Many of you may remember Oscar as the patriarch of our cats or as the loud sneezing animal in the microphone of our Teams calls. If so, you know that he’s been kicking death’s ass for the last several months.
Today, he decided to let Death win, just as a treat.
Aimee and I took him to the vet where we learned that his liver function was shutting down, and we let him know that we considered his duty as our guardian fulfilled. After a brief goodbye, he returned (as my grandfather would say) to the Church Triumphant.
Oscar arrived in our lives in June of 2010. Our greyhound Patti hadn’t been cat-safe, so when she passed away, we filled her open position with Oscar. He soon became a key addition to the team, contributing expertise in lounging, napping, and box-sitting.
Oscar was also a constant companion during writing, and he witnessed many a story in all its stages.
He also had opinions on my other activities.
In January of 2015, we brought him to the vet after a fainting episode and learned that he had a heart murmur. The doctor’s prognosis was grim: Oscar’s heart was effectively a hand grenade, and if we wanted to give him Atenolol tablets every night for the last week he was alive, we were welcome to do so.
Oscar thrived for eleven more years, outliving five other animals.
He was a quiet and pleasant boy who governed the other pets with a gentle but firm aura of command. He rarely had to raise his voice, which was often gravelly in an old movie star sort of way.
He was quite a cuddly boy, though he preferred Aimee because she took care of him during an early illness while I was out of town. He never forgave me entirely for that.
For much of his life with us, Aimee and I both have checked on him in the middle of the night to make sure he’s breathing, and every time he had a hairball, I’d go running for the cat carrier to take him to the vet. He probably found that tiresome.
In reality, he was the Chuck Norris of cats.
- Catnip gets high from Oscar.
- Oscar no longer has a shadow because it was following him too closely and he smacked it with his mighty paw.
- Oscar doesn’t chase laser pointers. They flee from him.
- When Oscar knocks a glass off a counter, the floor rises to meet it.
- When Oscar kneads your lap, you gain a +4 to your STR and DEX.
And the final one today: Oscar once had a heart attack…his heart lost.
Really, it’s our hearts who lost, though we had much longer with him than we ever expected. He bravely endured a lot of health issues to stay by our side for so many years, and I suspect he left us only reluctantly because he thought we’d fuck everything up in his absence.
Sleep well, good friend. My mother awaits over the Rainbow Bridge to take care of you.
