Born:  ??/??/1992 or 1993

Rescued: 08/26/1996

Died:  05/05/2014

In August 1996, we rescued Luisa from a local park, popular with runners and students, and adjacent to a student housing complex.  She liked to hang out on the roof of the restrooms.  My husband had fallen in love with her a few weeks earlier and fretted that she might have been abandoned.  We resolved to at least take her to a vet and post notices in the hope that her “owners” would come for her.  No one came forward to claim her, so she came home with us.

And lived with us for almost 18 years.  In all that time, she seemed to be the healthiest of the bunch, outliving Rascal, Smokey, Joshua, Elodea, and Mikey, and not showing any evidence of the chronic illnesses that they had all been afflicted with in their later years.  We had one scare in December 2011 when she developed fatty liver disease.  We had had to euthanize Mikey just two months before and neither of us felt emotionally strong enough to go through that again.  Fortunately, medication resolved the disease and soon she was eating and drinking and being as contrary as her usual tortie self.

This time ’round though, the big C knocked her down.  Although we tried medication, nothing could stop the progression of the disease.  These past several weeks have been a hellish roller-coaster ride with us getting hopeful every time she would raise her head and purr and chirp at us, alternating with painful dread of her imminent death when she started to refuse food and eventually only drank if we brought water to her.

Timing is everything, but it’s never perfect in this situation.  Either you euthanize them when there is still a shred of quality of life within them, and forever wonder if it was too soon and inhumane.  Or you put it off until they are simply a shell of a living creature, breathing hard, almost unable to move, and forever flog yourself for waiting one day too long.

In Luisa’s case, we feel we put it off too long.  Yet we are grateful she died at home and we were with her.

We gave her all the love and care and comfort in our power.  We loved her and will miss her deeply.

Luisa is survived by:

 

 

 

 And two broken-hearted furless bipeds named

Marie & Greg.