MSI Press Blog

  Happy Cat in one of his dark places Happy Cat's days of valiantly fighting his brain tumor are drawing to an end. We are now on death watch for him as he valiantly trues to stave off death even though he knows it is hovering over him, calling. Happy Cat was one of those cats who never asked for anything, not even for a home. He was an alley cat, and he would wait until all the other street cats had finished their turn at the handouts from local residents, including us, before he would approach and finish up the remnants. We got to know Happy Cat from afar, seeing him every day hunkered down under the juniper bush, watching the other cats eat. (One of those cats was Snyezhka , his pal, whom we captured and adopted.) He would only come eat after they were done and he thought we were gone. Then, he became very ill. Something prompted him to trust us to help, and we found him spread-eagled outside our second-story entrance door one morning as we were departing for work. Cat lifted i...

  I have written a bit about the process of pets dying before, along with the ways in which vets can be (or not) helpful. In that post, I shared a book by Barbara Karnes on understanding the pet-dying process, which I had found very helpful and which would have provided me with a fair amount of relief and guidance had I known about while Murjan was still alive. It explained much about his dying process and death that was comforting in retrospect. You can read that post HERE . In this post, I want to share the emotional aspects not only of the dying itself but also of the role of the support community (which should be supportive but in our case was not so, at least not to the extent that we needed and that could have been). As a result, my experience with Murjan's dying days were traumatic--more traumatic than they should have been because of lack of support from the veterinary hospital that should have been my source of support.  As I explained in the earlier post, Murjan had...