R. I. P. My Sweet Cat Tex

On Monday we had to make the difficult decision to let our cat Tex go. We had been dealing with his ailing kidneys for some time now, and in December the situation went from bad to worse. He spent 10 days in the animal hospital and came home the day before Christmas Eve. In order to keep him going I had to give him subcutaneous injections of water and electrolytes pretty much every day. This involves a fairly large needle injected into the nape of his neck and letting the water flow from an I.V. bag. Not an easy thing to do, and he didn't much like it either. I'd hold him tight, massage his forehead, and hope he'd be able to stay still long enough to get the necessary dose. I didn't always succeed, but I always had to weigh his quality of life, and if he was not liking what I was doing, then it just made it harder. He rallied for four months but eventually his heart just gave out. He was obviously in pain and he'd quit eating. I tried force feeding him food and water for the last week, but on Monday he flat out refused all but water. It was time.

We will really miss this gentle cat. He showed up one day, while I was in the garden. I heard a purring noise, looked down and there he was, a very fat cat lying on his back. I reached down and rubbed his belly and said, "Whoa..who's Bhudda cat are you? From that day on he never wanted to go back to his owner, a neighbor down the road. Tex was a very fat cat, and probably had diabetes which led to the kidney failure in his later years. He was with us for 7 years and we never really knew how old he was. The neighbor said he'd found him as a stray, and that his girlfriend was allergic to cats so he couldn't let him live in his house anymore. We gladly accepted him into ours.

He loved Marlena from the beginning. He let her carry him around, holding him around his chest with her little arms with his body swinging as she walked. She'd dress him up, she'd wrestle with him, and he never said peep or scratched or bit. One year when we were outside with Marlena watching her go down the little hill on her sled, he surprised us all by getting on the back of the sled and riding along with her. We videotaped him riding the sled and then riding down the same hill with her on a wagon in the summer. We would say that he acts more like a dog than a cat. He was never much of a predator. When he first moved in we had a couple voles in the house. He basically watched as they ran past him in his cat bed. He never brought us mice, and living in the country, there was a lot of opportunity, right in the basement! As the picture above shows, he had a curiosity about creatures, but didn't attack. He was sitting on the porch one night, with a mother racoon and 4 babies. He refused to com in and watched as the babies ate his cat food. We quit putting out food after that. Even though the babies were adorable. I think Tex liked them too. He was much too fat and slow to ever catch a bird.

He was the perfect cat in so many ways. He always did his business smack dab in the middle of his box, in all the years we had him he never went onto the sides of his box. He tried to scratch the new couch when it was first delivered. I scolded him and he never scratched the furniture again! He would lie in my arms and let me clip all of his claws, purring the whole time. He never got up onto the counters or table and he loved to take showers or get right into the bathtub with you.

He won over more than one "cat hater" in his life and was well loved by everyone who met him. I miss his little greetings whenever you'd look at him and he'd notice. Just a little chirp to say hi. Sleep well my kitty!