There was no goddamned warning, the best that I can even come close to thinking was a sign of her dying was that she seemed to take a treat a little reluctantly the night before, but that was the only real sign I could possibly think of. I couldn't sleep most of the night, and kept cuddling up to her. Then in the morning, right after I finally fell asleep, I woke up and realized she had pooped on the bed, which she had never done before, and as I called her name and poked her, she wasn't responding to me. She was still breathing, and I woke my boyfriend, while I sat next to her and watched her, while he called the emergency vet and called an uber, and Princess just stopped breathing. Right in front of me, she stopped breathing.
I told my boyfriend and he put his arm to her chest, and after a minute turned to me and said, "I'm so sorry."
It happened so quickly. It feels like it took forever from the moment I woke up, but it couldn't have been longer than ten minutes at best. I keep thinking if I just woke up sooner I could've realized something was wrong sooner, maybe I would've even seen a sign that she was rapidly declining, something, that would've at least given us the chance to get her to a vet, and given us some chance to prevent her from dying. I just wish we had a chance to try instead of her dying on my bed.
My boyfriend says that for a horrible event, it happened in one of the few best ways it could have. She didn't die while I was asleep. She didn't die while we were out of the house, because we had both planned to go to the gym in the morning. She died while I sat next to her and pet her face, and she loved being near me more than anything.
But my baby girl is dead, and the house is so empty without her. And I keep thinking about her last day and the fact that she was still sneaking cat food by balancing on a shelf and tilting her head to steal one pebble of cat food at a time. She still sat next to me and stared at me while I ate a sandwich and I gave her some of my bread. I cuddled her during the night and she put her full weight on me like she always does. There was nothing to prepare me that I would never have another day with her. And I know there's no real preparation for death but damnit, I could've made her day special. I could have given her a whole day of bones, and stolen bread and all the belly rubs she could ever wish for.
And it feels so unreal that she's dead that I keep turning to my boyfriend and asking if she's really dead. I have this intense fear that she was just sleeping, and we sent her to get cremated and she's going to be burned alive. But I felt the lack of heartbeat and the lack of breathing, and her pupils were no longer responding to light, she had no blink reflex, and I worked with animals before, I am trained to tell that an animal is dead, and it took hours for the crematorium to pick her up, and when they did I realized she had gone into rigor mortis. Every sign of her being dead is there but I'm still so scared that we just missed some little thing and that really she was alive and then we killed her.
