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This is JD. She was our cat; she died sometime within the last few hours. She was about 7.

She had been fighting acute kidney failure, and we had given her a big dose of fluids and medicine around 10pm before putting her to bed in our downstairs powder room. We got up at 2:30am to check her temperature and roll her on to her other side, but she was gone. She was still warm and flexible, so it hadn’t been long. She didn’t appear to have been in pain, which I guess is a blessing.

Now she’s in a box in the freezer, because if we left her where she was she’d start to smell before we could talk to the vet tomorrow and find out what we have to do now. While she’d been sick, she’d been so cold she’d been wrapped in layer after layer of blankets. Now she’s as cold as she’s ever gonna be.

I don’t think that’s a blessing.

I remember when she was little. We got her from a coworker of Sarah’s, whose cat had had a litter of little gray furballs. We had been told she was a boy, and she was so fluffy and, get this, modest, that we couldn’t tell otherwise. Whenever we tried to lift up her tail for a good look, she’d scoot away. We assumed she was the promised boy, and named her “JD,” which stood for Jefferson Davis. She had a grey coat. Get it? We weren’t able to confirm her gender until she was almost 6 months old.

I remember her first nap in her new house, when we lived in south Wilmington; curled up into a little compact ball (she was so small I could hold her in one hand, if I didn’t mind a good bit of wiggling and the occasional kitten bite on my thumb) on a corner of our big bed. Pete and Poly, our pre-existing cats, would occasionally slink into the room, put their paws on the bed and put their heads up like prairie dogs. After spying like this for a moment, they’d gently put a paw out to probe at the new creature, and I’d gently say “Pete” or “Poly” and they’d run from the room like I’d flung a shoe at them.

I remember a few months after that, finding a big bump on her ear that turned out to be the largest, most-engorged tick I’ve ever seen. Sarah wasn’t around for some reason, so I had to hold her down with one arm and pull on the ticket with a pair of pliers in the other, carefully so I wouldn’t leave any legs stuck in her. It was still wiggling when I put it on the counter and sliced it in half.

I remember a year later, when Veronicat AKA “The Cheat” showed up on our driveway and we eventually invited her into our home. JD’s response to this was about the same as Pete and Poly’s had been to her own arrival. She and The Cheat never did warm up to each other; in fact, to our dismay, JD became a hidey-cat, spending most of her time in our bedroom, usually only coming out for food and water.

She loved fresh water. We have an automatic dispenser that works a little like the water-cooler in a regular office; a big tub of water on the top, and it leaks out little by little into a little bowl. Any time we changed the water, she was first in line, mewing her little kitten-like meow. She loved dry food, too, to the point of being dangerously obese. After Pete had a “blockage problem,” we started putting out wet food to make sure everybody was suitably hydrated; JD wouldn’t go near it. All she wanted was her dry food, some clean cool water, and once or twice a day a good scratching around the ears and the base of her tail.

I regret letting her get so fat. With four cats, it’s nearly impossible to control the diet of any of them, since it’s so much easier to just leave dry food out at all times and give them a can of wet stuff twice a day. JD was a serious porker, which you can’t tell from the picture above (taken when she was just out of kitten-hood). She probably weighed 50-75% more than she should have. We thought it was cute that she couldn’t properly clean herself, that we had to brush her every few weeks to get the matted fur out of her hindquarters.

I regret not brushing her enough.

I regret cleaning the upstairs bathroom floor with a heavy dusting of Comet cleanser.

I regret not closing the bathroom doors when I went downstairs for a wet mop.

I regret not chasing her down to get the cleanser off her feet after she, being a curious cat, went in to see what was going on in her bathroom. I tried, mind you, but she went under the bed and then disappeared into the basement, and I was frustrated with her and the whole cleaning process and said to myself, “Fuck it. If she gets sick, I’ll take her to the vet and they’ll pump her stomach or something.”

I regret seeing her up and around the next day and thinking “Ah, she’s fine. Nothing to worry about. She probably just rubbed all the Comet off in the litter box.”

I regret not noticing whether or not she ate or drank anything over the next five days.

I regret, when we found her listless and depressed on Sunday, not immediately taking her to the emergency vet clinic, because it would have cost hundreds to thousands of dollars. We waited until Monday morning to save money.

I regret having to put her in a freezer to keep from stinking up my house.

Lastly, I regret every time over the last seven years that she gently headbutted my arm, wanting a few minutes of my time for a good scratching, and I shoved her to the foot of the bed and said “Not tonight, JD, go to sleep.”

If someone somewhere is reading this to you, JD, we’re sorry we didn’t do enough while you were alive, and especially while you were sick. We’re sorry your body is so cold right now. We miss you terribly, and we’ll never forget you. Wherever you are, I’m sure there’s clean water, fresh crunchy food, and enough hands to scratch whenever you want. And I hope then when my time comes, I’ll get to see you, and I hope you can forgive me and let me join in the scratching too.

We love you, JD. Rest in peace, sweetheart.