We Say Goodbye to a Family Friend Today

You gotta live every day like it's your last.

There's simply no other way to live.  You could die at any moment.  I found that out the hard way today.

I have a cat named Handsome.  Had a cat I should say.  I eat a lot of tuna sandwiches since tuna is pretty cheap and we're living in such hard economic times, so Handsome developed a habit of going through our trash. This usually wasn't such a terrible thing.  We'd wake up in the morning after a previous day's tuna luncheon and trash would be strewn about the floor.  I'd hit the cat and yell "NO!" and the cat would run off and hide.  That's the way it usually worked, anyway.

Well, this morning has been a rough morning and the wife and kids won't stop crying.  This morning they found Handsome lying dead in the bathroom.  You see, yesterday we once again had tuna, and last night Handsome once again got into the trash.  I once again had to spank Handsome.

Handsome was an old cat.  We've had him for 15 years, and for 15 years he's been getting into the trash.  I guess all those spankings added up, because after I hit him, Handsome didn't run off as fast as usual.  He took several strides forward and kinda stumbled.  After the stumble it was more of a staggering and the cat disappeared.  I didn't think much of it until about 12 o'clock.

The house was all but quiet around until around noon when the kids started waking up.  My oldest son woke up, but I would have thought it was my daughter with the blood curdling scream that shook the house, and found the cat "Just laying there and not moving not even when I turned the shower on." The running water usually scares the Hell out of Handsome.  "So I kinda nudged him with my foot..."  Crying.

It was an awful site when we found the cat.  A bit of dried blood was dripping out of Handsome's nose, and when I lifted him up to put him in his burial trash bag the carpet kind of stuck to the side of his face.

We held a small funeral service for the cat and I feel kind of guilty.  Everyone had a few kind words to say about the long time family pet, and there were a lot of tears from the kids.  This was their first experience with death, but they have to go through it sooner or later.

I can't help but feel like it's a little my fault that the cat died.  I had been drinking the night before and everybody knows that Daddy has a bit of a temper the next morning after he's been drinking, so I may have accidentally hit the cat a little bit harder than necessary.

I'm probably going to have to buy a kitten for the kids to ease my conscience and the kids sense of loss.

Today was not a fun day.