In Memorium

My first job was at Hamilton middle school. One day as I was driving to work on Beltway 8, I noticed there was a cat sitting on the concrete wall that separated north bound and south bound traffic. I ended up taking the next exit, turning around, and going to the cat. As I drove up to the cat, I noticed there was blood on the wall he was sitting on. I was scared. The traffic was whizzing by pretty quickly, the shoulder of the road was thin, and there was blood. However, I couldn't leave the cat there. I also didn't want to pick up the cat through the window because I didn't want cat guts to fall out on me in my work outfit or in my car. So, I got out of the car. The cat ran under my car. I was scared the cat was going to run through traffic and get hit right in front of me. However, he didn't run, so, I pulled him out by his tail. I put him in my trunk...because, again, I didn't know how badly he was hurt.

I drove back towards work because I knew there was a vet clinic next door to my school. I had not lived in the area long enough to know where the vets were. The cat was meowing in the trunk, and then stopped. I got scared that he died in my trunk. When I arrived at the vet, I opened the trunk to an alive cat. I dropped him off & went to work. The vets office took him in and loved him. They said he was a great cat. They explained that instead of freaking out in the office like most cats, he purred. He only really needed some stitches in his foot and maybe a few other things. They said the injury might have been because he fell out of a car, got sucked out of a sunroof...or something similar. However, the injury was minor. The vet office only charged me for half of the work because I was doing a rescue. I took him home and was unsuccessful in finding his owners. He became our Butler, our second cat.

Today, nearly 8 years later, we had to put Butler (or "Booger" as Stephen says) to sleep.

Butler had diagnosed thyroid failure and kidney failure. He went from 15 pounds to lower than 5 pounds. For months we wondered when his end would be. He hung in there very strongly through the disease, enough that we could not justify putting him to sleep. However, on Saturday he got out of the house and fell into the storm drain. We lost him, we didn't know where he was. We decided to call the animal shelter looking for him & sure enough, he was there. The fall and the trip to the shelter proved to be too much for the strength he had left. We brought him home and said our good-byes.

God is good because we had a chance to say good-bye. We were scared that he had disappeared and we would not see him again. Also, Sean had taken the day off of work because he wasn't feeling well & this gave us the chance to take care of Butler and appropriately address this situation with Stephen. Also, this has all happened before the baby is born.

We predict the Butler was somewhere around the age of 19. The picture on this post is him when he was a healthy, thriving cat. He was big. I want to remember him as big because in his last day, he was not big. He also was the only cat that loved company. He let everyone pet him & he was not terrified of vet offices. He was a great cat. He was the type of cat that would purr after being pulled off of Beltway 8.