The last photo

There's always a last photo. The last recorded memory of someone that you can have and hold outside of yourself and say, yes, this is them, this is who they were, this was the last I knew of them.

For Bonnie, this is that photo.

This was taken just after 9:30 the day she died, about an hour after I called to ask the vet to come, and not quite three hours before Bonnie died. You can see there wasn't much left of her. The little bowl contained the drainings of a can of tuna, which, kind of sadly, she actually completely drank that morning. For a moment I had hope, but pure water continued to confuse her.

Compare that to these shots.

This is from last October 14, about a week and a half before I noticed that growth under her tail that sent us to the vet in the first place. I guess you could call this our last "normal" week or so together. You can see she's still very robust. At the time, she weighted about 12 lbs. (Note: paired shots here are 3D; you can see the effect by crossing your eyes slightly.)

And this is a photo of her and Seth on February 15. Not much change to look at her, but right around this time I was beginning to be able to feel in my hands there was an undeniable weight loss. Still, she looked fine, could do anything she ever could before, and was still eating well.

These are her from the last day, May 6.

I look at the shots of her from even a couple of months ago and I can see how much I was fooling myself hoping she'd recover. She went down astonishingly fast after March but I swear, even that seemed gradual over six weeks. It's only when you can compare views like this instantly, without the interval of months, that you can see plainly what was really happening.