tavie.com

I wrote an email to some friends yesterday when I got home from the vet. It made me feel a little better to write it. I think I'd like to have it in this space, too, for my archives. So I'm going to put it here.

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I don't know what else to do since I can't sleep so I signed on. Being signed on is comforting because it's what I do the most even though there's nothing really to do.

This morning we took Rosie to the vet and they found fluid around her lungs and heart pressing down on her lungs making it hard for her to breathe. It's been building for awhile and although they could have drained it it would have most likely come back within a few days and kept coming back, and the procedure would have been traumatic for her. Just being there was traumatic for her. She hadn't left our apartment the whole 12 years we've lived here. Today was the first time and the last time.

I was there with her and Kirsten was too. I pet Rosie and Kirsten pet me and then Rosie was asleep. She was fifteen years old. She and Lily were kittens and Kirsten and I were also kittens when we first met. Mom dumped them out on Kirsten's bed and they were so little. Lily went to me and Rosie went to Kirsten so we thought Lily was mine and Rosie was Kirsten's, but later on it was Lily who latched onto Kirsten and Rosie became my girl. In her youth Rosie was a huntress who prowled the streets and backyards of Brooklyn. Her best friend was a tailless stray called Mr Mannix. She used to drop mice at our bedroom door as gifts. She looked a little like Batman. When she was two years old she ran out after us one day as we crossed the street with our mom, and right smack into a car. After her recovery she was a little crooked about the mouth. In later years I called her "Mary Jo Buttafu-cat" when I wanted to tease her, which was an exceedingly wicked and deranged thing to do. When we moved to Roosevelt Island she became an indoor dame whose favourite activity was basking in the patch of sunshine on my parents' bed, and drooling.

She loved everyone and loved to climb into laps and lick the hands of strangers. Licking was her highest form of affection. If you pet her she would lick you as thanks, and if you didn't she would lick you as a request that you pet her. She slept on my bed every night and when her licking became annoying I would flop over and avoid her until she got the picture and settled down in the small of my back to sleep. There is always a perpetual hairy patch on my bedsheets.

She was a diva. She was shaped like a meatloaf. She had a lot of mass in her ass. I would sing to her "Really Rosie" because that's who she was. Her full name was Calico Rose.

Dad was her second favourite, and then Kirsten and Mom, but I was her very favourite and she was mine. I will love her forever.

I didn't think I could be there for her at the end. I couldn't even go to my grandmother's funeral. But I was there and I held her. I did not leave her alone at the end.

I feel better having said all that.

This has never happened to me before and I don't really know what to do but it hurts very much.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 3:58 PM | shower me with attention