Doing the right thing...

Snoozing.

...does not mean it's the less-painful thing.  Or that it won't hurt.

It's been one week since we lost Keiki, and almost 9 weeks since we lost Po.

I miss them so much.

I struggle sometimes not to totally break down when the twins ask me at bedtime to pray for Keiki and Po, and to ask Jesus to take care of them for us until we get to heaven.  The requests to pray, asking Jesus to take care of Po and remind her that we still love her, had decreased until they pretty much stopped.

Small Fry would even obnoxiously remind Medium Fry, when she would ask me to pray about Po, that God already knows we still miss Po and we love her, so we don't neeeed to ask for that.

Which made me smile, even as it yanked at my heartstrings.

But now, with Keiki's death last week, the requests are coming back.

Balloon catcher.

My house feels so wrong right now, with less felines in it than there are people.  That's a ratio that's suddenly shifted after over a decade of it being the other way.  And it feels off.

It's easier to say we made the right choice for Po; that was so obvious, in the cancer that had so viciously invaded her mouth, the lost weight, the refusal of her insulin shots that she knew she didn't need anymore.  It doesn't make it any easier to have lost my first kitty, but I could not, in good conscience, let her suffer and go hungry--the tumor meant she wasn't really eating much--just because I wasn't ready to let her go.  (Especially since I knew that the ugly truth is that I'd never be "ready" to let her go.)

Keiki's death is harder to take, since we just don't know so much.  We don't know what was causing her behavioral issues.  We don't know for sure that she was arthritic, although we suspect it, because she moved stiffly sometimes and limped frequently.  We don't know what caused her seizures.  The only way to know was to run seriously expensive tests on a cat whose middle name should have been Contrary instead of Kaikaina.  And then, if the tests were inconclusive, a course of treatment that may or may not have actually treated what was wrong.  Could we put her through that?

In the end, no, we couldn't.

13 years ago, you'd have seen more chair.  But not much.

So, most of the time, I'm confident we made the right decisions.

I just wish that doing the right thing didn't hurt so much right now.

There's a lot I'd give to be ignored by Po or awakened in the middle of the night by a Wookiee-purring Ke (who would wake me for affection when she couldn't rouse Hubby).

And I really hope they know how much I loved them, and still do.