T-Rex Departs
We return to the site where our experiments with mobile living began in 2005, the Lakeside KOA in Fort Collins. Every time we return somewhere, even a place we’ve only been once or twice, T-Rex returns immediately to his old haunts. Here he scratches a tree that probably bears the marks of his claws from years ago, and heads for a nap in the rock pile that makes the northern campground boundary. He also obsessively licks at his bandaged a leg as he has been for the past week – a leg that must at last be feeling dead to him. A day passes like this while we do some life maintenance in Fort Collins. Thursday our favorite vet in the area, Debbie Sunken, makes a final house call for us. She examines him, guessing that his hugely swollen elbow is a fibrosarcoma (cancer). A younger cat could handle an amputation, but at 16 years old T-Rex has finally met his match. Debbie and her husband sit with us in the shade of a tree and encourage us to tell our best T-Rex stories and say a teary goodbye as T loses consciousness and peacefully leaves us. His absence will be felt for a long time.
