bone, her head or body pressed against my face blocking any view i had of the TV.
My daughter Laurel had nicknamed her , "The Suffocator".
She came to us in one of the earliest litters left in our storage area behind the house by a rather scandalous feral mother. She was born back in 1997 and was the runt of the litter. She remained our smallest cat, except for Asta who also died this year. (We've been hit hard by Death's scythe this year.) She was never much bigger than a kitten.
Her eyes glowed in the dark, more than any other cat I've seen. It was very startling to just see these two green lights peering from a totally dark space.
We noticed she was losing some weight, but she seemed fine until last Friday. She seemed to shed more weight very quickly and was so light you felt no resistance in your hand when you picked her up, as if she was an apparition and not solid at all.
Over the weekend she grew weaker. We pull a pad on our laps and someone almost always held her those last couple of days. When I placed her in the computer room over night on Monday, she raised her head to look at me, then she lay it back down. I told my wife, "I'll be surprised if Moochie's with us in the morning."
I was right. When I got up the next day, and I get up early, I found her basically as I had left her. She was already stiff, so she must have slipped away in her sleep earlier. I believe she died peacefully. She did not show any sighs of struggle or pain.
She is survived by her brother, Canterbury, the last of that litter. She had a good long life here, much longer and better than she would have had as a feral cat, if she had even survived kittenhood outside.
I expect we will see others pass in the not distance future. This is always painful, but a price you pay when you give older cats a home, as we have come to do. With the exception of Kerouac, the starving kitten my son Darryl rescued two years ago, and Flacco, my daughter Laurel's 7-month old kitten, all our cats are well over ten years old. My mother's cat, which we took in when mom died, is 17 pushing 18. Christy Cat was old when my wife adopted her 10 years ago. My daughter says Christy is 20; I say she is 100.
We'll miss you Little Moochie, rest well.
12/11/12
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