Richard,
Your loss resonates in this household because my wife's cat, Miki, passed away last year. She was 26 so we were prepared (we thought) for her to move on. To this day, I swear that Miki is walking around and is going to pounce on me from a high perch. If you look up "predator" in the illustrated dictionary, there is probably a picture of Miki.
Phyllis no longer has Miki to blame for my missing socks....
Steve
Steve:
For you and your wife to have had your cat, Miki, for 26 years is a great tribute to the love and care she received from you. The disease which is thought to have caused Tut's death, feline hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, is insidious in that it often displays no symptoms and can cause a cat to die suddenly after developing a blood clot in the heart. Such appears to have been the case with Tut.
You mentioned that Miki liked to be on a high perch. Tut confiscated a cabinet over the kitchen refrigerator which had been dedicated to little-used cookware. It is fully seven feet up from the floor. He figured out that if he jumped from the floor onto the kitchen counter and from there onto the top of the refrigerator, he could then open the door to the cabinet and rearrange the stored cookware to make a space for himself. Joyce finally relented, so we emptied out the cabinet and put his favorite cushion in there instead. It became his space.
I hesitate to take up much more room on the Forum for this personal loss of a pet. However, since Tut was mentioned on occasion years ago during the early days of the Forum in exchanges of posts with Chris and our recently departed friend, R. J. Hedley (two other admirers of cats and their inscrutable natures), here is one last photograph of "King Tutankhamen" (a.k.a., "Tut"), in his private "hole-in-the-wall" hideout, plotting his next ambush:
(http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y30/RichardS/tutambushperch.jpg)
{Good hunting, little buddy, wherever you are.}