Content warning: pet loss.
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When I wrote those words for The Wilderness of Girls, what seems like a lifetime ago, I was of course drawing on my own experience with grieving. I don’t know how those words felt to readers, but I will tell you how I meant them to feel: not devastating, or heart-wrenching, or cerebral, or anything like that. I just wanted them to feel true. I had hoped they might make readers feel seen, in their own grief.
But now, I also realize everything I write, though I might consciously be hoping to positively impact readers first and foremost, is also written in an attempt to be seen.
This past week, I have craved to be seen, because there is an ineffable power to being witnessed not just in the good times, but the worst times, too. These past days, I have been full of grief, the likes of which I’ve never known, simply because it has piled on top of me in layers that sometimes feel too heavy to crawl out from under—and other times feel as light as feathers, causing me to wonder if I even have a heart at all.
Our little family at Cluckleberry Farms has been going through it: first, with Rusty’s cancer diagnosis—then a sudden decline in his outward health—then the actual cancer treatment itself, which brought with it more bad news and a series of endless harrowing experiences. I cried a lot, for a grim future that may or may not happen, and the happy future we hope for but may not get, and for myself, saddled with the uncertainty of it all as I nursed my beloved furry friend who cannot understand why I’m forcing pills down his throat or leaving him with strangers for hours at a time.
But the worst of it came when I returned home Friday evening: my cat, Luke, had taken a sudden turn for the worse, and had to be put down. I say “sudden,” because it felt sudden, but realistically there were signs that something was off (apparent only in retrospect), and we had been managing multiple disease states with him for over a year. He was 17 years old and I had been prepared for a long time for his last days to come—I just never imagined it would happen on top of a week from hell where I was forced to confront the mortality of another pet not quite old enough for me to feel prepared to lose him.
I have spent the last many days swaddled in grief. And still, I must tend to our sick dog, force pills down his throat for his own good even though he hates it, and take him for weekly blood tests until we know if the new treatment is or is not working, and whether or not he can tolerate it. I have cried in front of so many strangers. I, having recently turned 40, sobbed on my mother’s shoulder this past Sunday, squeezed between her and my father, for the first time in over a decade. I sobbed removing Luke’s profile from our Chewy account, and again from our pet sitter app account, and again when said pet sitter reached out to offer condolences.
I feel the need to state these things to the world for some reason. Not for pity, but because sometimes you need to throw open the doors of your grief to let in the air and sunlight, otherwise you end up choking on it in a dark room, all alone.
I will be okay, though. I know this pain is temporary, even if the worst happens and we lose Rusty too soon—not to mention too soon after Luke. Grief is a strange and difficult land to inhabit, but one I am weirdly confident navigating. I think it is the one emotion I never learned to fear or reject. But that is a topic for another day.
Today, I want to tell you about Luke.
In October 2006 or 2007 (can’t remember which), I went to a Halloween event at a bar somewhere in Buffalo. They had hired a psychic for the event, and all I remember from that reading was that he said he saw a white cat in my future. In spring of 2006, I’d had to put my beloved childhood cat, Cosmos (AKA The Bean), to sleep at the too young age of 11. She’d been sick earlier in her life, so I was thankful for the extra years I did get with her, but it still came too soon and too suddenly. I had no intention of adopting another cat any time soon, especially while I was still in college.
But the cat distribution system finds a way. In 2008, a friend of mine was watching someone’s cat and she ended up escaping, getting knocked up, and having kittens. My friend, knowing how much I had loved The Bean, invited me over to see the newly born litter to try and convince me to take one. It didn’t take much. They were all squirming around the mom cat’s belly like a bunch of fluffy hamsters, precious beyond words. One of them—at the time, nothing but a white fluffy blob—was aggressively demanding his mother’s attention with the loudest, tiniest mew I had every heard. I immediately knew he was mine.
After the kittens were weaned, on August 11, 2008 I took that white cat home to my perfect little one bedroom apartment across the street from the Buffalo Zoo—and I also took a last minute bonus cat who was the color of smoke aside from a wee black nose. Both of them turned out to have beautiful blue eyes, so, as a proud nerd, I immediately knew their names: the white cat was Luke (as in Luke Skywalker), and the pale gray cat was Leto (God Emperor of Dune).
Despite being litter-mates, they were immediately and obviously very different cats. Luke was bigger, but gentler than Leto. He was braver, but needier, too. Luke liked to cuddle with everyone—Leto preferred to observe his terrain from high perches (but is always immensely happy when I scoop him up and cuddle him). Both of them used to curl up behind my laptop while I wrote at my writing desk, and sleep on my head at night.
When I got a roommate in my tiny one-bedroom apartment, she came with her own cat, Tad, and the three of them got along splendidly. But when I moved out to live with my fiance at the time, Luke was devastated to lose his friend. That was when he began his “singing.” As part-Siamese cats, Luke and Leto have always been highly vocal, but Luke was especially expressive, yowling at walls and as he wandered around the apartment. He was my little Loud Cloud.
When I adopted Lando in 2010, a big boy with zero fear (and possibly a little brain damage), Luke was the first to befriend him. It took some time—they were nervous at first about this beefy, fearless cat suddenly wandering around the apartment. But eventually they became brothers, if not friends.
