in some ways, i can't bring myself to write a eulogy, so the long and the short of it is this: morpheus suffered a stroke brought on by a blood clot which traveled down to his legs...resulting in the loss of movement thereof. in addition, he had a heart murmur that we didn't even know about. a week before this happened, beth and i noticed him limping around the house. he seemed to favor one of his front paws over the other, so we figured there was a splinter in his paw (we have wood floors in our apartment and they're not in the best of shape).

the night it happened, we had just come back from a friend's going away party. he was in his favorite hangout spot - the bathroom window deep set behind our toilet. beth checked in on him and he didn't sound like himself. she picked him up, put him down on the floor, and he dragged himself away by his front paws due to the loss of his hind legs. beth called the animal hospital, i washed out his carrier, and we got him situated to go.

he yowled for the entire car ride over. i thought that he just didn't like being cooped up. turns out he was in a lot of pain. we would learn that his time was short. any procedure to buy him some more time would have cost more than we could pay and would be too painful for morph to go through. so as much as it hurt, we put him to sleep. this was early saturday morning, december 17, 2005. he was only 11 years, 7 months old.

weeks afterwards, we still look for him when we come home from work. there are days i still think that i have to feed the cat when i get home. beth still gets distraught, sometimes wondering if there was some sign she could've recognized sooner, if she did the right thing by putting him to sleep. beth has had a number of cats in her life when she lived at home, but morpheus was her cat. he was her baby in a sense. she picked him out while she lived up in albany, coaxing him from under a dresser with a cat toy, and carried him home in a cardboard box. he was a tiny kitty, all ears and a scrawny body. beth was a mother to him.

as for me, morpheus and i had our own thing. sometimes antagonistic, but there was love there. prior to morph, i didn't like cats. when he was a kitty, i had a particular disdain for him. but somehow or another, he won me over. completely and totally stole my heart. when it came time to put him to sleep, i wanted to be anywhere else but that room. it was easily one of the most depressing moments of 2005.

morphy faked me out, in a way. as often as i used to tell him that he was a full-grown cat still acting like a kitten, he wouldn't hear of it. in his mind, he was all kitten, no matter how old he was. he retained a youthful energy right up until his last hours with us. even with the slight limp, he was still the morph we knew. in the end, i have to believe that we did the right thing. i think he would've been miserable being poked and prodded and having to get an IV and treatments and all. if he couldn't be maniacal morph anymore, if that side of him couldn't be tapped into at will, it would've been devastated. far be it from me to try to gaze into the mind of a cat, but i can only imagine that it would've upset him something terrible had we taken a different route.

at least beth and i can say that his youthful, energetic years outweighed his last few hours of pain. at least we can say that we gave him a nice home with a lotta love - more than he could stand at times (as the picture below clearly shows). morpheus was the cat that changed my attitude about cats completely. for that, he will always hold a special place in my heart. it will be quite some time before we get another cat. there may be other cats, but there will never be another morpheus.

okay, so i did write a eulogy. good thing, too - it's been bottled up for weeks. i loved that silly cat. he will be greatly missed.