even sadder...

...is me this morning after finding the cat's body, but not her spirit. I could tell by her breathing she was really struggling last night, and that the end was near. But not fully prepared to face that reality. Though I suspected, and really hoped, that she would be gone when I awoke. I did  not want to take her to the vet - it was always so stressful, when they somehow know bad things will happen. I guess because they only got in the car under duress, not voluntarily, and knew that riding/being confined in that big, fast moving 'thing' meant something unpleasant would follow.

She was heavier than I had expected, since she had gotten so thin, her hip bones were poking out. And you could feel every knob in the spine when you rubbed your hand down her back. I somehow thought when her last breath left, that she would be so light as to be almost like the vanishing cat in the Alice story. But she was remarkably weighty for such a small little cat.

I wrapped her in a piece of a sheet, that she had sat/slept on for months, covering an upholstered piece of furniture. It was covered with black fur. I often wondered when I swept the floor, that she was not bald, as she shed so much it was amazing there was any left on her body. Took her out in the yard and put her in the Cat Cemetery, where she will be close to the other cats she spent so many years with roaming the woods and neighborhood here.

R.I.P. Lucy