King Oscar, August 2002 - May 25, 2017

Oscar (also known as King Oscar, Oscar the Grouch, and Oscar Pipsqueak Boofit) at approximately four years old (late 2006)

• Let your memories grow stronger and stronger, till they're before your eyes. -Regina Spektor ******
  When I was five, I decided I wanted a black-and-white kitty. My older sister had her own fluffy orange Lenny, and since I did everything Hallie did, I must have a cat, too. On September 22, 2002, two days before my sixth birthday, I walked up the sidewalk to our newly-built house after coming home from church, and Mom and Dad said there was something in the utility room for me. I went in and found my little black-and-white spotted kitty, a clumsy, silly, crazy kitten with oversized ears and way too much energy. We named him Oscar. He was a naughty little freak: I remember chasing him around the yard late at night, trying to get him to come inside so the coyotes wouldn't eat him. But he was our miracle kitty: when he was a few months old, he got caught in the fan belt of my cousins' car. My mom didn't think he would survive the night, but he did, even though the jet-black tail that used to stand straight up as he pranced through the grassy fields was now broken. A few days later, he disappeared for the whole day, and no one could find him. We thought a coyote might have gotten him, but he came back. When he was five, he had such bad kidney stones that he had to go have surgery, and I thought he wasn't going to survive, but he did. His kidneys continued to worsen as he got older, and in October 2014, he took so ill that when I left to go housesitting, I sat by his little bed and cried and didn't expect to see him again, but I did. In September, when I left to go to Ellensburg, I found him, my fourteen-year-old, arthritic black-and-white kitty, outside in the grass, and I told him to live until I got back. None of us knew if he could get through another winter; he had such trouble moving around and the cold made his arthritis so much worse. But he was still alive when I came home in November, and when I came home in December, and when I went back for spring break, and when I went home for Amy's twelfth birthday in May. And then he broke his leg, and Mom called me on Thursday morning the 25th, and said he had gangrene, and this time I didn't get to say goodbye.

• People say cats are independent little buttheads, but Oscar loved everyone and probably purred more than any other cat I've spent time with. He always knew when you were talking to him or about him, even if you were talking to him from the dining room window while he was lying on the porch in the sun. It's still so hard for me to believe that he's gone. I miss you, Katze 💔