A moving memoir of love, caregiving, and loss, as one man recounts the final months of life with the cat who changed him forever.

“Calico Heart” opens with me discovering my normally-rambunctious, 15-year-old calico cat, Muffin, collapsed and out of breath under her cat tree. From there, it progresses to her being diagnosed with heart failure, being given a treatment plan that included multiple medications, which the finicky cat wouldn’t take without a fight, and, finally, my partner and I having to make the tough but humane decision to no longer medicate her and let nature take its course when it became apparent we were terrorizing her every time we tried to medicate her. Muffin’s ordeal ends four months after her heart failure diagnosis with her being euthanized on my lap in our living room. Every decision we made was with the approval of veterinarians. To give readers relief from the weighty central story, I separated each chapter of Muffin’s medical ordeal with a chapter about how the larger-than-life cat came into our lives and made them better in every way. I also discuss the process we went through to deal with the grief from losing our fur kid.