Our beloved Rosie was only 6 years old when we unexpectedly lost her yesterday. She was our sweetest, best tempered cat and we are all feeling her loss.
Rosie joined our household about 5 years ago, along with her littermate Dancer and her adopted brother, Nom Nom. She and her brothers were all born feral and taken in by a friend of ours who had them fixed and micro-chipped before putting them up for adoption.
Dancer and Nom Nom were extremely skittish when we first brought them home, and we didn’t actually see them for the first few weeks they lived with us. Not Rosie. Rosie was sociable with us from the beginning. And her friendliness extended far beyond us. She was always the first cat to come out and greet friends and visitors to our home.
She was the last to say goodnight to us at bedtime, often bringing us a toy to show her affection. She would come upstairs meowing at us with her squeaky meow (which always cracked me up) and then deposit our gift on the floor.
She also loved to flop on the floor in front of us while we were getting dressed or brushing our teeth. We would then need to pause whatever we were doing to give her some scratchies. She also loved to cuddle up in a pile with her brothers and spent many mornings on my lap wrapped around Dancer.
She had a knack for telling time and always let David know when it was time to soak the food bowl, and more importantly when it was time to give them wet food. And by “them” I mean her, since she was the only one of our cats who preferred wet to dry food.
When we came home from being away for almost 2 weeks, there was obviously something wrong with her. She was not her usual perky self. But, she was also known to hold our absences against us, so we decided to give her a day to bounce back. Thursday morning she failed to greet me upstairs and I started to feel some concern. When I came downstairs she was laying listlessly by the washing machine. At 8:01 I called the vet and made her an appointment for later in the morning. While I was on the phone she crawled under the couch and I mistakenly took that as a sign that she was feeling a little better.
We then went out for a #PDXBreakfast planning to come home and take her right to the vet. When we went to find her, she was still under the couch, but she was already lifeless.
We rushed her to the vet to see if there was any chance to revive her, but she was well and truly gone. The vet doesn’t know what took our young and seemingly healthy cat, but there was no trauma and no evidence of obvious pain (although cats are known to be stoics and will hide pain for as long as possible). The vet assured us that it seemed incredibly unlikely that she had anything contagious that would put our other cats at risk.
Now the remaining four of us just need to get used to life without our lovely Rosie around. Dancer is being extremely clingy and even Nom Nom is coming to David for attention more often than usual. This loss may even be what turns him from being a scaredy cat to a vaguely normal cat. But, we aren’t holding our breath on that one.