A Farewell to Montana

A week ago today I said goodbye to my beloved cat Montana. I brought Montana home from the vet clinic I was working at in October 2017 and he has been my near constant companion ever since. He moved with me from Guelph to Oakville, Oakville to the Ottawa Valley, the Valley to Sioux Lookout, back to the Valley for a couple months, and then to Toronto, where we have been since January of this year.

Montana saw me through grad school, a few worrying months where there was a small chance I had ovarian cancer, a global pandemic, a massive move during a lockdown to a town where I knew no one and didn’t meet anyone for about four months. He saw me through the most stressful job I have ever had and could never really leave at work and was the most perfect cat for my lifestyle I can ever imagine.

In 2017 he was brought to the vet clinic I was working at to be euthanized. However, as we had never seen him before, it is a legal and ethical requirement for a veterinarian to examine an animal before they can be euthanized. Since the previous owners had just dropped him off and paid for the euthanasia, he sat with us for a few hours before the exam happened. When the vet examined him, there was nothing medically wrong with him, and so ethically she could not euthanize him. She called the owner and asked if we could use what they had paid to house him, do a full work-up, and when that was complete send him to the Humane Society, with whom we did a lot of work. For some reason, the call was never made to the Humane Society and he spent a few weeks at the clinic. I had just started my masters and had switched from working full time at the clinic to only working Sundays. Sundays were a weird shift as the clinic was only open 11-2 and you would come in early to do dog walks, treatments, and breakfast, and open and close the clinic. You would then do afternoon walks and any mid-day treatments, and then local people would go home but I lived over an hour away so I would stay in the clinic and do homework, readings, or write papers and while Montana was there I would bring him into the staff room with me and we would hang out. After several weeks of that, and no movement on the Humane Society end, I asked the vets and my roommates if I could bring him home during the week so he wasn’t just living in a compartment at a vet clinic. And long story long, he never left. At that time I was told he was fourteen years old, I always suspected (and so did many of his vets) that the people who brought him in to be euthanized aged him up a little so it didn’t sound bad. I had him for almost eight amazing years and I have been left completely bereft without him.