Category Archive: Cat blogging

In Jewish tradition, 30 days of mourning are observed after someone passes away.  That time has now passed for Tiggr.

I’ll always miss him, but fifteen years of memories will still be with me. Like how I couldn’t get up in the middle of the night to visit the necessary without him wandering back five minutes after I got back in bed and climbing all over me.  Or how he would lead me to the kitchen for kitty snacks.  Or jump up on the desk just to sit on a warm computer.  Or lie in the back bedroom watching birds out the window, and “barking” at them.

Or, to go back to the first night we had him, remembering how he managed to climb up on the bed and nestle in next to me so I was afraid to roll over in fear that I’d crush him 🙂

I hope he’s glad to be back together with Snoopy.  I know he’s in a better place, no longer sick and in pain.

He was a good cat. Ave atque vale; requiescat in pace.

I think this is the first time they’ve done this, unless they’ve been snuggling up at night when we aren’t awake.

Tux was sleepy.  He was looking at me while I set up this shot, but his eyes slowly closed and I punched the shutter directly afterwards.

Poor baby.  Run around all day like a crazed Tasmanian devil, then can’t stay awake at night 🙂  It’s rough being a four-month-old kitten 🙂

I’m finally getting a handle on the fact that my cat is gone.  As my reader knows, we don’t have children (except children-by-proxy, one of whom is the mother of our “grandson”), so for us, the cats are our kids.  I cannot imagine what it must be like to lose a child, but I know what it’s like to lose a cat who has become a member of the family.  Maybe we Americans do treat our pets too much like family, but to anyone who says so, I say fuck you.  Tiggr was my friend and buddy and companion and his absence hurts my heart more than I can express.  When the vet asked if we wanted a footprint cast for him, I said no; his footprints are right here on my heart.*

Meantime, as noted in an earlier post, we brought Tux home on Saturday.  Unfortunately he and Tiggr never got to meet, because we were concerned that Tiggr might not take well to being pestered by a kitten in his condition.  But I imagine Tiggr and Tux communicated through the door of the room where we were keeping Tux, because Tux is exhibiting some of the same habits I remember from when Tiggr was a kitten.**

When I got home last night, I told the lady wife that I thought it was time to let Tux out.  We had let Frankie into the room a couple of times just so they could meet, but the first time Tux hissed and growled at Frankie, and the second time Tux had a complete change of heart and charged at Frankie (playfully, so far as I could tell), and Frankie backed up and hissed.  I said I thought that Frankie might be more likely to chill if he knew he had the whole house to back up into, and she agreed; so we opened the door and let matters take their course.

So far they got along just fine all night, and this morning as well.  Frankie is napping back in the radio shack and Tux is nosing around in the hellhole I call my office, and all seems well in the world.

I still miss my Tiggr, but knowing that Frankie is not rejecting Tux out of hand is helping me cope with that.

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* And there is enough of his fur around this house to make another cat.  See, my sense of humor is recovering.

** Although he did not get up on the bed last night and snuggle up to me, with me thinking “If I roll over, I will crush this cat.”  Which is what Tiggr did the first night he came home with us.  So far Tux does not seem to be a climber, although there is certainly plenty of floor space in this house for him to explore first.

We have a proud tradition around Curmudgeon Flats of cats deciding that they are more important than whatever I’m working on at the computer. This tradition has been passed on from eldest cat to eldest cat to eldest cat in an unbroken line going back to at least 2000. Today Frankie took his place as Chief Disrupter of Work as we move into the post-Tiggr era.  (The two in the middle are both Tiggr.  The top one is Snoopy.)

Snoopy in 2009

Tiggr in 2011

Tiggr in 2011

Frankie today 🙂

It’s done. He was ready and he went quickly, in my arms and on my chest, right where he went to sleep the first night we met him.

There was never such a cat as Tiggr of the 27 Lives. And never will be again. So mote it be.

Tiggr, last photo, August 3, 2015, 08:06.

Today is the day.  Tiggr has seen his last sunrise and is resting comfortably on the bed.  We’ll take him about 5PM and let him cross the Bridge.  In a few weeks, he’ll join Snoopy under the lilacs, but they’ll already be together in that undiscovered country where all of our furry friends await us.*

Born May 31, 2000.  Been part of our lives since before we were married.  Monster Cat of 27 Lives.

They really become part of you, these furry little critters.  My family has been keeping cats for half a century and it never seems to get easier to say goodbye.

But with the Psalmist, I do rejoice, and am glad, because he will no longer be suffering.

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* Or at least, they’d better be. If they’re not there, I ain’t going.

Monday is likely The Day.  🙁

We had to take Tiggr a day early for fluids, because he was not eating again, just sitting and looking at his food.  In addition, last night he was unable to jump up on the bed, which has long been my index for “Cat is having trouble being a cat.”  He’s lost another ounce and just wants to cuddle up against warm things (the UPS that runs my radio, for one) or under a blanket.  And he’s incontinent for at least a day after he gets fluids.

