Thank you so very much to everyone who has sent their love and hugs, blessings and prayers and comforting words. Again, I'll put this under a cut since I'm writing this up for my own very poor memory's sake. As if six months from now I won't remember how she loved to dive into shopping bags and rip her way out like a Ridley Scott alien. Or that she was mad keen on 'helping' me make the bed, burrowing under the sheets and holding very still until I pounced my hands upon her. Or how she disdained the foofy feather toy I bought, but loved the plain old stick end of it. How she and Esme raced around, chasing each other, instant friends. That she had a biting problem, and when I tried to break her of it, she merely licked the deterrent - full strength Tabasco sauce - off of my finger tips.

I'm trying to wrap my brain around the fact that, twelve hours from now, Zee won't be a part of my daily life. There's something fundamentally wrong about that.

Today was quiet, and less given to bouts of weeping. Honestly, I'm drained; if that masquerades as peace and acceptance, woo-freakin'-hoo. Anyway, Zinda slept most of the day. I trickled a bit of water into her mouth with the dropper I ought to have been using to give her her antibiotic (to which, by the bye, I said sod it. it was making her miserable to have cherry flavored goo squirted down her throat, and really - one more day's dosage wasn't going to do a thing. Don made the same decision with her eye drops). About ten o'clock this evening, she got down from the bed and walked, slowly but with great dignity, to the bathroom. We rushed to turn the tub faucet on. She drank, slowly, for a full ten minutes or so, and then came back out into the living room to avail herself of the scratching pad. The rest of the evening was spent curled up on the couch next to Don, her favorite person in all the world. She even roused herself when I fed the other kitties. When I saw her approaching the kitchen, I hastily threw a handful of food into a bowl for her. Now, she can't eat any more. She just... can't. Yet she sat there with her kitty sisters and nosed the food around her bowl because that what she's done nearly every day of her life. As I watched her, I thought she will never be there for dinner again.

And that, my friends, is what booted exhausted serenity out the window. I utterly lost it. Now I'm tired and bleary-eyed and my nose is runny. Zee's back on the bed. I expect she'll sleep with us tonight.

p.s. Don seldom checks LJ, so I think I'm safe in telling this story. Now, I've mentioned how Zinda is HIS kitty, and he is HER person. She loves him completely. Whenever he comes near her, he can say, "mrwor?" and she's up, back curved, tail raised, meowing back at him. Even now, weak as she is, she does her best. She used to wait on the bathroom counter for him to finish his shower each morning. She loved climbing up on his shoulder. So. I had to teach this morning, but when I got home, Don was waiting for me. "I sort of broke down this morning," he confided. He'd gone in to see the wee thing. She was asleep, her tiny frame curled into a ball on my fleece bathrobe. "I cried for about twenty minutes." As I hugged him, he added, "But they were manly tears." I &hearts my husband so very, very much.

I'm not disabling comments, but please don't feel you need to respond. You've all been fantastic and lovely and warm and wonderful, and I appreciate every speck of good feeling for Zee as well as for Don and myself.