cat

PK died this afternoon. She just crawled under the sofa and died. Bless her heart. I wish she’d been able to make it through the weekend, but she just gave out. I’m so sad. I feel so bad for T, too. He’s really sad, but he’s almost too sick to grieve. I spent a good hour trying to figure out what to do with the body. I wound up placing her in a box and putting the box in a large trash bag and leaving it all out on the back patio. I walked all over our yard and the woods behind our house looking for a good place to bury her. But it’s not our land. Part of it belongs to the church. Some of it belongs to a church member. Some of it, well, we just don’t know. And much of it is in a flood plain anyway. After some panic at what to do and then not being able to get anybody I know down here on the phone, I decided well, I only own land one place on the planet. It’s settled. So in the morning, I plan to take E up to the farm and bury the cat there. Grandma is already looking forward to seeing him. I’m not even telling her about the cat part. She just thinks we’re coming to visit, which is fine. I got someone to cover the nursery for me tomorrow at church (I do the 3rd Sunday each month), so I’ll just scoot out to CVS in the morning to pick up more Mucinex for T and then come back to the house and get E and we’ll head up to the farm. It’ll be good to have a place to run around for both of us anyway. It’ll give T some peace and quiet and maybe he can mourn and get well while we’re gone.

PK was such a good cat. She was always beside one of us when we were sick. She stayed right beside me through those awful pregnancies. She would keep me company, curling up in the crook of my legs, while T was out of town. She was my baby before I had any babies. She could fetch. We’d crumple up a sheet of paper and she’d come a-runnin’ and chase that paper all over the place, batting it with her paws. Then she’d get that ball of paper in her mouth and bring it and place it at our feet so proudly. What a lot of fun she was! She loved yogurt. She could hear a yogurt container opening from the other end of the house. She’d just lap that stuff up. How cute she was. She adjusted well to the addition of children to our lives, despite the fact that she’d been with us nearly 10 years by that point. She stayed with T’s mom for a year while we lived abroad and handled that just fine – both the moving away and the moving back. She was a great companion for T. She was a good pet, a really wonderful cat. I already miss her. In these past two or three weeks I had trained myself to look for her before I left the house and as soon as I came in — just to make sure she was still alive. I’ve already had trouble coming in the house and not seeing her. It’s just sad. She was 15 and 3/4 years old – would have been 16 in May. We got her right after T graduated from divinity school and we had moved into our first parsonage. We hadn’t been married a full year yet. She’s been with us for so long, it’s going to be hard to imagine life without her.

I tell ya, I’m just about at the end of my emotional rope. The whole scam thing and running the house by myself and T being sick and picking up the body of and seeing the eyes of a dead cat that I dearly love, well, I just about don’t have anything left. Going to the farm will be good. There are a few places around the world that feed my soul — the beach, the lake at my college, the Mekong River, the Harbour behind the Opera House in Sydney, and my family farm. You’ll notice a pattern. There is water at all of those places, all except the farm. It’s the only piece of land not near water that still makes my soul feel better. It will be good to be able to go there tomorrow.