Rest in Peace, Jeremiah

Jeremiah's is gone. Here, several months back, he looked wonderful in a cabbage butterfly crown while sunning in the window in the shop.
Our sweet boy cat, Jeremiah, died on Saturday. We took him in his last hours to a good doctor who gave him a drug-aided death. We were with him the whole time. He died with the same noble grace and dignity he displayed all through his life and last couple weeks of failing health. Not a whimper, not a mess, no complaints.

I never thought I could make a decision to "take" a life of a pet, preferring to leave big things like that to nature. But it became too clear very quickly that he was dying a painful difficult death, not from old age but from an undiagnosed major disease of some kind and letting him ride it out any longer felt more cruel.

It all started with his 100% feral/wild mother in Benedict Canyon in the hills above LA. Here she is in our backyard at the time, pregnant, standing in a tree above a couple of previous litter kittens who are eating. She was churning out kittens 4 at a time every few months and there wasn't enough food or clean water to nourish them all (not to mention the canyon was full of hungry coyote packs munching on cats at night).

Jeremiah, was a rare Lilac-point Tonkinese (Russian Blue and Siamese mix) in one of her litters. He was so small and precious and light-colored we knew he could not survive as a wild canyon cat for long. I asked Paul to capture him for us. He did, with a box rigged with a string and baited with food. After he calmed down over being inside for the first time, he started to play and splay his back legs like this. He was the cutest thing we'd ever seen.

Half-a-year later, we also captured his biological sister, from a subsequent litter, to give him a playmate and to save her life as well. They became inseparable as you can see.

We moved to several places after that and Jeremiah grew to be especially beautiful, strong, and agile. He had an amazing way of running to help another cat in distress instead of running away from the noise. For that I called him, "Fireman Cat". His jumps were breathtakingly graceful, even by a cat's standard, something to do with his strength and proportions. I noticed his "meow" sounded like the lilting ringing of a bell all his life. Yes, he was crossed-eyed.

We made a general house policy a few years ago, that we would stop spending hundreds of dollars on veterinarian care for our pets. We'd changed our financial approach and stopped using credit/debt for anything and decided that spending a great deal of money we didn't have on our animals would be unwise. So we bought the best quality food we could and let life go it's own way. They were animals after all, not people.

With Jeremiah's illness and death, however, we've come to a new understanding/learning. That if we are going to have pets we are going to have to be more responsible for their health care. With Jeremiah and his sister Isabella's being so wild (they never really tamed much) we thought taking them in for annual exams would be unnecessarily traumatizing for them. C'est la Vie, we'll take life as it comes. Not now.

Now we will take our pets in for annual exams and tests as part of their care. We still don't want to get every expensive test and medical procedure possible, and there's no guarantee that knowing what Jeremiah had would have given him more time, but we've decided to at least check them out as best we can and go from there.

Over the last year or so I can now in hindsight realize he'd been ill, he had taken to sleeping most of the day, needing way too much food (for a few years) and then more recently drinking more and more and having an oily coat. The last 3 weeks he lost all his flesh except for a bloated misshapen belly and finally could only drink water strained from fresh cans of tuna every hour. He'd look like death (no photos shown of that stage) and then would miraculously perk up and quietly cry when he heard a can being freshly opened to lap up the salty water.

Even though my mind saw that he was going and that there was nothing that could be done at this point, I still cried over his going. He was a good boy. And is missed everyday.

Dagoba, good boy.