Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

This weekend was a sad one in my family: our oldest cat, the nine-year-old Persian named Jasmine, passed away. It was very sudden and very quick, which is bad because of the shock but is also good because of the quickness of the whole thing. We are one of those families for whom pets are pretty much full family members, so her loss was hard. Also hard is explaining what has happened to our three-year-old daughter. She understood that something happened that made Mommy and Daddy very sad, and she understood that Jasmine became very sick...but she evidently hasn't put the emotions and the reality of the event all together yet. This is the first death in the family that she has experienced.