Goodbye, Dear Friend

As you can see from the above photo, I've been a cat person pretty much my entire life.

I really can't remember any length of time during my marriage that Heather and I haven't had a cat.

When we first got married, we bought a kitten, a Siberian/Himalayan mix (or something like that) that we named Stormcloud, Storm for short. She looked like a cloud, soft white with bits of grey, a little fluff ball with blue eyes. Sadly, less then 3 months into owning her, she was diagnosed with feline leukemia and we had to put her down.

About 3 years later, we received George from our neighbor's, Frank and Denise. George was a short haired, grey, tiger stripped tabby. He was awesome. We got him when Taylor was about a year old, and he lived with us for the next 14 or so years. Being an outdoor cat, that's a pretty long time. The night he died, I buried him in our backyard, and it was a pretty hard thing to do. So hard in fact, that I got rid of everything cat related in my house and just threw it away and told my wife I was done with animals.

She had other ideas.

About 3 months later, around March, she came home with a kitten. Barely 6 weeks old, infested with fleas, skinny, and able to fit into the palm of my hand. When we took him to the vet, the vet made the comment that we had truly rescued this cat due to the shape that he was in.

We named him Wolverine. (No, I did not name him, Heather did, she has a thing for X-men).

And he grew on me. He grew on Heather. He grew on everyone who came over to the house. And well, he... well.. he just grew.

He would sit with us at the dinner table, just watching us eat, or he would sit on the back of the couch and flip you with his tail while you watched a movie, or he would let you pet him a few times, just to lull you into a false sense so he could bite you.

He was a cool cat.

Last night, for no reason, he walked out of Taylor's room, laid on the living room floor and passed away. 15 minutes earlier he was fine, sitting in Taylor's room, just chilling. Then he was gone.

When I saw him, I knew immediately, something was wrong. I knew he was gone. I knew without knowing. I really didn't want him to go. I was so hoping that he was somehow playing, or something. But I knew he was gone.

So late last night, I went back out into my backyard, and laid Wolverine to rest, just a few feet away from our other cat George, and said goodbye to another good friend.

Needless to say...

It sucked.

Wolverine