Sitting on my couch on January 4, 2016, I awaited the heart breaking news. Months earlier, everything happened to be very different. My cat, Sampson, was my best friend, ever since I could remember. My parents adopted him from Friends and Felines when I had been around two years old. He slept with me every night, and he lay with me everywhere I lay. He followed me wherever I went. If I went anywhere in the house, he went there with me. Anywhere I happened to be, he happened to be there too. He was my chunky, little tiger cat that attached to me. He truly was the definition of a man’s best friend.
 Every winter he would bite the tangerine colored fur off his stomach. Vets had told us many times before that he had been totally fine and that we had nothing to worry about. Everything changed in the winter of 2016. He had always been a rock of a little chubby kitty but this particular winter he started losing an abundance of weight. He started chewing the silky fur off of not only his stomach but everywhere on his body. I tried convincing myself for so long that he was okay and that nothing was wrong.
Eventually, he started smelling as if something inside him was not okay. He stopped sleeping with me. Unfortunely, Sampson stopped eating. Then it grew to the point that he wouldn’t even move from this certain copper brown chair in my living room. I cried every day because he was just not the same as he used to be. My parents, finally, decided that it was time to take him to the vet to see what was wrong. They constantly kept telling me it was just a check up to see if there was anything seriously wrong with him. I knew there was.
I never went a morning without uttering goodbye to him before I left for school, but on the morning of his vet appointment I didn’t tell him goodbye for some reason. I thought I would come home from school and I would know what was wrong. I figured that the vet would just give him some sort of medicine and we could move on.
 My neighbor took my sister and I home from school that day. She wouldn’t let us go to our house. She made us stay at hers. My sister and I were very weirded out.
“Is this just her being weird, or is something seem off to you too?” my younger sister asked.
“Nope, something is up for sure,” I answered.
 I was worried because I had to get to swim practice. My mom picked us up and took us to our house, finally. She wouldn’t talk. She walked my sister and me inside and sat us down on the tan-colored couch. I knew what she was going to say.
She mumbled the words while sobbing, “We had to put Sampson down today.”
“The vets had determined that he had skin cancer, liver cancer, and his organs were just shutting down,” My mom struggled to say to her heartbroken children.
 I didn’t even know how to react. I ran into the pale and cold corner and just sat there in a ball. I brought my knees to my chest and dropped my head. I bawled, absolutely bawled.
 ‘My best friend is gone,’ I thought in my head.
Then it really hit me, bang, I never said goodbye. My mom came and picked me up out of the corner and just held me while I cried. I just sat on the soft couch bawling for hours. Then, my dad came home. I heard him, so I walked into the kitchen to see him. He was already crying. I had never seen my dad cry at that point.
He hugged me while he muttered, “He isn’t suffering anymore Belle. He is in a better place where he is happy and healthy.”
My entire family just sat around in shock the whole night until I decided I wanted to go to bed. I just lay there, alone, blue in the face, with no Sampson to lay with me, crying my eyes out. My parents knew how heartbroken I was, so my dad came in and lay with me. He started crying and I started hyperventilating. He went and told my mom and the both sat there with me and calmed me down. Until I fell asleep, they laid stayed with me. I cried all day at school the next day and at swim practice too. My coach, who I was very close with, gave me a warm hug and told me I could go home. My dad came in to get me from practice and told my coach that I was not going to be myself for a while.
 For weeks My coach, Doug, tried to get me to cheer up and would exclaim, “There’s that smile!” every time he managed to make me smirk.
Sampson’s death was the first trauma in my life and his death still affects me to this day. It sounds miniscule compared to losing a family member or friend, but losing a pet is just as hard. The memory of him always stealing my chicken nuggets will never leave my heart.