Merrick

One of our cats died today.  Hit by a car & I can’t even be mad about it because the cat loved to sit in the street & block the driveway & things like that; but he was a feral cat who moved in three years ago, so the idea of making him an indoor exclusive cat felt kinda cruel so that wasn’t really an option.  In a way it was a blessing because even though he was only four years old or so, it was clear he wasn’t in the best health.  Two vets diagnosed him as blind even though he routinely caught mice & snakes that he brought into the house & while his eyes were clearly screwed up from something before moving in with us, he could see well enough.  But his screwy eyes are why he was named after The Elephant Man.  Ever since he moved in he walked with a weird gunslinger swagger, presumably from something wrong with his hip or back & presumably the same issue made it so he couldn’t properly groom himself & I had taken to combing him every day to keep him a little more presentable.  More recently he’d started to gain a lot of weight & it seemed to make the hip/back issue worse.  But he was the sweetest cat I’ve known, the ambassador & soul of our home.  When my wife was pregnant & had hyperemesis graviderum he laid next to her pretty much every moment except for her hospitalizations, he’d stand outside the bathroom door waiting for her to come out when she went in to throw up for 30 minutes.  After Violet was born & started to move around & the other cats started freaking out, he’d let her use him to pull herself up off the floor with tufts of his fur coming out in the process.  When we took Violet for walks we’d have to lock him in the house to keep him from following us.  He was not a normal cat & I am happy he moved in with us & gave us all he had to give.