At the Request of my 6 year old

We have 3 cats, 1 dog and a turtle.

Two of the cats are sisters who are 17 turning 18 this year.  Tiger Lily and Hexadecimal
The dog is 15 turning 16.  Sara-Bear
The last cat is 11 turning 12. Katydid
The turtle is also turning 12. A'tuin

We've known that Hex hasn't been doing well since before Christmas when we first found blood in her urine.  A trip to the vet and round of antibiotics saw some improvement.
A second trip and another round of antibiotics saw no improvement.
Essentially it came down to the fact her kidneys are failing.
So we chose to just make her comfortable until things got worse.

What we didn't anticipate was her sister getting worse along side of her.
They have deteriorated rapidly over the past couple of weeks.  Moving a litter box upstairs did help some with the peeing in places they shouldn't.  It also showed us that things were much worse than we thought.

Both cats are having difficulty jumping up on things including meowing as if in pain when attempting to jump.
Both are now throwing up every where as well as not always making it to the litter box.
They also do nothing but sleep, all. of. the. time.

It sucks.

Because outside of those issues they continue to be their snuggly demanding selves.  When they are awake, they are demanding to be petted, snuggled and paid attention to.
Yet they are also telling us they aren't okay.

One of the cats, Tiger, is my sister's.  It sucks because my sister is in BC.  Yet I know exactly how she feels as I was unable to come be with my dog when my dog took so ill.  It was my sister who held her, who took care of her at the end.

My son is having a really hard time.

He swings from being happy they won't be sick anymore to uncontrollable crying because we will only have one cat and his favourite (my sister's cat) won't be here anymore.
We keep telling him it's okay to be sad.  It's okay to cry, that all of us have cried and I was crying with him tonight.  It is sad.  We will miss them.

He has said he will hold Tiger, but tonight, he asked if he could just sit beside her and pet her.  I think death is scaring him.  So we talked a bit further about the Circle of Life.  That death is a natural part of life.
Then I told him all the happy memories and stories I could think of about Hex and Tiger to bring him out of uncontrollable crying to just sad.

He then tearfully and earnestly asked me if I could tell everyone we know what is happening.  Initially he wanted me to place an add (he meant Obituary) in the newspaper like they do for people.  I tried to explain to him this wasn't something we did for pets, but he got so upset that finally I told him I would tell everyone on facebook and my blog instead to which he agreed to and calmed down.

So as requested by my 6 year old:

Tiger Lily and Hexadecimal

Born approximately November 1997

Came to be our pets in January 1998

On Thursday March 12, 2015

Tiger and Hex will be crossing the Rainbow Bridge together.

They came into our lives together, and together they will be leaving us.

(Tiger is the one at the top, Hex at the bottom)