It has been a week of tears, prayers and reflection for my family.
On Tuesday we said goodbye to a beloved four-legged family member, our handsome black panther cat, Jellybean.
He was only seven years old, and we'd had him since he was a kitten.
I've had pets since I was a toddler, so I've lost animals in the past, but it never affected me the way losing Jelly did this week. I guess the main reason is that I didn't see the others in their final days. They all "ran away" at some point, never to return. Somehow that was easier.
Jellybean, who came to us with that name from the Sunshine Coast SPCA, was a lively kitten with a sleek black coat who was happy to pounce on anything that moved.
We fell in love with him instantly.
As a kitten, Jelly would run so fast he'd actually run part way up the wall when he got to it. He seemed to have unending energy that would inevitably peak at about 2 a.m. with a sprint across our bed.
As he grew he developed a love of the outdoors, and I loved seeing him walk the perimeter of our yard to make sure nothing was out of the ordinary.
He took on a protector role for us.
He usually slept at the end of our bed and if a door opened or he heard something he thought was a problem, he'd growl loud enough to wake me.
He was always there in the morning, waiting for a belly pet, purring at my touch and waiting to escort me to the living room for my morning coffee.
We weighed Jellybean at the beginning of this month when we put on his flea medication. He was about 10 pounds. By the time we took him to the vet last week, he weighed half that.
We saw he was getting thin, but he was outside lots with the summer sun and we thought he was just running around more. We have two cats and we keep the bowl full of dry food all the time, so we never noticed he was eating less.
I did see him drinking more water but thought, again, it was the summer heat.
When he stopped sleeping on the bed and had little interest in going outside it was obvious something serious was wrong.
We took him to the vet where he was put on intravenous fluids. An ultrasound showed a large mass on his kidneys.
A costly surgery without any guarantees for his quality of life after or helping him pass were the options we were left with.
We chose the latter and took him home for the weekend to spend some time and say goodbye.
It was a heart wrenching few days.
I held my frail, listless little love and tried to tell him how much he meant to me. I cried and prayed and cried some more.
We fed him syringes of water and mashed up food those last few days and did what we could to make him comfortable.
By the time we had to take him back to the vet, I could see in his eyes he was ready to go, but I wasn't ready to have him leave us.
We all mourned the loss of Jellybean deeply that day. We made him a special casket and the kids wrote him letters and made him some trinkets and we buried him in our backyard with a simple service and many more tears.
That night I had a dream about Jellybean.
He was with seven other black cats all relaxing on a carpeted play-place, but Jelly was at the top - the fattest, shiniest, most regal looking cat of the bunch.
He jumped down to see me and then gave the others a nod as if to release them to run off to families that appeared to welcome them home.
The dream gave me some peace and I've thought about that image repeatedly this week. Jellybean always was a king among cats.
