Picket Fence Post

. . . after the death of our family’s 18-year-old cat before the words were uttered:

“I want to get a dog.”

Here I was in mourning, having never lived in a house/apartment post-college without this tiger-striped cat, while The Spouse was deeply sad after having witnessed the cat being put to sleep, and the 10-year-old girl was already talking about getting a dog. (Whenever the issue had come up in the past, our response had been that we wouldn’t even entertain the notion of having a dog while we still had our geriatric cat.)

We’d just had a toast to the deceased feline at dinner. We’d looked at old photos when she was but a small kitty. The kids were having on-again/off-again crying/sniffling jags. We all noted how strange it was not to have the cat’s water and food bowl in that corner of the kitchen, and how we knew it would be a long time before we’d stop looking for her underfoot as we walked around the kitchen.

So less than 10 hours after the death of our cat, the suggestion that we now get a dog threw us. (The cat’s remains haven’t even been handled yet.)

“It’s way too early to talk about something like that,” I said, looking at The Spouse incredulously.

“Maybe for Christmas, you could get a dog for them,” the Eldest Boy said to The Spouse and I as we washed the dinner dishes, referring to his two siblings who kept chattering about a dog as if they were the Obama girls.

Guess my worries over how the kids would handle it all — as well as the trauma of witnessing a couple of our cat’s violent seizures in her last hours — were for naught.