We are in mouring.

There's no way to sugar-coat this, and I am writing a post about it now just so that all of you out there who loved him, too, can know about this before Doug and I are really ready to talk about it, but we put Wyatt down yesterday morning. Wyatt is gone.

I mentioned in my last post that I was thinking about my cat who was acting disturbingly strange. That was Wyatt. He was not eating. Not talking. Not humping. Sitting gingerly, walking slowly, and just not acting like himself. Plus, he had become thin. Very, very thin. Which we attributed to his not liking the food we had bought (it was not the hairball control light formula, the little triangles, but instead simply hairball control, the little pellets). So we got him new food and gave him another week to see if that would encourage him to eat, but no. Saturday morning we took him in to our vet and we discovered he weighed only about five pounds, which was down from nine pounds when we took him to the vet in February, and had very englarged kidneys. The vet did a test and immediately recommended that we take him to an emergency clinic. He was in kidney failure. The vet said that the reasons could be either a kidney infection (best possible scenario), something else but I forget, or polycystic kidney disease, which is common in his breed and which would be the worst possible scenario.

We took our little buddy to the Tufts emergency clinic and after they did the ultrasound they let us know that he did indeed have polycystic kidney disease. It was so far along that he had almost no normal kidney tissue left; his kidneys were simply overtaken with cysts and there was nothing that they could do for him. We could take him home and give him fluids subcutaneously and that might give him a few days to a week to last, but that was it. We made the decision to put him down that morning because we didn't know what purpose giving him the fluids would serve. It certainly wouldn't help him, and how would it help us, being with him and knowing that each time we gave him his fluids it could be the last time? Looking at him each minute and thinking that the next minute he could be gone? We didn't want that. We didn't want that for him and we didn't want that for us. So we put him down. And now we're grieving for our little Wyatt who passed away at age ten, far too early.

What's ironic here is that we loved him so much because of his breed. He was docile. Cute. Sweet. Talkative. Such a good cat. A little alien baby. He was more like a teddy bear than an actual cat. And that was because he was a Himalayan. A breed I'd have recommended to anyone in a heartbeat, if they wanted to deal with all of that fur. But in the end it's his breed that cut his life short. His line carried this disease. And while we always knew that purebred animals were more delicate and tended towards poor health more than mixed breeds, we just never really thought that Wyatt would be susceptible. At least not at age ten.

We had Wyatt for six years. He was a fantastic cat. I doubt we'll ever have a cat like him again. How lucky were we to have found him in the shelter that day and to have taken him home! He buried himself deep into our hearts, and losing him is tough. So very tough. It will be a long time before thinking about him doesn't get us emotional. Before doing things like the morning feedings for the other two cats doesn't make us get weepy at the thought of that third food dish going unused. We're trying to distract ourselves this weekend by getting out of the house, but what's the point of getting out of the house when you don't really want to go anywhere? We're taking this one hard. It was so unexpected. So sudden. And, of course, so unfair.

Here's one of the last photos I have of Wyatt. I have a couple of others, but what I notice now in those is that he didn't look like himself. Besides being thin, his eyes were not normal. He looked disturbed. Uncomfortable. I can get upset at myself, thinking that if we had been observant enough earlier we maybe could have found out earlier, but all that would have done was bought us a couple of more weeks with him, weeks spent knowing that we'd so soon have to lose him. His disease was at a stage where there was nothing that would be done. We did what was right, but that doesn't make losing him any harder. We miss this little guy, and we feel so grateful to have had him in our lives.