Well, these holidays did not go as planned.

Usually when I say that it’s for an unexpectedly good reason, but not this time.

Our cat, Taco, had been sick around Thanksgiving, and although she rebounded for a while, ultimately, there was more going on, and two days before Christmas, in the middle of emergency surgery, the vet called to tell us we had to make a decision.

The phone call came just as I was finishing up some wrapping, and about to drop A off for a long-awaited night out with his friends.

G and E were down the hall, up to their own Christmas preparations, and unfortunately, in the quiet of the house, everyone quickly became aware of what was being said on the phone.

All I could think of was that she had been our Christmas kitty, delivered on Christmas Eve as a surprise for the kids. Losing her on what was traditionally her “birthday” celebration added an additional layer of awfulness to what was already a sad situation. She’d always been a reclusive cat, never quite the constant companion that our old cat was, and since we’d gotten the dogs, she ruled the upstairs while they ran wild downstairs.

Although she was playful as a kitten, as she’d gotten older, she seemed more than entertained by hunting mice around the farm, and no amount of catnip infused toys could hold her attention for more than a minute or two. The best G had been able to do was lure her in with cat snacks to perch on his bed while he played video games, but as soon as he would make a move in her direction, she would scurry off to her hiding places again.

One of the only regular activities we could count on her for was sitting at the top of the steps taunting the dogs. One day recently, Duncan overcame his fear of the spiral staircase and had a free romp through the upstairs. Rather than attribute her lack of engagement with the dogs to an underlying problem, we instead thought she understood that the steps weren’t a haven for her anymore.

While she usually slept in the boys’ room, she had never been terribly fond of E. Even the addition of squeaky guinea pigs to E’s room didn’t draw her attention in E’s direction. On more than one occasion, E announced that Taco hated her. While we assured her that wasn’t the case, we couldn’t do more than say that Taco just didn’t seem to care one way or the other. She had her own space and she liked it. I think my kids were hopeful that as she got older, she would mellow out and become more of a people cat.

In fact, over the last few days, I realized that a large part of their grief was for the cat that they’d hoped Taco would turn into, and now she never would have the chance. The idea that for as much as we miss her, she probably isn’t missing us much seems to be one of the things helping the kids to move past this right now.

As if that wasn’t enough of an emotional roller coaster, we finally decided that the time has come to once and for all move all our old things out of our old house. For almost three years now, it has been functioning as a de facto storage unit and we really needed to empty it out and get it ready for another family to live in.

We dug through filing cabinets and closets, pulled boxes out of storage, and sorted through so many of the kids’ old toys. We had to invest several vacation days into the endeavor, and it’s the most time any of us had spent in the house since we’d moved out. As we moved from room to room, the kids brought up memories, like when we moved the one cabinet, and that happened to be the one that Taco was hiding under the entire first day we had her, and we worried we’d never find her. They noticed the slight scratch in the ceiling and remembered when the Christmas tree was just a little bit too tall and we didn’t find out until we’d put it up.

We finally made some decisions we’d been putting off, like what things really needed to go in the donation bin and what things we really had a purpose for and could keep. As we stacked piles on our old kitchen table for sorting, one of the kids said, “it just seems weird that we used to sit here and eat,” and yeah, it really did seem weird. I felt like I owed it to that old table to clear it off one more time and get takeout and have one more meal on it, but at the same time, maybe it was just better to let that memory go and move on.

One of the other comments made by one of them was that there is no way we would have survived the last two years in “such a small house.” While I realize it’s not so much the house, as it is the great outdoors that we’re surrounded by, that make our current house much more quarantine friendly, I had to agree with that statement. We also never would have considered getting our two wild and crazy canine companions if we were still living in town, and they have certainly made the last two years much more bearable.

So, we spent these last few weeks saying goodbyes, one of them unexpected and one of them long overdue, both heartbreaking in their own way. As A said, “did we really expect anything more from 2021?” 2021 may not be memorable for the right reasons in our family, and maybe like us, you’re just breathing a sigh of relief that it’s over. Here is hoping that 2022 is the year we all need. I think many of us could do with a good one!

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.