When It’s Time to Say Goodbye…
Today is a hard day… In short… today sucks.
Nearly 19 years ago, I had a faithful companion come into my life… She was a tiny little thing, playful as could be and she would be trusted friend for many years to come.
For a four-legged friend, she sure gave me some special memories.
… Like when my friend and I were walking down to downtown Coral Gables and about a quarter mile from my apartment, we heard little bells ringing in the distance only to turn around and see two little kittens following us into town. (We had to turn around, walk them home and start again a few minutes later)
… Or when I’d had a particularly bad break up and cried on the couch for days to be comforted by a snuggly little cat nestled up to my neck.
… Then there was the time she “disappeared” and I thought something had happened to her only to find her on my doorstep a week later with a gash in her side. We got her all fixed up and then she was desperate to show me “what happened” by taking me through a song and dance down the steps, through the bushes and over to building where she had apparently been trapped when they put up vents (apparently this was her cooling off place in the summers in Miami)
… Then, there was the time that she befriended a giant rat and I had to banish her from the house for 24 hours while I recovered from the site!
… She was there when I bought my first home – through the beginning of my real estate career and when the market crashed. She was there every time I started a new business or a new job…
… she first came up to my now husband’s house in West Palm Beach and jumped on the back of the sofa only to fall right off the other side (She’d never had a couch that wasn’t up against the wall, so she was taken quite by surprise)
… And who could forget the 29 hour drive from West Palm Beach to Texas in the front of a 27′ moving truck where she had to have one paw touching Brandon the WHOLE way there, all after a night of no sleep because she’d just been given her rabies shot and was channeling the cat from Pet Semetary! Oh, and if cat’s could use shortcodes, she would have absolutely said WTF as we bounced over the bridges in New Orleans and 2 in the morning!
… Even as she got older, she would race around the house as fast as she could knocking ping pong balls down the wooden staircase one by one and watching them bounce down each step. Once she was done, she’d come get one of us to go down the stairs, pick them up and bring them back to her to do it again.
… Then, when we struggled for years to have kids, she would lie with me as I cried, fearing I would never hold a baby in my arms. And when I finally did get pregnant, she slept on my belly for the whole 9 months, probably in cahoots with Emma, plotting their schemes on me and Brandon.
… She was ever so sweet to both Emma and Ellie and we never had one moment where she was anything but good with them.
They both loved her… through her, at early ages, they learned to love animals, to be gentle and to be kind to them. They learned to pet her “softly” and to “be gentle”. Emma learned how to brush her and feed her (and they both tried to sample cat food a time or two. Admittedly, Emma was pretty quick to learn not to try it again… Ellie, not so much!)
I knew this time was coming for a while, but it doesn’t make it any easier. We decided to keep her with us for an extra week and try one more kind of medication to see if she’d rally at all, but mostly because we needed a little more time to give her some love and attention. We’d been pretty caught up in kids, business, and life that we didn’t pay quite as much attention to her as we’d have liked. Whose kidding? We haven’t even had time alone for ourselves, so in my guilt… I just needed this extra week.
And, like my mother in law said, she would tell us when she was ready to go.
So, here I sit, with a heavy heart, waiting anxiously for someone to come to our home and help her move on peacefully. Part of my struggle was putting her in the car one last time (she HATED car rides) and to take her to a vet office, which terrified her to say goodbye. It didn’t seem fair… It didn’t seem right…
So, instead, we have someone coming to her, at home… where I’ll hold her in my arms one last time and tell her just how much she’s meant to me and our family. Through good times and bad, she’s been my buddy… She’s stayed with me through laughter… She’s loved me through tears when nobody else was there…
Now it’s time to Rest In Peace, sweet Red…
You’ll always hold a place in our hearts…
We love you… and will miss you…
