Goodnight, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest

Today - all week really - my heart is broken. Our darling young Charlie cat went into heart failure last weekend. After a brief hospitalization and echocardiogram, he received a diagnosis of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, an incurable condition (not uncommon as a genetic disease in cats) that can only be managed with reduced activity and medication to limit the risk of stroke, paralysis, or sudden death. He was somewhat stabilized by medication but never accepted any food after his hospital stay, and his case was quite advanced (cases in cats are rarely detected early). So we made the miserable decision to help him across the rainbow bridge, figuring that the terrible clatter in our heads must have been Freyja shaking a colossal tub of Greenies in Sessrúmnir. We miss him so much.