Sunshine is dead.

[austin_dern]

She died overnight, sometime between about 3 am when bunnyhugger finally went to bed and about 7:30 when I got downstairs from my shower. We hope that it was quick and painless and not alarming; her overlarge heart finally seizing up, say, between one hop and the next. If she suffocated, her overlarge heart finally closing her trachea, we hope it was too quick for her to panic. We'll never know.

I found her flopped out on the floor, next to her litter bin, near the door to her pen. It's plausible to think she was beside her bin, tugging vegetables out of the bowl, and then decided to go somewhere else, perhaps her mattress, and never got there. But we'll never know more than our suppositions about the end of her life, just as we can only guess a the start of it.

She had been a bit low-energy yesterday but I didn't attach too much significance to it. She'd had a terrible night before that, fighting bunnyhugger's syringes of medicine to the point it was traumatic for both. And every now and then you just have a low-energy day. But she sought for and ate the carrot in her vegetable dish from her final dinner (even if bunnyhugger had dug it out of the middle of the vegetable pile for her). We think she ate more of her vegetables. Cleaning out her stuff we realized we'd never given her any of the mint we'd gotten at what we feared would be our last vegetable-shopping trip. That doesn't help.

We had both been coming to the conclusion her life was getting worse, and that we had to look at euthanasia. Holding us back this week was that the rasping, rattling noise in her breath went away again. This made it seem like her condition was improving. It also suggested her problem was pneumonia or some other disease controllable with antibiotics, since her newest indignity was a penicillin shot every evening. But perhaps her lungs weren't clearing up and instead she was just no longer able to breathe deep enough to make a rattle. The thought is as dire as it is plausible. Had we given in to our plan, though, we'd have most likely scheduled her euthanasia for Thursday evening, and we'd have had to cope with her having cheated her scheduled death by half a day.

We brought her corpse to the animal clinic. They're to send her to a crematory, and we're to get back her remains, and a print of her paw. We had thought some of taking a paw-print in clay while she was alive but the last few months, when her heart was at its most strained, we thought it too much to ask of her.

I am glad that we know she's not miserable, now, but wish she were something.