Well, last night around 6PM CST, we lost a member of our family.
My cat, Cotton, our white, fluffy mostly-Persian kitty died, after an astonishingly short battle with feline leukemia (a month ago she seemed perfectly fine). She was still alive when I got home, lying in her litter box (ew) moaning. I picked her up, brushed her off, and was prepared to take her to the veteranarian when she gasped for breath a few times, stuck out one of her front legs, then went silent. It was one of the most pitiful things I'd ever seen. I think she waited for me to get home before she expired. Maybe she wanted to wait until I was holding her in my arms. She was only ten, which isn't all that old for a cat.
She was the most beautiful cat I'd ever seen: a puffy white furball with one brilliantly blue and one brilliantly green eye. Just like a Persian but didn't have the characteristic flat face. When she was a kitten she had a "smudge" on the top of her head (looked like somebody had wiped some soot on her). She was our first "child," my wife and I, we'd gotten her as a kitten before we were married. In the beginning she was a prissy Miss Touch-Me-Not, but got to be more and more of a sweetheart as she aged. I was closest to her because my wife, being pregnant with twins, didn't want to touch her much, especially at the end. I was her daddy and I guess she loved me, too.
I'm gonna miss that cat. *sniff*