So, I was helping my friend out my taking the newly-adopted stray in for a health check. I’m sitting in the lobby waiting for the results of the FLK/FIV test, and a 60-ish woman walks in with a gorgeous, long-hair black-and-white senior citizen kitty. I make the usual “What a handsome kitty” kind of remark, and the woman looks at me with a stricken expression and says, “I’m here to have him put to sleep.”
Well, the tears immediately well up in my eyes, and when she sees me tearing up, she starts crying, too. I get up and get the box of Kleenex off the counter and offer her one, pet the kitty’s head, sit back down. She tells me he’s 15 and diabetic and he’s lost so much weight and…it’s time.
We talk some more and she tells me that a stray kitten just showed up at her house. “It’s like he [meaning the kitty in her arms] brought him to us.” She adds that the kitty that she’ll soon be leaving the vet’s office without came to her the same way, showing up after she’d had to have a dog put to sleep.
She gets called to go back, and it’s not too long before she comes out of the examining room, alone, looking a lot more composed than I would have been. As she starts out the door, I ask, “Are you OK?” And she says, “Yes. Thank you,” and she leaves.
These vets are great. I know they’ll send her a “Rainbow Bridge” sympathy card in a few days, but I wish I had gotten her name and address so I could send her a card, too. It was certainly not the right moment to ask for that kind of information. I guess I could take a card to the vet and ask them to send it to her.
Or maybe I should just try to pay it forward – take a bag a cat food to the shelter in honor of that obviously well-loved kitty.
Hug your kitties, people. And your doggies. Hug the humans in your life, too, for that matter. 