UPDATE
I just thought I’d update this post to let you all know that Happy passed away at some point last night. We think she passed in her sleep and seems to have gone peacefully. Thanks to everyone who took the time to read this post and comment, she’ll be sadly missed but we feel happy that we were able to offer her a home and a part in our lives.
Rest in peace, my love.
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Husband and I have both been unlucky enough to see elderly relatives fall victim to so-called ‘age related’ illnesses, he more so than I with both of his maternal grandparents suffering a combination of the most common ones. It’s not so much that they developed these illnesses, but that they spent years living with them, proud people needing to be cared for in a way that their former selves would have hated. We had this saying – “you wouldn’t treat your animals like it”; an allusion to the dignity that animals are afforded when their eyes/legs/brains give up and we resort to euthanasia. Humans are left to wallow and suffer while animals are sent peacefully to their place of rest without having to go through it.