Losing Raedthinn has been rough, to say the least. Thirteen years is from one point of view a fairly good run for a cat; out in the world, they might only last a few years. But housecats have been known to exceed 30 years, with 20 not being unusual. And Raedthinn had a lot of life left in him. Were it not for this *one* thing, he should’ve gone the distance. But there was that one thing.
Anyway, yesterday morning it was obvious that things were going wrong, so I called to set up a vet appointment. The *hope* was that I was setting up an appointment for the vet to look at him and say “oh, that’s not a problem, easy to remedy,” but the full expectation was that I was setting up an appointment to put him to sleep. AAARGHingly, the earliest appointment was some hours off, so there were hours of waiting. The first instinct was of course to spend those hours doing things with him, but I decided it was best to spend those hours letting him do what he liked. Mostly that meant laying in one window or another, and eating all the food that was suddenly made available to him in portions unheard of. When the time came, the vet Xrayed him again and found that, rather than improving, he was substantially *worse* than when they’d seen him a week earlier. The vet offered only the one way forward. Fortunately, that shot of whatever it is is *amazingly* fast and apparently entirely painless, and he was gone in seconds. The other vets working on horses and cows at the other end of the clinic could hear me give vent to my feelings. I wish I could say it was a manly Viking roar to warn those in Valhalla that a new warrior was coming and to get the hell out of the way, but it wasn’t quite that.
Anyway, had to spend some time after that processing. If I was a drinking man I likely would have spent a good chunk of the day blackout drunk, so perhaps it’s best I’m not a drinking man. One odd thing: he was, as is well known, a giant of a cat. But carrying him out of the vet… it felt like I was carry a hundred pounds. “He ain’t heavy, he’s my cat” transformed into “why is this so hard?”
Yesterday in those last hours, I took many photos of the old boy. I didn’t take any of him at the clinic, nor did I video his last moments. I’ve seen a number of YouTube vids where people did just that, and I gotta say I don’t freakin’ get it. If there’s something I’d never want to see again, nor share with the world, it’s the last moments of a beloved pet and my subsequent breakdown. But people do seem to love liveinstafacestreaming every damn thing these days so… shrug.
He spent a good deal of the day in the front window, and Fingers spent a good deal of that time next to him. She was not as pushy as she often was, and he did not push her away as he often did. It seemed good to let them have their time together.
Below is the very last photo I took of Raedthinn. Somehow it seems appropriate, him looking out onto the wide world.
So, thanks everyone for your kind words. Raedthinn was one hell of a cat and the world is that much less for his absence. Discussion of an afterlife normally leaves me cold and unmoved, but the notion of a heaven for cats simply seems *just.*