My Cat Passed Away And Her Sister Showed Us How To Cope

<p> Lori M. Day </p>
<p> Lori M. Day </p>

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

On March 15, 2015, our beloved cat Fog moved on. She was two days short of reaching the grand old age of 82 human years, or as we all know, 15 cat years. Her sister, Peach, celebrated her birthday for the first time alone.

Peach and Fog were inseparable companions for fifteen years, but they were very different cats. While Peach was intrepid, curious, active and aloof, Fog was special in her own way. She was endowed with substantially fewer intellectual gifts than her sister, but had the sweetest disposition and Zen-like calm. She even had a Buddha belly for most of her life, and when she tried to cram herself onto a small windowsill her blubber would spill over the side to everyone's delight. Unlike her sister, she never seemed to have anywhere she needed to go-no mice to chase, no furniture to scamper across, no doors to loiter around that might open at an opportune moment. She was always happy and content wherever she was, and she loved to be petted, purring like a flock of pigeons.

Fog doing the cat-in-a-box thing. Photo: Lori M. Day

I always wanted Peach and Fog to leave this world the same way they entered it - together. It was not meant to be. Peach was still lively and had even knocked over a lamp the week before. She was still naughty, jumping onto tables and countertops.

But Fog, oh Fog. She had lost over half her body weight, and was only a frail shadow of her former plump self. About a month before she died, she stopped playing with Peach. They no longer slept curled up together. They didn't groom each other. They simply coexisted. Fog didn't have the energy to be anything for Peach, and Peach seemed to instinctively know something was wrong. So she began letting Fog go. Sometimes she stepped over Fog's sleeping body on the floor as if it were a toy or some other thing and not her sister. In hindsight, Peach had been doing the work the rest of us had not.

Photo: Lori M. Day

We knew Fog's time had come, and that we could choose something other than the sterile environment of a vet's office, so we reached out to a special vet who provided elderly and hospice care for pets. She made what could have been a really horrible event into a transcendent experience right in our own living room. We observed the quiet passage of Fog, telling her how much we loved her, and petting her the whole time until her breathing and her heart stopped.

It was the most loving and gentle passage I could have imagined for Fog. Once she was dead, when we petted her, it was so different - her body was relaxed, soft, and not stiff. We realized how much she must have suffered at the end of her life, struggling to breathe, and we knew we'd done the right thing.

Our last picture with Fog, taken after she had been sedated, before the final injection. Photo: Dr. Rebecca Schoenberg

We think Peach still has a few years with us, so we're going to save Fog's ashes and when Peach's time comes, we'll ask our vet to help her pass as well, and then we'll mingle the ashes of the two sisters. We'll place them in the garden to nourish a special planting. The girls will, in the end, be together again.

We all miss Fog dearly. May she find happiness in a place with many sunbeams, saucers of tuna water, big windows looking out at the squirrels and the birds, and soft blankets to lie on. She was the best cat ever, and we will always remember her fondly, and with the deepest love.

Top photo: Fog with Peach, in the tender embrace we so often observed.