Coping with a fuzzball-shaped hole in my heart.

Chloe, our beautiful little mostly-grey dilute calico cat, died earlier tonight at home. My wife had left an hour or so before that for some work-related function, and still isn’t home yet, and I still haven’t been able to reach her. Chloe has been having what we thought were allergy-related breathing problems for about a year now, and we had been treating her regularly, which usually involved force-feeding her some really icky-tasting medicine with an eyedropper. Here recently, however, her breathing problems intensified, and our veterinarian stepped her up to some stronger medicine in pill form. She was due to go back in for a checkup next Tuesday.
Chloe was really my wife’s cat, though that doesn’t really explain why I’ve been sitting here crying my eyes out all night. When my wife’s sister got married, she gave Chloe to my wife, who had just lost a dilute calico cat named Andora, who she had owned for 21 years. She lived at the farm until we got back from our honeymoon, at which point Chloe got to move into our first apartment with Othello and Iago, who had a ten-month lead on claiming the place as their own.

Here she is holding down a pile of laundry to make sure it doesn’t float away. Fresh-out-of-the-dryer laundry just wasn’t safe around Chloe – it’d quickly turn into fresh-out-of-the-dryer-pluz-grey-cat-fuzz laundry.

Another Chloe tradition: drinking from the sink whenever someone was brushing their teeth. She’d also happily drink from a dripping bathtub faucet.

At first, we weren’t sure what the relationship would be when we got all three kitties together.

Speaking of which: only known photo of all three together.

Chloe even had her own super-cute little kitty bed.

This may have caused a little bit of sibling jealousy.

It’s enough to make a fuzzball go into hiding.





We’ll miss the fuzzball.