Farewell, Brody

 This is the last picture I took of Brody.  It was two weeks ago today.  I couldn't bear to take pictures of him wasting away.

This is the very first picture I took of Brody.  There are far too few pictures in between.

Brody's last vet visit was bad news and I didn't want to tell you that his temperature was 105.3 and he had fluid in his abdomen.  Luckily the fluid was where it was easily removed and Brody went back on Dex + B-12 and Lasix every day.  It didn't help.  By Sunday night, I knew that he was packing his bags for the Rainbow Bridge.  He didn't eat all day Monday and he had that sad. lost look in his eyes.  Monday night, he was waiting on the bed for me, just like he is in the picture. I cuddled up to him and started petting him and he got up on me in his favorite position, on my thigh with his head on my stomach.  I petted him until I fell asleep.  Sometime in the night, he left the bed, because when I woke up in the wee hours to pee, he wasn't there.  In the morning, I found him by the food in the computer room.  He had run away to the Bridge.  It was like he knew that he had to eat, but he couldn't do it.

I took the body into the kitchen on a kitty comforter and laid him down near Cissy's cave.  I wanted her to know what happened to him.  She came and sniffed over and over again, like she couldn't believe it.  I think all the kitties sniffed him at least once.  I called the vet to cancel his appointment, which was this afternoon.  After a while, I took his body to the vet to be cremated.  I brushed off a bunch of fur and put it in a plastic bag, because I knew that the private cremation was so much more expensive than the communal cremation.  Isn't it silly that after spending at least $5000 to keep him alive, I wouldn't spend $70 to get his ashes?  It's just the way I feel.  Everything that was the Brody I loved so much went to the Rainbow Bridge.  What was left was just a shell.  I can feed the other cats for a month on that $70.

I will order him a plastic tombstone from the company I get them from and get a solar light from the store and bury half his fur next to Austin. I'm crying too hard to see well, so I'll quite now.