Paco

This weekend we had to put one of our cats to sleep. I won't go in to details about what happened, but I wanted to write something about him.

We had Paco for roughly six years. We were eating at a Mexican restaurant with my cousin and her husband. As we were leaving, we passed by a car and heard loud meowing, and we couldn't tell if a cat was under the car or in the trunk. We finally figured out that there was a kitten inside the body of the car, and we found a hole in the driver's side rear wheel well that this kitten must have climbed in to and couldn't back out.

One of us talked some of the guys from the kitchen to come help us lift the back of the car up enough for my wife to slip her arm into this hole and retrieve this freaked out kitten. Once she pulled him out we knew he was going home with us. He was black and white and we named him Paco since it was outside the Mexican restaurant.

He was always skittish of new people and kept to himself away from the excitement when there was anything happening. Eventually he could warm up to people and come out from hiding when everything was quiet. We think that he rode in the car for some amount of time before ending up at the restaurant, and was traumatized for it.

Fast forward to this weekend...and I don't know what to say. Things happen too quickly, and it's true that you never realize how good things are until something happens. It's almost surreal how different it is now, and I can't help but think of my own mortality; how easily things can change in an instant and how many things are beyond our control.

I had almost convinced myself not to write about this - I mean, this is just some silly journal. Do I really need to expose myself like this? I still have a hard time actually talking about it, so maybe this is the right place for it. I'm not sure yet.