Farewell Ra

When Ra was a young cat our neighbour came and knocked on the door to tell me that she'd just seen him run over. I sat in the middle of the road with him cradled in my arms as he took his last breath and bled all over me. A had a sprained ankle at the time and he stood on one leg in the small back yard of our block of flats in Stanmore, Sydney, and dug a deep hole. We wrapped Ra up in a lovely shawl and buried him. We all cried lots.

After the burial we were standing in the kitchen, me, Stylish and A (no one else was around then) and we were all crying when all of a sudden ... Ra walked along the window sill and jumped into the kitchen.

We checked the hole ... no disturbance.

We discovered that we had actually buried the wrong cat! Ra was a pretty ordinary nondescript tabby cat! We laughed lots about that over the years, and a friend who is a teacher told her drama class about it and they did a play of the story.

However, we didn't laugh last week when we really did bury our little middle aged cat.  He started getting thinner, and a bit moth eaten, he went off his food, and within days he pretty much wasted away to nothing. We took him to the vet who basically said that he was too far gone to warrant testing. She said to take him home and keep him comfortable. The two conditions she suspected were both untreatable anyway.

We brought him home and he had a quiet  last week with us until one morning he just died in our dining room. A and Stylish were with him. He's buried next to the hothouse where he spent many hours in his cat style day spa.