Hi. I was struck by your comment that you can't imagine life without cats and dogs. You see, I have 4 cats, oldest is 15 and the youngest is 2. They make my life worthwhile. What I am worried about is how they will survive without me. They are all rescue cats, abandoned by former neighbors in my condo community. Heh! Community is an over-rated term. When I moved into my place in 1982 it was a fairly tight knit community. But then in the early 2000s (between 2006 and 2010) we had the mortgage fraud crisis which evolved into a housing crisis. People who had bought their condos intending to flip them were no longer able to. Many of them simply cut their costs, stopped paying their mortgage, and moved - leaving their pets behind. (What happened next was a group of investors bought up the foreclosed units, and contracted with the State to house drug rehab "graduates" . So instead of a working class largely Italian neighborhood I now have crack heads and dope fiends living close to me. )
I fed 2 cats outdoors for a year, then I heard the weatherman say that coming weekend the temps were going to drop into the single digits. I went out and carried the cats inside. One apparently was a "trap and release" cat, and the other was a golden fleece Maine Coon Cat.

As these cats became comfortable in their new home I allowed them to come and go thru my kitchen window. They must have told other cats that their Dad was running a soup kitchen for hungry felines. Other cats began jumping thru my kitchen window and begged for food. I adopted the 2 most needy, and now I have 4 cats, that all like to sleep on top of me!

So while I love them and am grateful for their company, I am very concerned that if I die in the next 10 years ( I'm 69 and 2/3 years old) life as they know it will cease. I don't trust many people, and none of my siblings share my love for cats. I am living on $1500 a month, and I'm not sure at this point what my options would be. I could try to find a "no kills" shelter that they could go to after I die but how could I be sure that any particular shelter would still be around when they need one?

Some might say that if my cats' welfare is my only problem that I should consider myself fortunate. The cats that I have now, and the ones that have passed away, are the children that I never had. I need to do right by them.