RIP IVF Kitten

IVF Kitten (who, at seven, was hardly a kitten) died unexpectedly this morning.  He was a totally healthy, albeit overweight, cat.  He spent the morning stalking a blue jay through the window and purring next to me on the couch.  At some point he moved to his cat bed, which is tucked back behind a chair and, happily for him, near a heating vent.  He started howling and kicking the wall; at first I thought he had a toy or even a mouse.  Then it was clear he wasn't okay.  I took him immediately to the vet but he had stopped breathing, I think, before I could even run and get the cat carrier.  (What I will not tell the kids is that they still offered to try CPR on him, though by that point he'd been dead for at least 10 minutes.)

He is the third cat I've had die in an unexpected fashion; the first had a necropsy, which revealed undiagnosed cardiomyopathy.  That was also the presumed cause of death for the second cat, which was the first's litter-mate.  The vet assumes a similar situation here, or a neurological problem; it's not worth it to me to spend several hundred dollars to find out.  It won't change anything.

The kids are devastated; at first Tiny Boy said he wanted to go to the vet and say goodbye and then decided he didn't want to see something dead.  He's asked me to print pictures, and I think I'll probably make a shutterfly book.  LG has been crying for several hours now, nonstop.  I'm upset off and on, mostly because I didn't really like IVF Kitten (he woke me up, he had a whiny meow, he constantly got into food, climbed on the counters, attacked the other cat and occasionally my kid, etc.) but he was still part of our family.  I worry about Big Cat, who has been losing weight, and who has a (diagnosed) heart condition and possibly something else, like asthma, that should be investigated, but given she has panic attacks, cannot really be taken for testing.

Oy.  This was really not a way to start winter break.