One thing about Tater cat. She doesn’t care to be profiled. So she wags her tail when she’s happy, she bounds to the front door if anyone knocks, she lets me trim her toenails because shredding my personal meat instead never occurs to her, and, in general, she writes her own story.

So no surprise I no sooner put in a blog post about how great her condition is in her old age than she starts to falter. Don’t define me, she says, and shit starts to happen. Fast. She had a seizure about a half a year ago and has been on oral meds since then. True to form, she is seriously unhappy about being corralled for a blast from an oral syringe three times a day, but has no idea what to do about it.

We’ve gotten a whole lot of cat out of this cat. She was a lot of cat to begin with. She’s closer to 19 than 18 and until very recently she looked like a kitten. A really big kitten, and then a smaller one. She was 12.5 pounds and then she was 5.5, and still kicking, still charging the front door, still gobbling up the same damn dry kibble she’s eaten her whole life, with no diversions. Don’t try to feed this cat a treat or fresh chicken or salmon or even ice cream. She’ll give you the same look as an expatriate Russian dissident being cornered in a crowd.

But—probably because I deigned to rain praises on her health in a blog post—something changed last week. She was fine on Friday. Saturday morning I notice a big clump of fur on the carpet. Then another. There were dozens and dozens of big tufts of her famous fur, her otter-fur, her utterly buttery velvet suit, all over the carpet. And the cat herself was balding along the spinal column. Overnight. Also? Not interested in her kibble. I was alarmed. We took her in to see the vet.

Now, I thought “sudden unprecedented loss of appetite” and “sudden dumpage of fur” were pretty specific symptoms. Of something. Imagine my surprise when, after a few routine questions—no, she’s not itchy, no, she isn’t over-grooming, no, she doesn’t appear to be in any pain—the vet stuck her laptop right on the exam table as Tater nosed around it, and started Googling. For, like, twenty minutes. Which, of course, was exactly what I had done, before coming up short and deciding to ask a vet.

“Seven years in this office,” the veterinarian said, finally, “and I still keep seeing new things.”

She called the next day. The blood work was grim. “And I still don’t know what the fur loss is about,” she said.

I do. Tater has always had a sense of humor. She hung onto her every follicle until the day after we took her nemesis, the cursed vacuum cleaner, in for service, and then she let fly. Now you’ll remember me forever, she thinks.

Tater loves everyone, but Dave is her very sun. If he is going upstairs for a shower, she bounds ahead of him and waits for him at the top. She parks herself just outside the room where all the nasty water is until he re-emerges safe and sound. When Dave developed troubles of his own and had to slow down on the stairs, she preceded him one step at a time, looking back to make sure he got to the next step. Yes, she did. Dave is her guy.

She ate nothing for four days. She still made the leap into Daddy’s lap, and, abandoning the tiny squeak she has used to communicate with humans her whole life, she rubbed his nose with her own and cut loose with a full Mrow. Mroww.

Tater cat had a good long life and we gave her a good death, the best we knew how. So long, little buddy.

We’ll get the vacuum cleaner back in a few days. But she’s right. We won’t forget her.