Luckily, we’re flying home today after several days in Phoenix for the annual conference of the Western Society of Criminology.

We’ll be getting home just in time, judging by the somewhat cryptic in a message from our cat sitter just a couple of days ago.

Aloha, my furry friends are doing just fine. They just seem to be aging quickly. Makes me sad?

Yes, Annie got knocked down by kidney stones and the resulting infection that almost killed her, and still may at some point in the not-all-too-distant future. Romeo’s been slowed way down by a worsening heart murmur and other as yet undiagnosed maladies.

And then there’s Duke, who has suddenly become the center of concern.

Duke’s 18th birthday will be on April 30. He is diabetic, first diagnosed a decade ago. I give him insulin shots twice a day, morning and evening, and it’s a struggle to try to keep his blood glucose in a reasonable range. The ravages caused by diabetes have left him toothless (like his mother) and slowly going blind. He’s got a chronic upper respiratory infection (likely congenital) that has resisted repeated rounds of antibiotics over a period of years. Recently he’s gotten unsteady on his feet and often seems disoriented, sometimes walking in circles as if it takes a while to remember where he is and where he wants to go.

Now, he’s facing another indignity of age and dementia.

Yesterday’s message from our cat sitter.

Duke is having a lot of mistakes!!! Very soft poop. It wouldn’t be so bad except he must walk in circles and then tracks it all over. Have to wash his feet when I get there….Poor guy isn’t all there anymore ?

Duke’s situation drags me back to the final months of 2008, when my dad was in similar shape. He was suffering from dementia which, among other things, affected his balance and left him dizzy and unstable. He also had difficulty controlling his bladder, and would lurch out of bed, stumble out of the bedroom and take the few steps into the single bathroom of my parents’ WWII-era home, often losing it once through the doorway and spraying pee everywhere.

It was a very sad few weeks. It doesn’t appear that he understood what was happening. My mom and sister didn’t know what to do, other than continue to mop up the urine so that they could use the bathroom.

Some time in early November, he fell and couldn’t get up. My sister called 911, and a Honolulu Fire Department crew arrived and helped get him back to bed.

When he fell a second time, just days before Thanksgiving, he was taken by ambulance to Queen’s Hospital. He never returned home. When discharged from Queens, he was admitted to a nursing home in McCully, where he spent almost two years before his death.

Now that memory of my dad is overlaid over my view of what’s happening to Duke. If I’m right, and he’s sinking into kitty dementia, it may be time for us to consider whether he retains enough quality of life to continue on.

With access to the outside world, a cat that’s sick, or slowly losing its mind, would probably wander off, find a place to hunker down, and drift away to the next life. Inside cats are denied that option.

They depend on us to make some of life’s crucial decisions.

I’m crossing my fingers and hoping for the best, but I’m well aware that we’re reaching some decision points. If not now, soon.