A letter from Brett and Shelly Faucett in Thailand
April13, 2009
Friends,
It was Sunday night and we were just saying goodbye to a friend who was visiting us from our church back in California.
I dropped Erin off at her hotel and headed home. During the drive, I got a call from Acacia that her cat, Tiger Lilly, was having a hard time breathing and her tongue was dark purple.
This was about 11:00 p.m. When I got home, Shelly and Acacia grabbed Tiger and wisked her off to the animal hospital. They seemed to be gone forever. I started to worry and called them to get an update.
Anna with her note about Tiger which will also be attached to the hot air lantern.
Shelly said that they took an X-ray and it showed that Tiger was only able to use 10 percent of her lungs. She apparently had some sort of infection, and her previous injury was making it worse. (For those who follow our blog, you may remember when Tiger had her ribs broken and her heart was bruised. Evidently, somebody had kicked her really hard.)
Shelly called me back to say that the vet would keep her and do whatever it took to keep her alive. Shelly and Acacia finally got home around midnight, and Acacia went off to bed.
We got a call about an hour later that Tiger had died. My heart sank. This is the third cat that has died in the short time that we've been here.
In the morning I took the girls to school without telling them that Tiger had gone to heaven. (Shelly left that morning to go to Nepal for a week. She was very hesitant to leave under the circumstances, but I assured her that it would be OK and that I would handle it.)
Acacia tamping down to earth on Tiger's grave. We had a burial ceremony and said a prayer for Tiger.
When I picked the girls up from school I had a very heavy heart. I sat on a bench in the school playground and told my little girl that her cat went up to heaven. She immediately started crying, and I held her in my arms and started crying too. I wasn't crying so much for the cat, but for my little girl's heart, which was breaking once again.
The girls have a tendency to gravitate to their Mom when something like this happens. I think maybe Shelly’s leaving and my having to deal with this alone was not a coincidence. I think God had a hand in this that helped create a deeper bond between my daughter and me.
Brett
The 2009 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 110
