It has been two weeks since Holly left us and it is still incredibly painful. I still can’t believe she is not here with me, I still can’t accept that she took her final breath. I feel somehow like I failed her. I promised her that I would have saved her, I prayed so much every single day that God would have made a miracle and took the cancer away, I hoped so much that the surgery would have helped her and that we would have had so many wonderful years together…and now she is gone and I will never see her again.

I still think of all the times we went to the vet recently, and how she always came close to me, as if I was there protecting her from anything bad that could happen. But in the last moment I was not there with her. My wife told me “let her go, don’t force her to wait for you before you do euthanasia”, but now I think that she was sleeping on the vet table without me and that I did not have a chance to tell her one more time how deeply I loved her. She was my world!

The photo I am posting here it’s the most beautiful I have of her, but it also gives me so much pain. This was a few months after surgery, when I completely fell in love with her “new” face after the mandibulectomy. And this was a day where I brought her to the vet for a check-up and she was recovering very well from the surgery. We were discussing removing the feeding tube because she was eating a lot on her own. In this photo she was looking all around the vet office, super curious and super excited to be there. She was not scared because I was there with her. 

When the vet diagnosed the cancer the first time, some of the specialists I consulted told me it was not humane to go through surgery, it was not humane to go through the feeding tube. When we did the surgery, I was so scared that she would have never gone back to eating on her own and I was so stressed at the idea of having to feed her through the tube her entire life. And now I am here, after witnessing what tube feeding means and how cats adjust to it very well (she used to come look for me when it was feeding time, and she was jumping on my lap, waiting for her syringe and purring the entire time I was feeding her), thinking that I would give everything I have to still have her with me, even if this would mean feeding her through the tube and waking up at night to feed her. Anything to have her here with me.

I would love for someone to tell me “yes, you’ll see her again, her life continues somewhere else and you will join her when the time comes”. I would live my life with joy, knowing that at some point we will be together one more time and that she is doing well now.