No decorations

My plan for yesterday when I got up in the morning was to get the Christmas decorations up, but Stella was so lethargic I knew I had to get her back down to the vet.

I’d taken her there earlier in the week when I realised there was blood in her urine. She was diagnosed with a urinary infection and given an antibiotic shot to clear that up. And for a day she did seem to be a bit better. 

The local community television folks decided recently that they wanted to do a piece on the history of pantos on the island and I’d been quite involved in putting it together. The producer wanted one last thing on Thursday – an intro to the piece. He came here early Thursday afternoon to film it. The best place for me to sit was in what had become Stella’s chair – the one right under the heat pump. So I shifted her to the sofa, but she didn’t settle. Apparently she wanted to be in the shot. “That’s fine,” Frank said.

The piece went up late yesterday. When I sat down to watch it this morning, there she was – Stella on the arm of the sofa with me stroking her chin as I spoke.

Of course I started crying again when I saw this. 

Stella was not a lap cat when she came into my life. She would sit beside me on the sofa when I was watching television, sit beside me on the bed when I was reading. Then one day, six years after she came here to live, she suddenly got on my lap, where she has regularly rested since. And that is where she was twenty-four hours after this interview was filmed – on my lap in a friend’s car with the vet coming out to the car to give her the shot that would send her on her way.

The first thing I did when I got out of bed this morning was look for Stella in her chair. Of course she wasn’t there.

There isn’t going to be a Christmas tree this year. The angel and all the other memories will be staying in their boxes. I just can’t face it.