This week has been absolute hell.

On Tuesday, I had to say goodbye to my all-black kitty, Lester. Over the last year or so he’s been fighting diabetes and, while he kicked diabetes’ ass, being a 12-year-old cat, he developed congestive heart failure. We’re not sure how long it’s been developing, but at his checkup about a month ago, his tests for his diabetes showed numbers that weren’t so good. But there weren’t any signs of heart failure until just this last week. He stopped eating, he had really labored breathing, and he seemed incredibly depressed.

I took him into the vet on Tuesday after he didn’t eat anything on Monday. In only a matter of a couple hours, I went from believing my kitty just needed a checkup to make sure he was okay to realizing that I was going to have to let him go. That same day.

I am an absolutely wreck. I can barely hold myself together. I had Lester for 12 years. He was such a loving, gentle, good kitty. He got me through the worse moments of my life, and I couldn’t save him. The vet assured me that even if I had all the money in the world to spend on his treatment, he could still throw a blood clot in his heart and die without warning. Instead of putting him through the possibility of suffocating to death, we decided to put him to sleep.

I have been barely holding on by a thread since then. I can’t go home because he’s not there. He’ll never be there again, and I’m not ready to face the reality of his absence. So I’ve been staying with my boyfriend. My mom was with me when we put Lester to sleep, so he was surrounded by people who loved him. No one loved him as much as me. I know that I will get through this, but right now, I am beyond not okay.

I’ve been through heartbreaks and failed relationships and losing jobs and struggling financially and being poor and struggling with mental illness and chronic pain, and nothing is as bad as this. Nothing. I’ve been saving every photo, every video, I have of him on social media so that he’s always with me. I bought a black cat stuffy so that there’s something that looks like him that I can snuggle with. I’m heartbroken. I’m depressed. I don’t want to do anything but rot in bed.

I’m taking things one day at a time. He’s not in pain. He’s not going to die afraid or alone. He was loved fiercely. He lived a great life. I take comfort in those things.

But I’m broken.