Last month, Bernhard shared this photo on Reddit with the caption: "He held our hands on his last trip to the vet. Little Andrew was much stronger than his mom and I."

"I was crying a lot, for sure," Bernhard told BuzzFeed News of realizing that Andrew might know, on some level, that it was time to say goodbye.

Bernhard said that putting Andrew the cat down had become the only "fair" thing to do.

"He was by my side for a long time and just had been running out of gas," he said. "He wasn't eating or drinking, stopped purring, and just wasn't himself. It would've been selfish to keep him just because I didn't want to lose him."