Charlie died this morning.

She was at the vet's for tests, because she's lost 2 lbs in just over a month and in the last week or so had been very listless. I thought perhaps it was because she needed her teeth cleaned and if they were bothering her, she wasn’t eating as much. Plus, we were still fighting with the nail bed infection on several of her toes. The vet couldn’t schedule her for a teeth cleaning for at least three weeks, so I scheduled a checkup yesterday. While we were there, they took her in the back for urine and stool samples. Apparently she balked at any more tests, and in fact she bit me when they brought her back. I didn’t blame her; she was a very unhappy kitty. The vet said the urine looked bad.

So we took her in this morning and left her there so they could get bloodwork done. They had to sedate her, and while she was under anesthesia, her heart stopped. They tried for half an hour to resuscitate her, but they were unable to.

Obviously, this came as a complete shock. We are devastated. I can't believe she won't be crawling under the covers with me tonight, talking the whole time.

It looks like she may have had some liver damage, so she was already sick. The vet is going to find out what was going on there. We'll get the ashes in a few weeks. We still want to take Eclipse's ashes to the big cat rescue center and get a brick in their walkway for her, and now we'll do the same for Charlie as well.

We’d had her since June 2003, when an SCA acquaintance was moving across country and couldn’t take Charlie with her. From the first night, when she dared to crawl out from under the bed and onto the bed to snuggle at my side, Charlie was my cat and I was her person. She tolerated other people, but she was devoted to me. She was talkative, with a huge vocabulary nobody could understand, and she was adorably pushy: If she wanted to sit on my lap (which was pretty much all the time), she was going to sit on my lap, by the gods.

Please give your own pets some extra scritchies and love tonight. Thanks.