Thank you to those who sent kind thoughts to Ms. Kili. The news, I’m afraid, is not good.

We got up yesterday morning and scheduled a trip to our regular vet, hoping to get some Kili some relief. She was the oldest of our five cats, had eaten almost nothing for several days, and had been having obvious difficulty breathing.

Earlier yesterday, in response to a comment on a post about Ms. Kili’s health issues, I wrote:

I’m terribly afraid that there are cascading issues piling up, one upon the other, and it’s going to be hard to stop the downhill slide.

That unfortunately proved to be exactly the case.

We came home late in the afternoon after unexpectedly having to say goodbye to her.

It wasn’t how we had hoped to be ending the day.

Such is life, I guess.

We lost her sister, Ms. Wally, in early July 2015. They were the last of that generation of our cats born in the 1990s.

And now there are just four remaining cats sharing our household.

The details aren’t pretty. We had been focusing on Kili’s congestion and sniffles, which seemed to be the focus of her breathing issues. But after our vet, Ann Sakamoto, examined Kili and took an x-ray, it turned out those were only symptoms of the bigger problem.

What she found was that Kili’s abdomen was full of fluid, which put pressure on her internal organs and made breathing difficult.

“There are several possible causes, and none of them is good,” Dr. Sakamoto said.

We discussed possible options, and realized none of them offered Kili any kind of quality of life. It was, unfortunately, time to face the inevitable. We said a tearful goodbye

We can say that she lived nearly 18-1/2 pampered years, most of that in Kaaawa with free access to the outside world, where she proved to be our most adept huntress. She had very few illnesses or injuries over the years, certainly none serious, and the end, when it came, was not marked by a drawn out period of suffering. She was a lucky cat.

This is a photo of Kill and Wally, just after we rescued them from Kahekili Highway back in January 1998. We called them the “auction cats,” because we had been on our way to an estate auction in town when they were literally dropped into our lives.

For the record, we had nine cats when 1999 began. Then we lost Leo (1999), Silverman (2013), Harry and Wally (2015), and now Kili.

And now, Kili and Wally in their prime (photo taken in 2002).