Pollo

All good things must come to an end. I know that when we first got our cats, we had the joking conversation about who would take them to the vet at the end, but I don't think we ever truly thought about the reality of either cat dying. In some respects, that makes sense as it feels morbid to do so, but in others, it's also a bit silly as their life expectancy is so much shorter than ours.

So it feels like more of a shock than it should do that we had to have Pollo put to sleep this morning. He had managed to develop two conflicting diseases in different parts of his body which required treatments that would counteract each other. The vet gave him less than a week, so while it feels like an awful decision to make, I now understand better what it means when people say "put them out of their misery". Pollo deteriorated so quickly this week to the point where he couldn't really move or be comfortable, so I feel that, given the inevitable, we made things a little easier for him.

In a way, the death of Hayden, my wife's beloved family dog, just after we arrived in the US has made talking about Pollo with Jake easier. We've decided to discuss the idea of heaven with him, so when we found out on Tuesday that we were going to put him down, we told Jake that Pollo was going to join Hayden in heaven. Jake burst into tears and we cuddled a lot and talked about how much we love our pets. Jake worked out something was up this morning when he found out that his grandparents were taking him and Sophie to daycare, and asked if Pollo was going to heaven today. When we nodded, eyes full of tears, he leaned to give him a pat and a kiss and told him he would miss him. I'm sure we'll discuss Pollo more over the coming days with Jake and how it's important to keep our memories of him alive by talking about him more.

Pollo didn't look great towards the end, and that's not really how I want to remember him, because the skinny emaciated cat he became is not what my memory says he was. Even the idea of him being the states conflicts with this memory, which is of him, fat and chubby,  on the windowsill in our house in Leeds next to the tumbler dryer, gently snoring behind the curtains. That's the picture I will always have of him in my mind (and indeed that multiple people have sent me when we told them the news!).

So here's to Pollo, thus named because when he first arrived in our house, he hid under everything for the first week like a big chicken. The name also comes from playing "hunt the cat" around the house, where we felt like we were playing Marco Polo with him, calling out to him and hearing him respond in his traditional yowl.

Here's to Pollo who gave us a heart attack on the first day we got him by hiding in our kitchen for 24 hours. We honestly couldn't work out if we had actually got two cats, or if one had some escape despite our best efforts to keep all doors shut. Eventually, my wife found him nestled in a notch in between the top of the fridge and the built in cabinets. I still don't know how he found that space comfortable, or how my wife's hearing managed to work out this unusual hiding spot.

Here's to Pollo who lived in permanent optimism of getting wet food. Anytime that we opened a can of kidney beans, he would come running and meowing and wouldn't stop until you let him sniff it and realise that it wasn't cat food. It was actually one thing that tipped us off that the end was near when we tried to feed him a pouch of wet food and he didn't touch it. He never quite realised that giving him wet food was always our way of getting him to take his meds as he always lick the bowl clean.

Here's to Pollo who took comfort everywhere, and had a special penchant for lying on scrunched up newspaper. Don't ask me how, but he always made it look like a memory foam mattress. He would also fall asleep leaning on things, and my friend Vicky sent me the most wonderful picture of him sleeping on the windowsill (of course!) and smushing his face into her handbag. I'm pretty sure that his head would have stayed that way had we removed it.

Here's to Pollo who will always stay in our family's memory as Sophie's first "word" (She would scream the word KITTAH whenever she saw him) Right from the word go, she has always been obsessed with him, and slowly over time he has got used to her and allowed her to practise "gentle hands" on him. There's a lot of cute pictures of her staring lovingly at him, with Pollo staring back in a "oh just get on with it" kind of look on his face.

Here's to Pollo, half of our first fur babies. He became an integral part of our life in Leeds and everyone recognised his yowl (earning him the nickname Yowlsey). Pollo even changed how people used our house, after he pulled Matt's coat off the radiator and peed on it, which forced us to buy coat hooks to put everything out of his reach. Our phones were filled with photos of him and his sister and to say that he will be missed is a massive understatement.

So here's to Pollo, gone but not forgotten.