I did not want to take him today for the trip across the Bridge.  I’d rather get him fluids and let him have at least one or two more days feeling a little better.  If he doesn’t improve overnight (it usually takes about 12-24 hours for the fluids to work) then we may take him tomorrow, but I think (hope) he will last till Monday.

And I was also hoping for a bit of overlap, because we are bringing home a kitten tomorrow.  He sort of fell into our laps during the last couple of weeks when we were taking Tiggr in; the vet had three black male kittens for adoption, and the wife has wanted a black kitten for years (she was looking for a black one when Snoopy, the white-with-peanut-butter Turkish Van, chose her), and the timing was sort of reasonable.  Normally I’d prefer to wait a while and look around, but when it’s clear that this little kitten is the one, you just go with the flow.  And, truth known, Frankie is going to need a new playmate.  He’s already freaking out that Tiggr is not interested in playing with him anymore.

It looks like he’s going to have a flash of white on his chest…so we’re going to call him “Tux.”  Short for “Tennessee Tuxedo”.

I do want to add that by no means is Tux a “replacement” for Tiggr.  There is no “replacing” any animal that has been part of one’s family.  No, Tiggr the Cat of 27 Lives will live on in our hearts, and he’ll be buried under one of the two lilacs in the back yard, close to His Majesty Snoopy I, who is buried under the other one.  And when the time comes, he’ll go to sleep, peacefully, on my chest, right where he went to sleep the first night we met him.

And I’ll be bawling like a little baby.  Just like I am right now.

I swear, that cat must be on about life #26.

Every time we think he’s about to cross the Bridge, he rallies and starts acting like a cat again.  He spent two days hiding in the back bedroom and coming out only occasionally to lick at the food in his bowl and drink prodigious amounts of water (which he then proceeded to pee out on the bed back there…c’est la vie, we’re going to get rid of that bed and replace it with either a hide-a-bed sofa or one of those storable air beds, anyway, but damn).  Poor kitty.  We were starting to think it was time to take him on that last ride to the vet.

Well, we started him on that vitamin regimen I mentioned in a previous post, and bought some Iams canned food (salmon and chicken, in a pâté form), and for the last day or two he has been really going to town on it.  He chewed my butt twice this morning after the lady wife left, wanting me to put more in his bowl. The second time I think it was just to see if I’d do it, because he then toyed with it and went back to bed.  Sometimes I think his brain doesn’t actually catch up to his tummy.

So it’s been kind of up and down emotionally here at Curmudgeon Flats for the past few weeks.  The problem with the upswings is that we know he’s only got a few weeks left, if that.  And the downswings are just abysmal.

Tiggr may have turned a corner.  He barely ate for two days, then the vet gave him a vitamin B12 shot yesterday.  Today he called back with the blood work results and told us that they indicated a low red blood cell count, among other things.  (His creat level, interestingly, went from over 6 to just over 3.)  So he made up some stuff called Calcitriol solution, which I guess contains vitamin D3 and calcium, which we picked up last night and started Tiggr on.  The vet also told us to get some multivitamin paste from the pet store for him.

All of this was in aid of getting Tiggr to eat again.  The Calcitriol and the multivitamins were for the anemia and general support.  The vet also said, feed him whatever he will eat, tuna, chicken, even red meat if that’s what it takes.

Yesterday he picked at some canned chicken.  Today he ate a little more of that, but his motor really started running when I tried him on tuna.  He’s been a little eating machine since then, and he’s drinking more water than I’ve seen him drink in a long time.

Hopefully this is good news.

(Edited 7/24 to fix time frames and clarify some things…I posted this from my iPad last night and my mind was muzzy.)

We took Tiggr to the vet yesterday for another subcutaneous fluid treatment, but also to have the vet look at him to see if there was anything else we could do.  The vet gave him a B12 shot and drew some blood for a test, and we should find out what the results of that were today.  He said that the vitamin shot might prompt Tiggr to eat.

I think we are pretty much at the end of the rope, but he did hop up on the bed this morning and climb on my chest and let me pet him.  He’s just not big on eating right now.  And none of us want him to just waste away to the point where he has no quality of life.

I hate making this decision, just like I hated making it when Snoopy went.  Now I know how my dad felt when he took our other cats on their last trips to the vet.  It smacks of playing God.  Yet at the same time, I think of animals in the wild who don’t even have a warm, soft place to lay their heads when they decide the time has come (if they manage to live long enough to die naturally).  Is it better for a human caretaker to decide, God-like, that a sweet little cat’s time on Earth has come to an end?  I suppose it is, but in the nature of things, I will always have my doubts.

I’ve known since I was a kid that animals don’t live as long as we do.  That doesn’t make me any happier about it.

ETA: Tiggr, when he was feeling better, back in February.

Tiggr, February 15, 2015.