It’s been a month since Kotetsu passed away.

I don’t know when it happened, but his sickness had already progressed to the point where he was suddenly light enough to hold easily.

He’d been living with us for 15 years.

I’ve heard that cats hide themselves when they are close to death, but he’d been living in the house his whole life, and he wasn’t able to walk, so he couldn’t.

We didn’t know how long he had left to live, and it was in the middle of the cold season, and his body temperature felt low to the touch, so we let him sleep in front of the heater.

Even so, even though he couldn’t walk, he would move himself into a corner of the room, under a desk, off the rug onto the cold flooring.

It felt like he knew that he was close to death, and he was moving himself so that his passing would go unnoticed.

He wouldn’t eat, and he would only take enough water from a syringe to wet his mouth. I thought that he might be able to lap up some water, but, almost as if on purpose, he wouldn’t even lick a drop of water off the edge of his mouth.

He didn’t go to the bathroom at all in the last days of his life when he couldn’t walk.

We would have been accepting of any type of mess, but there wasn’t eve a little. It was as if he chose a time when no one was in the house to draw his last breath.

I wonder how much cats watch people. 虎徹 (Kotetsu — that is is his name in kanji) was a cat who would rais his face and look people in the eye.

People are always watching cats, but how much do they really see.
I gazed at his still beautiful face as I continued to pet his still soft body.
It was a fitting end. I could not hold back the welling of my respect for this little cat.