Yellow Kitty came into our lives on a sunny July morning. He left us on the same day we took Baghdad. That Wednesday morning, after taking L to school, I opened a can of wet cat food to feed Kitty, and he wouldn't eat it. He looked at it for a while, then walked away from the dish. I gave the food to Loki, instead. Loki really enjoyed it! I went looking for Kitty to take him for his last dose of sub-q's and kidney test, and I couldn't find him. I called and called and he didn't even give a "here I am" meow. I finally found him wadded up in a ball behind L's door, facing into the corner. I've seen this kind of behavior in cats before, and I knew what it meant. I called to reschedule his appt. for later in the day, so L could say goodbye to him after school.
Then I retrieved Kitty from behind the door. When I picked him up, he started making this awful "I'm in pain, you're hurting me" sound. I wrapped him in a towel, carried him into the living room and put him on my lap. He just laid there on me as I held his head and petted him. His fur was hot like he had been lying in the sun. He was still making "I hurt" noises, so I tapped into his energy and took the pain and fever away. When his body cooled down he slid off me and went back to behind the door.
I told L that this was Kitty's last day when I picked him up from school, and he cried some, then he visited with Kitty and cried some more, then like any normal 12 yr. old boy, he went outside to play for a while. When it came time for Hubby and I to leave, L asked me to tell Yellow Kitty that he would miss him. It was the last words we said to him.

When I was a kid, we had to put a pet down. We took the cat to the vet, said our good bye's and left him there. Not so this time. We didn't want him to die alone on a table, so we stayed with him through it.
The vet, who I highly recommend by the way, gave him a sedative shot in the butt, which seemed to hurt like hell. Kitty meowed and hissed and bit at my sleeve, then the sedative kicked in and he totally relaxed. He laid there with his eyes open, and we watched his pupils dilate and contract, dilate and contract. We joked that he was tripping, and we hoped it was a good one. We petted him the whole time the sedative was taking full affect. After a while, the vet returned and gave him a second shot. A few seconds passed by, and the vet said "Alright. He's gone. You can stay as long as you like." Hubby and I cried, stroked Kitty's body, cried some more, got ourselves under control, cried some more, etc. I did not feel Kitty go. I felt him still there not breathing, and then I spent some time crying and trying to breathe around the tight lump in the back of my throat, and when I looked again it was just a furry body. My eyes panned from Kitty to the wall, to my Hubby to the other wall, and I saw little twinkly gnat-snowflakes fluttering behind me and Hubby. In typical me-fashion, I thought, "Kitty hasn't been dead long enough to draw bugs, why are there gnats by Buck's head?" I looked all around watching the twinklies flutter between us and the wall, and said "Do YOU see the twinklies?" He said, in a kind of sad voice, "No, I don't see them." When the twinklies went away all at once, we left the body and paid our $55 bill and went home. On the way home, I suggested that perhaps what I saw was because I had rubbed my eyes before seeing the Kitty snowflakes. My wonderful husband said "I prefer to think it was Yellow Kitty." And he meant it!
I DID rub my eyes. Petting the cat and then wiping tears made my allergies flare up, and my eyes itched. So I put a kleenex to my eyes and rubbed a bit. I took the kleenex down, looked at it, looked at Kitty, looked at the wall, looked at Buck, THEN saw the sparkles along side of us, but not between us or overlaying Buck's face. I like to think it was Yellow Kitty too. I am honored that he chose to share his life with us. He was a fabulous cat.