Fifth Year of Retired Introvert – Cats

I always considered myself a dog person. And then I had cats. It doesn’t make me less of a dog person. Instead, I know I have a love for both dogs and cats.

I didn’t get a chance to blog much about our cats. They weren’t mine until I got married in 2015 and I didn’t even start my blog until early 2018. So, unfortunately, a lot of my posts are sad as they got older, sick, and then died.

The happy times

At the end of April 2016, I retired and Tim was still working. That meant it was me and the boys together all day. We became the best of friends, which I wrote about in this post.

Did you know August 8 is International Cat Day? I chose this occasion to write about what I’ve learned about cats. One of my favorite things was how much Brutus liked to lick our fudge bar sticks. I still think about him every time I eat one. Now Mickey; he wanted nothing to do with those.

The downhill slope

In November of 2018, we had to take Mickey to the vet’s office because he wasn’t feeling well. It was basically the beginning of the end, but we didn’t realize it yet. Maybe we should have so we could have saved Mickey from a lot of suffering. But you just don’t know.

A month later and Mickey still wasn’t doing well. No one had any answers for us. We felt so helpless.

We lost Mickey on December 30, 2018. We now know we let it go on too long and I’m afraid he suffered terribly his last day. He died on his own at the vet emergency hospital but I wished we’d done something sooner. Always easy to look back and question decisions you made. I wrote a Tribute to Mickey.

We had Mickey cremated and kept his ashes in a little wooden urn with his picture on it. You can read more about that in A Mickey Followup.

Life with one cat

Now we were down to one cat. I think Brutus was a little confused and he became needier. Or maybe he just took advantage of having us all to himself. Brutus was always the more entertaining of the two and he helped me get through the loss of Mickey.

Brutus felt the loss of his best friend. While he was still pretty happy, I could tell he was different. I think we need to recognize that our animals grieve just like we do. We definitely gave him extra love!!

We thought Brutus was doing great, even though he started to lose weight. We just figured he needed to lose a few pounds, so that was a positive. He had more teeth pulled in May and the doctor declared him healthy.

Six Months without Mickey, we thought he was adjusting pretty well. Then things got bad.

Losing our last furry boy

I don’t think any of us realized what was going on with Brutus. He was always so tough and he didn’t appear to be hurting. But his kidneys were failing. We discovered this shortly after I posted about his six months without MIckey. Unlike Mickey, we did not allow Brutus to suffer.

When we realized there was nothing we could do, we gave him a good last day. We made our decision and I brought him home from the vet hospital. We spent the whole day together and even had our last fudge bars.

It was tougher on us than it was on him, as it seemed like he was OK. But the doctors assured us he wasn’t, so we let him go in a peaceful way, laying between us as the doctor gave him the injections. That was July 18, 2019.

As with Mickey, I wrote A Tribute to Brutus. Good therapy.

Last post about cats

I wrote my last cat post in September 2019, two months after we lost Brutus. I was trying to convince myself we didn’t need any more cats. All the reasons are perfectly valid, but we still talk from time to time about getting one (or two). I know we both miss having little furry creatures running around the house. I think about Mickey and Brutus all the time and wish I’d had more time with them.

Two and a half years later and we haven’t broken down. We just spent our first winter in Florida, which was always going to be difficult if we had pets, especially cats. But we still say, if this Florida thing doesn’t work out, we’ll be getting new furry friends!! But they could never replace Mickey and Brutus.