Guilt Over Peko. More on Starly's Death.

Peko is charging around here tonight, playing with all his friends. Tomorrow, he is leaving and his life will never be the same. It will be a good life no doubt, but the turmoil as he adjusts will be hard on him. I feel great guilt tonight, watching him so happy here.

Zorro too is leaving. However, today, when I came in from hours out raking and shredding leaves, poor little Zorro was limping around, holding up one front foot. I imagine he caught a claw and twisted it, or fell on it wrong. He is quite the climber and there is not stopping him.

He is bedded down in the spare bedroom tonight, on the floor in a cat bed I put there so he would stay off his sore foot. I trimmed his nails again. I have learned cats get into lots of accidents when they catch a claw when jumping down. I think Electra broke her jaw that way. I'm still not sure what killed Cattyhop, but I am not convinced it was not a diaphramatic hernia, maybe inflicted in a fall from a shelf or the top of the bed, when chased by another cat. Cats do fall.

I trim nails now as often as I can, every six months on the ferals here. I net them and do it.

Starly's death has gotten to me some. A person dies, there is no sense grieving for them. They don't know anything now. I barely knew her, and to be honest, got into i with her at least once. I guess her brother moved into her place and is temporarily taking care of her animals. He wants to rent it out, one Eugene cat person said. I have never been to her place.

There was indeed a dead cat in the road, where Starly was also hit and killed. She had left her car running, door open, and probably had seen the cat hit, and went to see if it was dead. She made it across the road, but not back across. One of her best friends told me she stopped in the middle, thinking a car would just go by, but instead, the car changed to the lane she was in, probably thinking she would continue walking into the next lane. She was hit by that car and thrown under another car that ran over her.

There was, of course, a cat inside her car, too, probably on the way to a clinic to be fixed, or just picked up from being fixed.

Starly always struggled to make ends meet. I remember her working a Neuterscooter clinic. She could barely walk. She needed a double hip replacement and was waiting, she said, I think for a surgeon arranged through the Whitebird clinic. She had no health insurance. Next time I saw her, which was not that long after she had a double hip replacement, she looked great and was running around like she'd never just had major major surgery. She said the surgery changed her life, took her out of most pain, and she felt forever in debt to that surgical team who helped her, for nothing.

She died doing what she would do, trying to help a cat, who had been struck by a car. It is fairly fitting she died near a stray and in the same way.