Life moved fast, though. We moved into a house. We got Rusty. I got divorced. My friends moved into my house with their own menagerie of pets, and Luke adapted again to new friends (Leto, not so much). Then the friends left; I was starting a new era of my life, so I re-named my home “Cluckleberry Farms” and a few years later my new love moved in with his own cat, Mort. Soon after in late 2019, Lando, who had been ailing for some time, reached the end of his life, and Luke’s behavior changed again. Just as he took up his yowling after losing his friend Tad, Luke suddenly began to sleep curled up in my arms—or rather in my armpit, to be precise. He had always liked to sleep on the bed with me, but this was new. And he was insistent about it—he would enter the room with a yowling pronouncement, jump onto the bed, and pluck at the comforter with his wee claws to indicate he wanted to get under them. And he would not lie down until I let him tuck himself into my armpit.
There were many nights of slight puncture wounds from his enthusiastic claw flexing against my arm or my boob. And though, yes, sometimes it was annoying to be woken up by his yowling, or his clawing the comforter, or walking across my pillow, or clawing my boob in my sleep…I was ultimately always glad to have him there. I was glad he saw me as a comfort, and that I could give him such a sense of safety.
It was also in that position that the problems began. He’d had an incident with bladder crystals in the past, but in 2020 he had a very bad episode. He alerted me to his discomfort by leaking a whole lot of pee while tucked into my armpit. I rushed him to the emergency vet where they were able to save him (while I waited in the car—this was during the pandemic) but since that was the second time he’d had the crystals we had to switch him to a prescription food, which was very expensive. It was worth it, though, to know my little schmear would be healthy. But he didn’t love the flavor of this new food, and he started getting picky about eating. My normally hefty (not fat, just large) marshmallow prince started to lose a bit of weight, but nothing we were too concerned about.
Gradually, that began to change. He lost more and more weight, and eventually was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism. The vet said we could go off the prescription food because it was more important that he eat than anything else. So we switched him to whatever he would eat, but we went through many brands, cycling flavors and textures constantly, just to keep him eating.
Last spring, we discovered there was an issue with his liver. We never got it diagnosed because it would have required a biopsy under anesthesia and we didn’t want to put him through that. We gave him a supplement to help support his liver, but we were preparing, even then, for the worst. We tried to spoil him as best we could, but he was a generally happy boy and still fairly agile, despite slowing down and sleeping more. And to our delight, just last month, Luke started eating more. He hadn’t eaten kibble in over a year but now was chowing down. At his last vet visit at the end of July, he’d even gained a half a pound. I dared to be hopeful he might last another year.
Unfortunately, we weren’t that lucky. On August 10, I got home from a 3 day business trip in Texas around six in the evening. Luke greeted me along with all the others; he was interested in my food when we ate dinner; and while I tried to de-stress from my travel and prepare for the imminent stress of the week ahead (I would be leaving at 5 in the morning on the 11th to take Rusty to Ithaca for the week for his cancer treatment) Luke and I cuddled together on the couch—him curled up on my leg, face on my foot, just as he liked it. I brushed him with the massager brush, and was sad about how bumpy his spine felt under the brush nubs. He looked happy, and peaceful…until Nadja decided to walk over him to get to me, and he yelled at her and jumped off the couch to sleep in his heated bed.
And that was the last good cuddle we had before we made the difficult, awful, but compassionate decision to say goodbye to him on August 15.
But Luke was a cuddler and a peacekeeper right up to the end. He was always ready for pets. When he wasn’t sleeping, he was always interested in what we were doing. He was every contractor and repair person’s best friend. He would yell at us from the open windows if we were outside too long. He would wake up from his heated bed every time we came home, just to say hello. He even woke up that last day, dazed and unhappy—though he didn’t seem to recognize me for a while. And despite his confusion and discomfort when we were at the emergency vet, he purred, ever so lightly, when I held him and scratched his chin and told him how much I loved him, before we said goodbye.
Losing a pet is an awful experience. Having to choose for them—without their understanding or input—whether to keep going or provide permanent relief is an added agony, no matter how certain you are about your decision. But I have been comforted by this: it is not just a painful thing to hold a loved one while they pass into the next world—it is an honor.
It is an honor to be loved, and to love. With pets, especially, it is the utmost honor to be loved so unconditionally, and to experience that love in return. Pets serve no other purpose but to love and be loved, and that is a beautiful, incredible thing—something humans cherish so tremendously, we are willing to take on their expenses, messes, and inconveniences, and ultimately we are willing to endure their inevitable loss.
I know not everyone is a pet person. That’s fine. This post is probably not for you, then (it’s not for anyone but me, really). But despite the ache in my heart for the friend I have lost, and the shadow of grief hovering over me while I fear losing another beloved friend too soon, I cannot imagine a world where I do not put my bleeding, tender heart in the hands of these beautiful, innocent creatures. Because no matter the grief of losing them, I am made 1000% times stronger for having known and loved them, and having been loved by them.
Luke, I am so grateful and honored to have been your person for 17 years, almost to the day. I am honored to have loved you and given you the best home, family, and life that I possibly could, from your earliest, tiniest, fluffiest hours, right up until your very last breath.
Yours was an entire lifetime of love—and then some. What an extraordinary gift we gave each other.
Luke Franklin
AKA: Luckas; Luckles; Cluckles; Cluckleberry; Loud Cloud; Toasted Marshmallow Prince; the perfect schmear; my fluffy little butternut squash
Beloved Friend.
❤
June 26, 2008 — August 15, 2025
If you’d like to peruse the (nearly) entire 17 years of photos I have of Luke, I’ve made a public album here. Feel free to leave comments or “heart” your favorites. Some day in the future when I have more energy I will try to make a more curated album for myself.
Thanks for witnessing me and my beautiful boy.
If you’d like to contribute to Rusty’s ongoing medical care (which will also help us cover the cost of the EV visit for Luke) please check out this post or our Gofundme.