Farewell, Chemisa

We've known this was coming for a while, but that doesn't make it any easier.

This afternoon we had a vet come by the house and put down Chemisa.



Chemisa (we never really decided on a spelling for her name...), like all of our cats, was a foundling; Katy and the kids brought her home from Santa Fe some 15 years ago. She was never an especially friendly cat, but she mellowed a bit in her old age, and has slept with Katy and me for years.

She was initially an indoor-outdoor cat; our attempts to keep her in would cause her to start peeing outside the cat box. As she got older, she stopped going out in the winter, and after a run-in with another critter that resulted in a nasty, infected bite, she finally relented and stayed inside. After a period of stand-off-ishness she eventually accepted Willin and Ditz, and the three of them would sometimes curl up together.

Back in August Chemisa began to lose her appetite, and for the past few weeks she's been losing weight. Having seen what Willin went through to get to his diabetes diagnosis, we we decided we just couldn't do that with Chemisa and elected instead to put her down. Katy found a vet who would make a house call, and this afternoon, at about 1:30PM, Chemisa died, peacefully and quietly, in my lap, with Willin, Katy and RuthAnne next to her.

She's buried in the garden beneath a new tree. I'll update this next spring when it blooms.



Thank you, Chemisa, for being part of our family.