Days until Christmas: 13
Days until my birthday: 8
The holidays are coming too goddamn fast this year. With Daisy's possible jury service thrown into the mix, time is at a premium to try to get everything done and ready in the less than two weeks we now have before Christmas. I don't know if it can be done.
I am done shopping for her and for my parents; barring any other little things I find for Daisy between now and December 25, I'm good for her. My parents will get their box shipped to them from the local post office sometime over the next few days, if not today (time permitting).
However.
I still need time to wrap presents, I need time to unbox packages, open mail, run the shredder, and clean the things in the house that I normally do -- and clean deeper now that we're attempting to fully eradicate any fleas with diatomaceous earth on and in/under everything. I also want more time to write and more time to sleep, and the normal care of the cats still is necessary even if it's a lot less time-consuming with Pete now gone. On top of all of this, I've still got six more working days before I am off for my far-too-short holiday vacation.
Daisy is doing a wonderful job with flea control on the cats; she combs each of them out every day and gets some living ones and eggs off each cat every day (some days they don't have any, and some days they have several). I told her how much I appreciate that effort and work, and also reminded her that it's a process; there's a life cycle for fleas so they're not going to disappear overnight even with the cats on the Frontline meds, even if there's a day or two she doesn't comb any off the cats. Frontline will eventually kill them all, and every egg and flea she combs off the cats every day helps greatly reduce new ones, but it is a process. Hank and Charlie are the worst as their fur is super-thick and it's the perfect fur for fleas.
I guess without Pete, though, one less cat means that much fewer fleas? Possibly?
To those ends, I ordered $221 worth of Frontline in bulk from Amazon this week; it is enough to protect all five cats for five months. Frontline is ungodly expensive, though, and I'd like to see if there's a cheaper generic option that has the same meds in it. We did try something else for a few months a while back, and it worked just fine for the cats, but I can't remember now what it was.
Anyway.
We miss Pete terribly. There is a great emptiness in the house now that the old man previously occupied with his presence for 18.5 years.
With his passing, a lot of things went into motion -- for example, he had to be removed from the city registry for tax and vaccination purposes. Our vets had to be notified that his prescriptions and refills can be canceled and closed out. He needed to be removed from our Chewy.com profile(s) for the same reasons. Those are the things that most people would consider, and are all already done.
The things that most people likely would not think about are some of the things I took care of yesterday and am in the process of caring for today -- swapping out foods and food bowls, water bowls, and washing the water fountain is part of that; I'm sure they all smell like him still. Same goes with the cat beds and couch blankets; they are all Pete-scented. Whether actively or passively, all of the surviving cats look for him and know he should be there when he's not. Getting rid of his scent from most things in the house will help them move on.
When Maggie and Sadie passed, I did the same thing each time. Pete lost his mind with anxiety searching for Maggie when she left us, howling and wailing for her, trying to get into rooms with closed doors just to see if she was in there, etc. When I cleaned the house of things that obviously smelled like her, that anxiety greatly lessened and eventually went away.
I know the other cats know Pete is gone. They don't understand why or where he is because they can still smell him. They don't seem to be experiencing any anxiety or restlessness, but Daisy and I have both realized that all of them have become more lovey and intentional with us. Gary has awakened me the past two days by climbing up on my chest and kneading. Charlie came to bed with us yesterday morning and slept in Pete's spot, in almost the exact same position, and has taken up residence in Pete's spot on the couch, laying there with me and with Daisy like Pete did. Mable has become even more of a secret daddy's girl and has wanted to spend almost all of her waking hours with me in my office when she can. Emmy, surprisingly, has become a lot more loving towards Daisy when previously she was mostly standoffish with everyone but me, Hank and Pete. Hank, while it's not completely out of the ordinary for him, has become far more enamored with "dad time," and will sneak away from everyone else to come in my office to get love and rubs and chest cuddles -- but he won't do that if any of the other cats (or Daisy) are around.
The house feels so lonely, so quiet, so empty without Pete. I don't feel his presence here at all. I felt Maggie's presence when she left us, at least for a brief time (here and there, for a few weeks after she passed) and I had such a bond with Sadie that I still feel her presence around the house, as if she's laying at my feet or on the couch next to me, on a pretty regular basis -- as if her spirit is there watching over me. It is an intense feeling that she's just there with me still, as if I could reach down and rub her ears and actually feel her there.
But Pete? I don't feel him here at all. It does not feel like his spirit came home with us when it left his body. I expect to see him laying on the couch or drinking water from his bowls, like if I just squint enough or let my peripheral vision take over -- but I don't, I can't. I don't see him or feel him there. Where he used to be there is a deafening silence, an empty hole.
