Today I had to say goodbye to my cat, Snickers. She had come down with liver disease and a bad bowel infection. Even with medication, she would only have a 50-50 chance of living, and that would require a couple thousand dollars that we just didn't have. They would have kept her two weeks, tube fed her, among other things.

So we said goodbye...

We I was 14, we found this cantankerous little fuzzball in a drainage ditch, just outside of our yard, with her 5-6 siblings. After some time when they all had come out, we showed our parents these cuties. They told us to pick one, so my sister and I chose the most peculiar of the bunch. Our fuzzball was the only tortie of the bunch. We thought she looked like the inside of a Snicker's bar, so that's what we called her. We took her in and for 11 long years, she stayed with us. Towards the end, things started to go bad for her. She was sick about every day and she had the most ungodly poops I had ever seen come from a cat. After 7 months of this and a month of treatment from the vet, those symptoms died down.

The last few weeks made us grow more worried. She didn't eat. If she did, there wasn't very much that she ate. And as the days past, she ate even less until she mostly just drank water. She had lost over half of her weight. If you picked her up there was nothing to this little girl anymore. I had figured that we were going to lose our little one soon. I thought it would be Wednesday. But I should have figured that as soon as mom took her to the vet today, that this would be the last day we would see her alive.

We got the call saying what was wrong with her, and that there wouldn't be a great chance she would pull through. Mom asked me what to do...I wanted to say goodbye to my beloved fuzzy. So we rushed out there to the vet's office and when we arrived, they had already sedated her. They brought her out in this blanket and asked if we wanted to hold her. So of course I did. And it was probably the hardest moment of the day. I stared at my cat, sobbing, because while she wasn't dead, she was so far gone it was hard to look at. We didn't want her cremated, couldn't afford it. So we brought her home with us. I held the box in my lap, staring at it, trying not to cry but failing miserably. Then came the grave. Dad dug a spot for her in the garden....and I was the one to gently place her in the bottom, all wrapped up in a ball in that blanket. I watched as dad threw the dirt on her wrapped up corpse. For the thousandth time I said 'goodbye' and 'I love you' in my head as the last 11 years came to rest, as my dad buried my friend from the drainage ditch.

So for the 1,001st time, goodbye Snickers. I love you.