Tokaji's Ashes

Those of you who were following the few blips I managed to do at the end of 2012 and start of 2013 will perhaps remember that on the 23rd December 2012 we collected 3 beautiful kittens. I uploaded a blip of them the day they arrived - it's here.

There will be more pictures of Tokaji, the little tabby and white girl, as I catch up with the backblips over the next few months, but sadly they'll all be old ones now.

On the 20th December 2013, in the late afternoon, there was a knock at the door and a woman said she'd seen a cat in the road outside our house. It turned out to be Tokaji. We rushed her straight to the vet, but her body was broken and the vet said she was most likely killed instantly.

It took us several days to get over the shock, and we're still coming to terms with the fact that we had her for less than a year and that her life was cut so tragically short. She was less than 14 months old when she was killed. We've been through question after question - Did she just run out and whoever hit her couldn't have done anything? Was the person who hit her going too fast? Did the lady who called at the door actually hit her (her body was still warm), or was she just a messenger? Should we have sensed something would happen and got them in?

In the end we stopped - asking questions like that can never really produce answers, and the blunt truth is that Tokaji is gone. We had three kittens and now we have two cats and we just have to mourn her loss, face up to it, and move on, however difficult that is. We both lost young cats on the road when we were children - the Wonderspouse was around 7 when his childhood cat Tiggy was killed on the road, and I was 6 when Leonora II succumbed to the same fate. These things, horrible as they are, do happen, and there is nothing much that can be done - we live in a very quiet village, and had thought that this would offer some protection, but that has turned out not to be the case. The only other option would be to keep the cats indoors all the time, and we considered doing that, but decided that their quality of life would be so significantly lowered if we did, so we've let them out again, and tried to carry on as normally as possible.

We collected her ashes from the vets' this morning, and tonight we will open a bottle of Tokaji, after which she was named, and will drink a toast to her beautiful, but short, life. Her brother and sister are still with us, and a brother who looks very much like she did lives with a friend, so, in that way, she'll always be in our thoughts, but tonight will mark the end of the mourning period, the time when we have to move on and treasure the memories of the time she was with us and accept that she is now part of our past, and not, as we had expected, of our future.

RIP Tokaji. We'll miss your crazy ways, your big fluffy tail, your snuggliness, the way you curled up with your brother Carson and allowed him to wash your fur for you.