Goodbye, Sweet Kitty.

Natasha passed away this afternoon, after a very brief and very fierce illness. She started looking a little thinner and we thought, "We need to keep an eye on her," but her eyes were bright, she was as active as she normally was, her coat was glossy she was still showing up for dinner - the change was subtle. We knew she was eating less - she didn't like the puppy and avoided making her usual 14 trips to the food bowl every day (she was always bulemic and used to stuff herself several times a day and puke it up five minutes later, so this change wasn't exactly unwelcome) and she got down to a normal, yet still solid and large cat. Coat still glossy, eyes still bright, still alert and able to bitchslap a dog when it got too close. She had always been kind of standoffish, she never liked the boy cats much and loathed the dogs, so her going off by herself more didn't really register with us, and she still showed up for dinner most days.

In the past five days she lost weight insanely fast - Friday we said, "She looks awful, she's going to the vet on Monday." But she was still getting around, eating, purring, getting petted. By last night she could barely walk. I called the vet the first thing this morning and came home from work early - she was under my bed, where she'd been for most of the weekend, and she was gone. She was still warm to the touch - she must have slipped away in the half hour between when Girl checked on her last and I came into the room. We don't know what it was - cancer's a good guess, but whatever it was, it picked up speed horrifically in recent days.

This is gross, but this is the kind of black humor that gets us through life - when she died she left a puddle of drool under my bed, and it stank like old cat food - my bedroom smelled like low tide in the hot sun. (Girl made a heroic effort to clean it up, but I think we'll have to move the bed and use the carpet machine.) Girl wisecracked, "She went pungently into that good night."

Hell of an epitaph for a cat who was a real character.

My moment of unexpected laughter came when the vet's office asked if we wanted her ashes returned - we'd done this with our golden retriever years ago - and I said, "Yes, sure, we'll bury her in the yard next to the dog. That'll really piss her off." The vet's office got it, thank God, and laughed with me. I took her to the vet's office in a cat carrier, and Boris sniffed her body and walked away - it's hard to tell what cats understand, but he and Higgins slept with me last night, while Tasha was under the bed, and they both checked on her periodically.

The windows are open and I'm burning candles, the room will be fit to sleep in tonight.

As Mondays go, this one really sucked. Time to get ready for the little trick-or-treaters - minus one black cat.