My dear Tisha is, I fear, preparing to leave us.
Tisha, more than sixteen years old, is a blue-cream Persian that we've had since she was a scant eight weeks old. Her compact, stocky body (Susan always described it as "cobby") always looked larger than it was, largely due to her thick, almost wooly fur. Tisha is one of those extremely flat-faced Persian cats--the type of Persian whose carefully-bred extreme look gave her problems all of her life. That same flat face made her appear to be scowling, but when she saw Susan or me or her sister Asia, the joy in her eyes put aside any thoughts of a scowl.
I have a thousand thousand Tisha stories I could tell, and sometime I'll begin sharing them. But right now, the joy of those memories is tempered by the sorrow of knowing that Tisha is almost certainly in her final days. Just a few days ago, she broke with her normal eating routine... in fact, she wouldn't eat at all. Then, two days ago, Susan found her lying on her favorite afternoon sleeping spot--an old padded computer bag that I had put down next to the back stairs over a year ago, intending to store it in a closet that day until Tisha discovered it and made it clear that this was now her afternoon bed--but she was lying in a small puddle of her own vomit. For a cat as fastidious as Tisha, who devoted hour into attempting to groom that wooly body, this was a serious sign of problems.
We took her to the vets, where they discovered she had a high fever and was dehydrated. Blood tests were done, and no signs of an infection showed up, not did any signs of metabolic disorders... but a subsequent x-ray showed something ominous. There was a large almost circular mass in her stomach, a mass that shouldn't be there... a mass that was almost certainly a tumor of some sorts.
The doctor gave her some fluids subcutaneously and showed me how to administer more fluids if needed, and we took her home. A few hours later, I came in from my afternoon exercise to the wondrous sight of Tisha standing near the door to greet me. I opened a can of her favorite food--Nine Lives tuna with cheese, the same food I gave her on the very first day we brought her home--and she nibbled at it three different times that afternoon. I was convinced the diagnosis had to be a mistake, and that Tisha was going to come right back to her normal self.
Of course, I was fooling myself. That was the last time that Tisha ate anything; she has showed no interest in food since then, nor has she drunk anything other than the water I've given her with an oral syringe.
Now she does little more than sleep... but oh, what glorious dreams she must have! In her dreams, she's young again and healthy and vibrant, and her feet move ever so slightly in a running motion; I know that she must be scurrying to meet her sister Asia, who left us in May of 2004. The two were inseparable in life, sleeping together, eating together, playing together--they were ideal sisters (even though they weren't related, although we did get the both of them on the same day in 1989)... and now, they'll be united again, in a place where cats are always happy and the sun always shines in time for an afternoon nap and there's never any pain or illness...
But still, when I gently touch a hand to Tisha's back, stroke her head, she awakens, and she purrs. In spite of all, she purrs incessantly at my touch, and she stretches out as best she can, and she finds the only joy I can give her. I stroke her for a long, long time, and I scratch under the chin that she always stretched upwards in order to get me to comb her neck, and I scuff my index finger across the top of her nose, between her eyes, in that spot that always made her absolutely blissful, and she is for that moment happy again and I only wish I could make that last forever, not only for her but also for me...
But I think that Asia and Tisha will be together very soon...
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