You are wondering if grieving would be easier if you’d spent more time — maybe 10 minutes more, or 20 or 30 or 40 minutes more — combing Lexi’s tiger-striped fur and petting those black velvety paws and smooching her still-soft ears — taking her in — before you placed her limp body into her bed, curled her up the way she used to sleep, folded the pillowcase over her, put the bed in a box, and buried her.
Dear one, the answer is no.
You could have wept over her body for hours; you could have stayed out there all night, combing and petting her, kneeling by the lawn chair where the vet had euthanized her while you held her in your lap; and still it wouldn’t have felt like enough time to say goodbye.
There is never enough time to say goodbye when what you want is to have more years with your beautiful sweet feisty kitty alive and healthy.
You’ve been here before. Faixa, at 13. Ousadia, at 18. Now Lexi, only 12. Losing a beloved companion never gets any easier, and no matter how many years you spend together, it’s never enough time.
And it has to be enough time, because it’s all we had.
And it was marvelous. Even when she drove me bonkers by meowing incessantly when she wanted something but didn’t seem to know quite what, or when she turned down the same flavor of food she’d eaten a few hours earlier, or when she stole my chair the minute I stood up, it was — she was — marvelous.
How lucky were we?
Note within a note: With your next kitties, make sure you videotape them and record them purring while they’re healthy. The only purring recording you have of Lexi is her whisper-purr from when she was sick. Too sad.