This site is dedicated to our dear friend, companion, and family member, Bella. We euthanized her on Tuesday, February 14, 2023, Valentine’s Day, after a four-month struggled with Basosquamous carcinoma. Our grief is raw and ever-present, and this site, a memorial to her memory and effort at healing, will likely evolve as we move through the healing process.

Much of the focus will be on her illness, and I hope that readers whose animal companions are stricken with this or another terrible disease might find some of our experiences informative.

Most of all, I would like to celebrate Bella’s life, which, while far too brief, was rich with warmth, affection, and quirkiness. Her love for us and constant companionship transcends her illness, and I hope that was we move through the pain of her loss, we can increasingly reflect on the wonder of her life rather than the sadness brought on by her loss.

I wrote the following on the day of her death: it’s emotional, unpolished, and upsetting, but it’s a sincere account of the emotions I felt the day we took her to the vet. As such, it might be difficult to read.

The experience and her illness will not, however, be the sole focus of this site.

2/14

The dream is vaguely specific; in it, a nondescript vet tells me Bella’s down to seven pounds. Then I wake up. It’s 5:57am on Valentine’s Day, and I can hear Bella’s claws clicking on the floor near the bed. It’s the first time she’s gotten up this early in over a week, the first time she’s gotten out of bed on her own for several days. She’s taken to staying on Traci’s side of the bed until one of us picks her up and carries her to a chair in the living room. She’s gotten that weak.

Traci looks for her under the bed, then around the house, in a panic. Bella could slip into the basement, hide, die on us. Both of us quietly hope she’ll pass in her sleep here. Both of us know it would be cruel to let her live to that point. We’ve scheduled her euthanasia for Friday. I told her last week that I didn’t want to associate Bella’s death with Valentine’s Day.

She spots her under my side of the bed next to a heat run. It’s the first time she’s done this. I reach her, pick her up. The vet in my dream is optimistic. I doubt she weighs more than six. She was eight and a half three weeks ago, ten in December.

Bella rests in a nest of fleece blankets Traci set up for her on the chair, her breathing rapid and labored.

She won’t make it to Friday.

Traci makes a call. The appointment’s for 11.

It’s 10:35, and we’re driving through Westcott toward 690, which will carry us to 81, the Onondaga Lake Parkway, Liverpool, and the vet’s office. We bought a house in the University Neighborhood last summer, and Traci brought Bella through this neighborhood from our apartment in Hawley Green in August less than seven months ago. We joked that we chose the house with its gray interior to match our gray cat. Now, we’re carrying her away for the last time. She wrapped in a blanket, too weak to struggle. She glances outside, then stares at me with wide eyes as we navigate the roads north. Her cries come in series, raspy, plaintive, though I occasionally hear echoes of her old voice.

I cancelled my classes to spend what time I could with Bella. She lay diagonally across my lap, every breath a struggle. Traci came back from work before 9; Bella, always the cuddler, climbed into her lap. We said little to each other, stifled sobs. I stared at Bella, trying to freeze time, trying to photograph her with my mind one last time. Now, we’re pulling into the veterinary hospital. Bella has less than an hour to live.

It’s 11:35; a tech carries Bella back into the room, a catheter dangles from her blanket. We spend a few minutes we her before I knock loudly on the room’s back door. Dr. Horner enters, explains the two shots. One will stop her heart. The second will propel the lethal dose into her veins.

For her part, Bella lies relatively sedately on the steel table, which just minutes ago revealed just how gaunt she’s become over the past month. Traci and I kiss her for the last time. Traci covers her eyes as the injection enters, implores her to go to sleep.

And at 11:46am, she does.

Bella passed into memory a little over eight hours ago as I write this part of the story. Tonight will be the first night in nearly nine years that Bella won’t be with us. Tomorrow will be the first day I return to a house, a life without Bella since March of 2014. I’ve been grieving for four months already. Perhaps now I can begin to work through my grief, but I feel empty, except for my pain.