Daisy, for the record, disagrees with me. She feels his presence, and believes he still came home with us when we left the vet's office. She said that his presence felt very strong when she was laying on the couch mourning him, after we returned home, and that she told him it was okay to go upstairs and sleep with me.
If he's here somewhere, it's so faint I can't sense it; I can't feel him. And I wish I could. I keep expecting to hear his little cry and his paw scratches on my office door, and I don't. I keep expecting to turn and look at the couch while I'm working at my desk downstairs and see his big green-yellow eyes looking at me with love, as he always did, or see him sitting on the long part of the couch next to me just because he came over and wanted love and chin scratches. But he's not there.
The night after he left us, I caught myself saying "I love you, old man" aloud to an empty room, because it's such a habit for me to look over to him and tell him that multiple times a night -- it's muscle memory.
But he's not there, and if he is, I can't feel it. And on some level that is just as sad as losing him in the first place.
Regardless, he'll be back with us physically in a week or so, albeit in an urn. There's not much to him, especially since he had lost so much weight, so I would imagine it will be a small urn.
I will heal in time; we both will, of course. He was just such a sweet old man. Pete was the most unique cat I've ever known -- a cat that had human-like intelligence, emotions, and empathy. It was very hard for either of us to picture a life without him in it, and now we have to. I will love Pete forever, just like I love the departed girls -- but it's a different kind of love now that all of them are gone.
It's also the beginning of a new era -- for the first time ever, there's not an older-generation cat in the house with us. All of the cats here now started with Hank as the first member of Generation 2 back in 2023. That just seems so wild to me. I found a picture from December 2023 -- a mere two years ago -- that was labeled "all four, 12.23" and opened it up. It was Pete, Sadie, Maggie, and Hank all lounging on the couch in the living room, and my first thought was wow, three of these four cats are now dead. In the span of two years. I can pinpoint the exact date to between Christmas and December 28 too, because also in that picture is the stack of Daisy's already-unwrapped but neatly organized presents, and the "all four" denotes that Empress wasn't in the house yet -- we adopted her on December 29.
In fact, I made the observation to Daisy yesterday that we're "breaking even" for the year -- we lost two cats and gained two more all within the year 2025. Sadie died at the beginning of the year, leaving us with four again -- then we got Charlie, five; then we found Gary, number six -- and then at the end of the year Pete died. So we're breaking even at least when it comes to cats. It is a slightly amusing observation if nothing else.
I am thankful for the time we got with Pete; some of the last words I said to the old man were "thank you." We thought we were going to lose him three different times this year due to his health issues, and each time he bounced back for a while longer -- but it was always going to be diminishing returns each time, and we knew that. I am also thankful, in a sense, that he went down now instead of in another week or two, because (again) the selfish part of me did not want his death to ruin my birthday or the holidays.
I think Pete is a large part of why my enthusiasm for the holidays this year is quite diminished anyhow. My stress levels have been really high and my energy has been low, and time is ever-marching forward. All the time we spent taking care of him and making sure he was okay and comfortable was time we could not spend taking care of other things or getting quality rest. Daisy was a trooper through it all, her near infinite patience and love/compassion for that old man draining her energy reserves as well but still soldiering on. For me, to suddenly be released from Pete duties, the routines of it all -- making sure he had his meds and Churus and clean water and treats and all the love and attention I could possibly give him -- having those suddenly stripped away and removed from my proverbial to-do lists would normally give me breathing space to relax and decompress. But, because all of those tasks were for Pete, I just feel empty and hollow inside; I am saddened that my time does not revolve around him anymore.
You may ask if there's relief -- and there is, to an extent. It is a guilty relief. I know he's not in pain anymore and each day is no longer a struggle for him, and taking care of him was indeed a lot of work -- but it was a labor of love; that work was me pouring love into the old man and letting him know that yes, he was seen and cared for, and very very loved. So it just leaves an empty hole. I only hope he understood at the end that we just wanted him to rest and no longer suffer. I hope his spirit, wherever it may now reside, can forgive us for ending it for him.
I told Sadie she could go, that I loved her and always would, but when the fight got to be too great, she could go and we'd understand. And I think she got that, in some strange way. I told Maggie the same thing, and I think she understood that as well. When I told Pete, he did not seem to understand. He fought hard for each new day with us. He did not want to leave us. I think that's part of what makes it so much harder with Pete.
But, as I have said before, life goes on. The sun set tonight, and it will rise again tomorrow. The holidays and cold weather, snowstorms, and biting temperatures will turn to the warm rains and tornadoes of spring and summer. Soon Pete will be back in this house, inside a cat-shaped urn, and he will be silent witness to all of these things again.
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