The Lady and the Milktiger

Once upon a time there was a Young Lady- twenty years young, to be exact- who was, for the first time in her life, going to live alone.  She was an introvert, so this wasn't as daunting as it might have been, and anyway several of her best friends were living in the apartments across the hallway and directly beneath her- but still, it was going to be odd, to come home to an empty apartment every day, and so she decided to get a cat.

She went to the animal shelter with her grandfather, and when they got there a small, pale orange kitten yowled at them, and reached out and popped the Young Lady's grandfather on the head: they took to one another immediately.  The Young Lady, however, diligently walked through the entire shelter and saw all the available cats and kittens, before coming back to the noisy one, who was still "talking" loudly to anyone who would listen.

It would be nice to have someone answer when I say hello, thought the Young Lady, and so she adopted the kitten, whom she dubbed "Milktiger Kink" for his stunted, kinked tail, and the fact that his markings made him look like nothing so much as a tiger cub who had been dipped in milk.

She called him Kink for short, and brought him home to the little one-bedroom apartment, where he did, indeed, fill it with noise.

Kink, as it turned out, was a bit of a hellspawn.  An evil, demonic hellspawn that gave the Young Lady (and others) a number of scars over the course of his kitten-and-young-adulthood.  But the Young Lady had claimed responsibility for his life, and that meant sticking with him, no matter how bloodthirsty and vicious he could be.

Fortunately for the Young Lady, Kink finally mellowed out around age seven.  How much this had to do with her moving him 3000 miles cross-country so she could get married, the world may never know.  But the fact remained that Kink eventually settled down into a perfectly reasonable, non-attack-cat, who shared his human with first a husband, then a second cat, then two rats, a dog, and eventually two small humans who could be a little hazy on the concept of "gentle"- and not a one of them was ever so much as bloodied.

And then one day, about eighteen years after he'd come into her life, the Lady noticed that Kink seemed to be... going blind.

And she knew that the Downward Spiral was beginning.

Or, rather, that it was Accelerating- after all, it had been nearly a year since they'd had to start giving him fluids, and changed his diet to support his kidneys.

So the Lady took Kink in for his annual check up, and the doctor confirmed what she'd feared: he had gone completely blind, his blood pressure was high, and his kidneys were failing.

There were things that could be done to extend his life, the doctor said- but the Lady chose not to do them.  Instead the Lady chose to bring Kink home so he could have a few final days of cheese and tuna and goodbyes to family and old friends.  And then, two weeks later, she took him back to the doctor for his Final Visit.

Because the Lady had claimed responsibility for his life, and that meant sticking with him, no matter how painful.