The old guy surprised me.  Didn't slouch off into the woods to be alone when the end came, as many cats instinctively do.   He died on the vet's cold steel examination table, draped for relative comfort in a terrycloth towel with my warm hands both stroking and restraining as the lethal injections did their work. 

Junior was a tough old tom.  It took two injections, one in each leg, and he endured the needle jabs without so much as a whimper.  When he cried out, horribly, it was in response to the drug's shutting him down.  That's when he struggled, and it took four hands - mine and the vet's aide's - to keep him from writhing off the table.  All the while I'm talking to him as a mother to a terrified child.  I even called him "honey" once, after the second terrible cry escaped his mouth.  I'd never called any four-legged creature "honey" in all my years.  I was struggling, too, to fight back tears.

Then it was over.  The kindly vet confirmed this with her stethoscope.  She carried him out of the examination room and returned a short while later with a soft, padded bright blue blanket wrapping tied with a shiny white bow.  I took him home and buried him in the grove of crape myrtle trees my family gave me for Fathers Day last.  That was this morning.  It started raining gently soon afterward and just now stopped. 

The x-rays showed Junior's abdomen swollen with gas that had escaped through an apparent tear in his intestine.   I wish I had known this Saturday, but then I couldn't bring myself to face what I fairly well knew was the approaching end.  By Sunday I'd decided he might be constipated and I suffered vicariously with him waiting for today when I figured the vet could give him an enema and all would be well.  He spent Sunday and Sunday night in the upper half of a doghouse outside on a cement pad that once housed our swimming pool pump.  

He was pushing 18.  I'd had him since the moment he was born.  I posted a little sketch on him as one of the first things I did when I joined OS in January.  Here's a link, in case you're interested:

 Junior in June

 R.I.P.