Thankful to celebrate life with our beloved Sage
HIYA!! LINDA HERE
12:30 PM (PDST), Friday October 6, 2023—our home stopped breathing, everything around us stood still. Peter and I held our breath—knowing that our precious, sweet eleven-year-old house panther Sage had just started her journey to The Rainbow Bridge. All else before and after that moment is still a bit fuzzy.
Many of you have known Sage and “TKS”—The Kid Sage as Savannah called her when she first joined Savannah in their forever home. Savvy was about seven years old and Sage about eighteen months old. It took a long time but eventually Savannah tolerated Sage sleeping between Dad’s legs, or under the covers with him while she slept by my side.
We believe that Sage has visited us at night a couple of times since last Friday. She knows how inconsolable our grief still is. We had so little time to come to understand her diagnosis, let alone come to grips with it.
Just five weeks ago she was diagnosed with large cell lymphoma, aggressive and terminal. With attempting chemo treatment, she might have four to five months more. If no chemo, then maybe four to five weeks! We started the first chemo capsule; but we could see that more lesions were appearing all over her body. We knew it wasn’t working; and that was the verdict last Wednesday.
We are so very fortunate that my best friend happens to be our retired feline veterinarian, Dr. Josie. On Friday morning about 4:30 AM, I visited Sage where she was resigned to stay downstairs. We don’t think she could move. We called Josie immediately about 8 AM and she changed her personal plans to come over to help us send Sage painlessly onto her journey to The Bridge.
I waited to post on Brian’s Thankful Thursday blog hop so that everyone knows how very thankful we are to have had precious, beautiful and loving Sage in our lives. She is much missed by our young Domino and Katie and our foster Dory. We believe that Nana also knows Sage is missing.
I never expected to learn that Brian himself would make his trip to The Bridge before I could post. Or that my good blogger pal Pattie Kleinke, aka Cathy Keisha aka CK aka Stunning Keisha—would also pass the same day as our Sage. I’m so very sorry for Brian’s family and Pattie’s. We know how deep their loss is.
Thank you to Ann Adamus for making these beautiful images of our girl Sage. And thank all of you who have enjoyed reading about Sage’s exploits with Savannah from 2014. She was picked out special by her Dad P—she was his forever Princess House Panther. Sage is so deeply missed and yet—we feel eternal thankfulness to have called her “family”.
PAW PATS AND HUMAN HUGS, LINDA
























