Goodbye, Busa

Yesterday was a sad day around here. Our cat, Busa, passed away. Busa has been a part of our family for the past 17 years. Tom was 3 years old when he chose him from a litter of kittens at the humane society. It's very hard losing a pet that we have had so long. It is especially hard on the boys - for Tom because Busa was his cat, and for Andy because this is Andy's first experience losing a pet. What made matters even worse was that Jerry, Andy and I were in Delaware yesterday. Tom had stayed home to do schoolwork and went looking for Busa upstairs and found that he had passed away. Tom was very brave because he had to handle things until we got home. When we got home it was 11:30 at night but we gave Busa a proper burial anyway. Tom had wrapped him nicely and readied him for burial because he said he didn't want Andy to see him. Now that's a good big brother. I'm sorry that we weren't here when it happened, but I'm not sorry that Andy wasn't here at the time. Busa had been slowing down considerably over the last couple of weeks and over the past few days I noticed that he wasn't eating very well, so we figured it probably wouldn't be long. He was very old for a cat, and definitely lived a full life! We used to joke that he used up 8 of his 9 lives a long time ago. He was bitten in the leg by a bobcat when we lived in West Virginia and we were told by the vet that he might not make it. He was run over by a car and had half of his tail lopped off and his back legs crushed - again we were told he probably wouldn't make it. Something (we don't know what this time) got into a battle with him and tore part of one ear and put a massive wound on his head - we didn't think he would make it that time. Then when we were moving here from West Virginia, at the last minute he jumped out of the car and ran into the woods. We searched for him but couldn't find him. We had a caravan of people helping us move and we needed to get on the road. It broke my heart, but we had to leave. I knew that we would be returning in two weeks to tie up loose ends and I prayed that he would be there then. Well, he was - because that was 14 years ago! As soon as we pulled up I jumped out of the car and started calling for him whereupon he promptly came bounding out of the woods. He had survived two weeks by himself out there. This time when it was time to go, he didn't even try to get out of the car - in fact, he laid down and got quite comfortable! He was a guard cat around here and would actually chase dogs out of our yard. He even chased a pit bull to the fence line once. We definitely didn't think he would survive that - but he did - again. He was one tough cat, but he was also a real sweetheart and loved to be cuddled, purring so loudly that you could hardly hear anything else. Busa was a great pet, and we will miss him very much.