A Brief Visit
We said goodbye to Darwin yesterday, who in his short, five month tenure with us still managed to become a fixture in our house. Darwin was, for a cat, incredibly old, and the part of his story that we know is a sorry one. At some point in his life he had developed kidney disease, which causes cats to urinate frequently and not always in the litter box. Peeing around the house caused his family to evict him to their barn. At some point after that, his family sold the house and moved, but they left Darwin. Acts like this defy my comprehension and reinforce my uncertainty about a shared, inherent goodness in our species. Neighbors later found him sleeping in the middle of the road and delivered him to the animal hospital where Lauren works. The neighbors related the scant bits we know of his story; veterinary records confirm that Darwin was 20 years old when he arrived in our care. Lauren’s hospital agreed to keep him as a “hospital cat” for the remainder of what time he had left, which ...