Celebrating a Life

Yesterday we said good-bye to a dear member of our family, our 19-year-old grey cat, Casey. It was a very tough day, and today wasn't much better. I'm hoping it will get easier each day, but right now, that's hard to imagine. She was still doing great just a few months ago:

Casey joined our family in 1993, when Christine, who is now almost 23, was just four years old.  The two of them had a bond that was unbreakable, even though Christine didn't live with us during college. Visits home often resulted in joint naps like this one:

She slept in Christine's bed and always came running when Christine cried (even if Christine faked it just to get Casey to react).

We got Casey and her sister, Max, when Alex, who is now 26, was only seven.  He told the neighbors, who had just rescued three kittens, that we would take two.  I'm sure the neighbors thought that was wishful thinking on his part, but we did indeed take two kittens.

Here is Alex a few years ago eating a bowl of cereal at our house.  Casey seems to be saying, "Where's mine?"

She loved laps and fires and blankets:

and boxes:

And she loved to look out the windows of our little Sears house:

Doug likes to tell the story of how she almost killed him about 8 years ago, before we were married.  He was allergic to cats but decided to hang out with her at my house waiting for me to return from a trip.  His airway closed up, and I rushed him to my bedroom where we opened all the windows, and I called 911.  Not only did Doug live, but after that episode, he was no longer allergic to cats. I guess Casey inoculated him.  They became friends, and she was his best buddy for 14 weeks in 2008, when he broke his foot:

Doug turned into an old softie when it came to Casey.  On a trip to Target for groceries, he was disappointed that there were no cat supplies on the list.  He wandered into the pet department anyway and came home with a refillable catnip toy for Case.  Here she is playing with it at the age of 18:

She gave us quite a scare when she got lost in the house a few months ago, which I detailed in an earlier blog entry.  But we found her several hours later.  Here she is, sitting in the living room when Doug came downstairs after another fruitless search for her.  She looks annoyed that anyone would question where she was all that time.

That wasn't the first time she had been lost--before we decided that she should be strictly a house cat, she was lost in the woods for 5 days and we thought she was a goner.

Her time wasn't up yet then.

But yesterday it was.  She died in my arms at the vet's office.

Bye, Casey, I'll love you forever.