Guffy slipped away into the night last night.
Of course she has crept off to die on her own somewhere, and I am very sad.
Obviously we have hunted everywhere. The day has been interspersed with not-very-hopeful searching in all of the places where she usually goes, and quite a lot of the places where she does not, and calling her name endlessly.
There has been no answering mew.
It is too terrible for words. I thought she had a few days left to her, and it is utterly heartbreaking to think of her crawling into a hole on her own in the dark somewhere, only to become too weak to move. The thought of her thirsty and in pain is unbearable, and we have looked everywhere, desperately hoping that we might find her, and knowing that we will not.
I am absolutely grief stricken. She was such a brave little cat. She stopped coming upstairs because it was too far from her litter tray, accepting the shrinkage of her world in the stoic way that animals do. She became so sore with the endless guffing, but still found the energy to play, and to bite my fingers, and to swipe at the dogs.
I have had to come to work, because it is the weekend, and am having to work hard to stifle the endless urge just to pop home, just to call her again, just to look behind the wood pile one more time, just to see if she might have come back.
I do not want to think about the late night dog walk tonight, when there will be no pale shadow following silently behind us, no soft little ghost slipping from tree to tree. I do not want to think that there will be no more anxious mews from the conservatory, because she has had enough of her own company and would like a knee to sit on and somebody’s hand to wrap her paws around and sink her teeth into.
Of course I did go home in the end, more than once, and the sight of the candle burning for her in the kitchen, a tiny bright spot in the darkness, was a sharp pain all over again, but there was no Guffy, no mew to let me know she had heard me, not even a rustle in the bushes.
Somebody sent me an email this afternoon, wondering if I would like another kitten. They did not know about Guffy, it was just an odd chance of fate, but the thought of a robustly healthy, fortunate kitten seems too painful to contemplate.
The only thing that has made me smile about the whole thing is the previously unimaginable certainty that right at the moment I would be unutterably thrilled to come home and find a fresh puddle of cat poo on the sofa. Nothing would be as wonderful.
She enjoyed her life very much. Even with its sickness and discomforts, she wanted to go on living.
I am glad we have had her.
LATER NOTE: We still have her.
We were on the late night dog-emptying progress around the Library Gardens when there was a sudden flash of white in the darkness, and she was there, slipping after us through the shadows like a tiny cat-phantom.
I was so pleased to see her that I picked her up, much to her horror, and she fought to be put down again and followed us home.
She was terribly thirsty.
We do not know where she has been, but we think she has hidden somewhere and slept for the whole day, because she is massively recovered after yesterday. She is still painfully thin, and of course she is still leaky, but her darting energy seems to have returned. She sat on my knee and purred a contented purr, not a troubled one. She even ate some of her cat food, although not very much.
It seems that we have a cat for a little while longer.
There will be cat poo to be cleaned up in the morning.
I can’t tell you how happy I am
