{"id":8568,"date":"2012-07-24T06:27:05","date_gmt":"2012-07-24T04:27:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.breigh.com\/wordpress\/?p=8568"},"modified":"2012-07-24T06:43:38","modified_gmt":"2012-07-24T04:43:38","slug":"rip-spencer-1996-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/archives\/8568","title":{"rendered":"RIP Spencer (1996-2012)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday we said goodbye to Spencer<\/a>, the craziest, quirkiest, wildest, most amazingly and frustratingly unique cat I have ever known.  Inside this house he was incredibly affectionate but always into mischief\u2026 he was always getting into something and giving me funny things to write about.  Like the time I caught him fishing in the turtle tank<\/a> or the time he somehow took the door off the hinges to get to the spare room<\/a>.  <\/p>\n

From the moment I took him home he made sure I knew that he wasn\u2019t going to make my life easy, but he also showed me that even though I apparently absolutely hate cats and everything that comes along with them\u2026 that I was fully capable of loving him in spite of it all.  He was affectionate, funny, and loyal to me like no other.   I was the only person who could do anything with him, while others lived in fear of ended up shredded.  I admit, I sort of loved that.<\/p>\n

I am completely devastated.  I know he was old, I know his health was deteriorating rapidly and I know it was the right thing to do\u2026 but I feel completely and utterly heartbroken.  I knew that no matter how much he drove me nuts over the years that when the time came to say goodbye that I\u2019d be absolutely shattered, and I am.  I feel so incredibly sad and more than anything I feel guilty.  Guilty for all the times he frustrated me and I fantasized about cat free life, for the times I tried to rehome him, and for all the times he ate my plants, scratched my furniture and shed all over everything\u2026 making some small part of me wish he wasn\u2019t here.  I wish I\u2019d never had any of those thoughts, because I did <\/em>love him and I never REALLY wanted him gone.  <\/p>\n

Now that he is gone the house feel so empty without him.  He had such a presence in this house and in my heart, and both just feel so empty without him now.   He was my longest relationship other than my parents\u2026 I had him almost 17 years, that\u2019s longer than I have been with my husband!<\/p>\n

Taking him to the vet and making the decision to put him to sleep was horrible.  Watching it was horrible. Everyone says that they just get a needle and fall asleep\u2026 well not SPENCER!  I know I\u2019ll look back on it and laugh one day, because it was so HIM, to fight them right to the end, but it was so hard to watch.   He has always hated the vet and was one of those cats that need the giant gloves and blanket.  So he struggled, screamed, thrashed and everything else while they were trying to give him the needle.  Nothing we\u2019ve not seen a hundred times, but it was harder this time because we knew what that needle meant.  The struggle somehow made it not so much a peaceful end, but like we were actually KILLING him.  <\/p>\n

Once they managed to get the needle into him, we were able to lay him in his bed and stroke him and say our goodbyes as he went to sleep, and I\u2019m glad for that, but I\u2019d be lying if I said the entire process wasn\u2019t horrible for us.  Xander<\/a> can see it all a bit better than I can, he sort of thought it was appropriate that Spencer went out like that, because he is a fighter, but for me\u2026 it was just incredibly sad.<\/p>\n

When I came home, it was extremely difficult, because once again I found myself in a typical situation where I would normally eat to numb the pain, and that wasn\u2019t possible anymore.  If this had been 2 years ago it would have been McDonald\u2019s for dinner and then spending the evening consoling myself with a bag of Maltesers.  Hard for the non food-addict \/ emotional eater to understand but it really was like a drug that would tone down these extreme emotions.  <\/p>\n

Now?  All I can do is FEEL and DEAL and holy shit, it\u2019s hard and it sucks.  I have to just cry my heart sore, talk it out and deal with it and it\u2019s completely foreign to me.  I just sat and cried and was completely twitchy with frustration from not knowing what in the hell to do with myself, what to do to make it feel better\u2026 it sucked, it just fucking sucked.  On the flip side, I wasn\u2019t even hungry.  My husband had to keep telling me to eat because while I knew that the food is how I would have dealt before, not only was the ability gone but the hunger was as well.  A very strange and frustrating feeling.  I\u2019ve always wished I was one of those people who COULDN\u2019T eat when I was sad or stressed, rather than wanting to eat everything in sight\u2026 now I guess I am.<\/p>\n

So all of this together, the guilt, the fresh memories of the vet, the sadness and the emptiness in the house \u2026 yeah, I\u2019m just pretty damn miserable at the moment and all I can do is ride it out and let it run its course.  I am just SO FUCKING SAD and I miss him so much.<\/p>\n

Farewell, you crazy, crazy, annoying, adorable bastard.  I love you.<\/p>\n

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Yesterday we said goodbye to Spencer, the craziest, quirkiest, wildest, most amazingly and frustratingly unique cat I have ever known.  Inside this house he was incredibly affectionate but always into mischief\u2026 he was always getting into something and giving me funny things to write about.  Like the time I caught him fishing in the turtle …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8599,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,20],"tags":[394,391,62,630,83],"class_list":["post-8568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-man-thats-sad","category-the-zoo","tag-cats","tag-death","tag-pets","tag-sadness","tag-spencer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8568"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8603,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8568\/revisions\/8603"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}