We too also have no children. And it was a week ago today, about noon, some woman came knocking on our door to tell us our kitty had been hit.
He was still warm so we figured it must have just happened. During last week at work, one of the managers in our department lives across the highway told me he'd seen the kitty lying in the highway at 11pm Saturday night. And when he and his daughter got up Sunday morning, someone had moved the kitty from the highway onto the median strip that separates the East bound from the West bound. And that's where we found him Sunday.
So we buried him in the back yard next to Little Kitty, who got literally squashed on Aug 13, 2005. He died on the street, last week's died on the highway (we live on a corner lot).
And it was Dec. 16, 2005, when I had just got back from a grueling business trip to Puerto Rico, and it was like 9:30pm, that Big Kitty made sure it was me, and then immediately collapsed. I thought she had a stroke as half of her was standing and the other half was on the floor.
I thought she was dying right then and there, so I got down on the floor and held her paw. She eventually got back up and then collapsed a short while later again.
So, I put a blanket into a plastic basket and we went to the only Pet hospital that we knew of that was always open.
My wife found Big Kitty when she was about 1-2 years old in the alley behind where she worked. Big Kitty immediately became the "Warehouse Kitty" and my wife took care of her for the next 10 years. She then found another job, and asked if she could have Big Kitty but was told "No, she belongs to the company".
2 years later, they called her up and asked if she still wanted Big Kitty. It was either "You take her or we take her to the pound". So Big Kitty retired to our house. We had her over 9 years, which adding it all up we figured she was somewhere in the 23-24 year old range.
Putting her to sleep was the single most hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life. And she's buried in the front yard right where she liked to lie in the sun that last summer of her life. She never left the yard, until that night.
After all these years we miss all of our kitties: Kit Kat, Leo Lion, Blackalacka, Big Kitty, Little Kitty, and Kitty, and a couple more that just never came home. Leo Lion came from Kansas, and we later found out his twin brother died in Kansas on the exact same day as Leo Lion died.
So I share your grief Nicko.
doc