Category Archives: Last things

Dusty

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We had to put our cat Dusty down Wednesday evening.

Dusty showed up at our previous house sometime around 2006 with his mother and two siblings. We gave one of the siblings away, but ended up keeping two. The trio became Chloe, the mother; Rusty, the sister; and Dusty, the brother. Rusty died a few years ago from feline immunodeficiency virus.

Dusty was diagnosed with lymphoma last week. His mother Chloe had been diagnosed with the same disease a couple of months ago. She had been eating like a pig but losing weight. The vet gave her a steroid injection, and it helped tremendously. She got a second shot just a couple of weeks ago. And then we noticed Dusty was not eating well, so we took him in. Same disease, and same shot. But the shot did not work for Dusty. A couple of days ago he became lethargic and refused his food. It got worse. On Thursday it was bad enough that we were going to take him to the vet, but I was tied up taking my aunt to the dentist. It was too late to take him in that day.

We considered taking him to the emergency veterinary clinic Tuesday night, but held off. Then Wednesday he was even worse. A doctor’s appointment kept us from taking him our vet, so we took him to the emergency clinic around 7 pm. After the examined him, they told us he was in the process of dying. We already knew that. So we made the only decision we could.

Dusty was probably the most even-tempered of all our cats. He tended to mind his own business. He didn’t roam, and he almost never had disagreements with the other cats. He was a little timid around me, less so around Leah. Like most cats, he spent a lot of time napping.

Sometimes he slept on the top step.

Sometimes his choices of places to nap and napping posture were comical.

His relationship with his mother was reasonably close.

This was taken a few years ago. More recently they tended to sleep in separate houses. A few days ago Chloe started sleeping with him again. Leah thinks Chloe knew something was wrong with Dusty.

We brought his little wasted body home, but it was too late to bury him. Tomorrow afternoon, after the rain stops, I’ll put him near Zeke and Lucy.

We know that Chloe will follow before too long. She’s doing pretty well now, but lymphoma is a death sentence.

21 Years

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My father died 21 years ago on this day, March 24. He was 82.

This is a photograph that was probably taken in November 1943 in Rome, Ga, around the time my mother and father were married.

My mother, my brother and I were at the hospital when he died, or more accurately, when his body was allowed to stop working. Someone at the hospital called me around 2 or 3 in the morning and said we needed to come to the hospital right away. My mother and I drove over immediately. I had to call my brother, who was living in Chattanooga at the time.

My mother and I sat in the chairs lining the walls of the ICU, outside the room where my father was, waiting for Henry. The weather was mild, and the windows were open. A mockingbird sang at the window the entire time

When my brother arrived, we went into the room to see my father. Then we told the staff to let him go.

And that was that.

That was one of the dividing points in my life. There was the time before my father died, and the time after my father died.

Now, with my mother and brother both gone, the days when there was a whole family don’t seem quite real. We were all there in those days, playing our parts. Then it was over, and I went home alone.

I ran across the photo while I was going through some photographs that my aunt gave me several months ago. They had somehow ended up at my aunt and uncle’s house, probably after my grandmother died.

A lot of the photos are from those days more than 75 years ago. There are a few with just me as a baby or very young kid. I told Leah that once we’re gone, there will be no one on Earth who cares about those photos.

There are a lot of photographs of my parents from many years ago, some of the whole family, and some of me and my brother as kids. There are a couple of class photos of my brother in elementary school, and some of him in college. I plan to send all of the photos, except for those of just me, to my nephews. I don’t know what they will do with them.

Aunt Lorraine

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Leah’s Aunt Lorraine died on Tuesday. She was 89.

Lorraine was Leah’s mother’s sister, the last of that generation in Leah’s family. Although they lived in Winston-Salem, NC, and we didn’t get a chance to see her often, she was Leah’s favorite. The last time we saw her was at least five years ago, although Leah spoke to her often, or at least as often as she could actually get her to answer her phone.

Her health had been deteriorating for some time. She was in and out of the hospital and nursing homes. At the end, she was diagnosed with uterine cancer, untreatable at her age and in her condition.

Leah is still in the stage of thinking about calling her to tell her about something that has happened here. That passes, of course. She will miss her aunt.

I wrote about milestones in my last post. This is another milestone, but not a welcome one.

Henry’s birthday

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Today, September 2, 2020, would be my brother Henry’s 73rd birthday.

It was about two and a half months after his 70th birthday that he called me and said that something strange had happened. That was the observation in an ultrasound of spots on his liver, and his doctor’s implication that it foretold a distressing diagnosis. Eventually we learned that the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer, and it had spread to his liver and other organs.

The doctor guessed that Henry had about a good year to live. He died 216 days after his 70th birthday.

Henry will never be older than 70, and I am catching up to him. I will pass him in December, and then I will no longer have an older brother.

103

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Today, August 2, is the 103rd anniversary of my father’s birth.

A lot of things have happened since he died back in 2000. I finished the first house Leah and I lived in. He told me the night he died that he was afraid wouldn’t be able to help me work on it. He never got to see it finished.

For years after he died, when I completed some little bit of work on the house, I had the urge to show it to him.

He met Leah before he died, but he had been dead five years before we got married.

My mother died 13 years after he died. I don’t think my father could have handled having her die before him.

We built another house. He never got to walk out onto our front porch and see the view. I wasn’t able to show him the trim I put around the arch on our front living room window.

He never got to see the various RV’s we have had over the years. He and my mother loved traveling with their trailers and in their motorhomes

I couldn’t show him my bright, red truck.

He never got to meet Zeke the dog. Or Sam the dog. Or Zoe the dog. I come from a long line of dog lovers. He would have loved them all.

He never got a chance to walk down Fouche Gap Road with the dogs. He could have named all the birds and all the plants.

He never got to see the foxes that lived around our old house. Or the owl that flew into our garage in our new house.

He didn’t get to see his grandson get married.

Every once in a while I hear a song that I think he would have liked.

My brother died, 18 years after him. That and my mother’s death are two of the few things I’m glad he missed.

I understand why people want to believe in an afterlife, where you can meet your loved ones again. There are a lot of things I would like to talk to my father about.