Our senior cat Chloë has gone to the great catnip field in the sky.

I have posted before about her lymphoma, and the relative success of steroid shots to help her intestines, but in the last week or so she has declined. She had lost about a quarter of her body weight in the last couple of months. She felt like a furry sack of bones. She was eating sporadically, if at all, and apparently not absorbing any nutrition from the food. Leah spent a lot of time trying different cat foods, but nothing seemed to work. Chloë spent all her time on our front porch. We put a kitty litter box out there because she was becoming careless in her elimination habits.

We finally understood that she was in enough distress that ending that distress was the only humane option. So we took her to the emergency vet clinic, four months after we took her son Dusty for the same reason.

We don’t remember when Chloë showed up at our old house. I think it was no more than a year after we moved in, so around 2006. She came complete with three half-grown kittens. Chloë was a gray tabby/calico. Two of her kittens were orange tabbies, and one was very close to Siamese. I find that cats can have different fathers for kittens in the same litter, a phenomenon called superfecundation.

I do not judge.

We tried to give the kittens away, but were only successful with the Siamese. The two orange tabbies became Rusty and Dusty. Rusty died about six years ago from FIV. Dusty died this January from lymphoma. Our other cats, Zoë, Smokey, and Sylvester, have disappeared. Zoë came with Leah when we married. Smokey and Sylvester appeared in our back yard not too long after Chloë showed up. We presume that Zoë was taken by a coyote. We found good evidence that Smokey suffered the same fate. Sylvester has been missing for nearly two weeks, and we hold little hope that he will reappear. A coyote is the most likely answer to what happened to him.

So Chloë was the last of the original six cats. She has been with us so long that it’s hard to imagine being without her.

Chloë will join her son Dusty and three dogs in our growing pet cemetery. I buried my mother’s little dog Lucy out there, then I buried Zeke. I had his friend Zeus cremated some time ago, and I put Zeus’s ashes in with Zeke to keep him company. Chloë always got along with Zeke. Now they will rest close to each other.