It’s been a heck of a week and I know what you are immediately thinking about when you read that: The Blue Tsunami. Trump and MAGA got their asses handed to them this week and it was long overdue. This made me so happy. It also made me happy to see that my dire predictions of Trump’s immediate reactions were all wrong (at least so far). However I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about any of that this week. Why? Because one of my cats, Ollie passed away on election day in a very unexpected fashion. In fact because of this, Annette and I almost didn’t get to vote.
Now I know at least half of you are probably thinking, “Is he seriously going to write an entire blog post about his dead cat” and to that I say: “Absolutely fucking yes”. I know that feelings around family pets differ wildly among people and sometimes those feelings differ based solely on the species of the pet. Well let me just say up front I think that’s bullshit. My pets are a member of my family and losing them hurts. But even I have to admit that the death of Ollie is hitting me a lot harder than the deaths of previous pets did. I think part of that is due to the circumstances around his passing, his general demeanor and maybe the fact that like I indicated in my recent post “We Happy Few”, I’m tired of being depressed and posting negative thoughts birthed from a negative place.
Today however, that can’t be helped. I’m going to share my grief with you all today and if you don’t like that: Kindly fuck off. If you don’t think a pet can be a family member and that losing one can’t leave deep emotional scars, you can stop reading now. I’m neither interested in having that discussion nor am I interested in justifying my feelings on this particular matter.
For those of you who remain, lets start off by introducing Ollie. Ollie was a Maine Coon and we were his second home. He spent the first seven years of his life living with a loving family of four that lives about ten minutes from us. One day in 2022 when we happened to have just two cats (we oscillate between having two and three cats at any given time), I happened to see a post on NextDoor from his former owner asking if anybody would be interested in providing a new home for Ollie. Since I already had one Maine Coon male cat named Tony, I thought there would be a benefit by having two so that they could maybe roughhouse with one another instead of Tony chasing around our petite and aging Siamese cat Sophie at the time.
Side Note: Sophie herself passed in 2024 at 14 years old. Her loss was not easy and continues to be felt. Tony is still with us and doing quite well at ten years of age. We also have another cat who succeeded Sophie, an orange and white female about five years old named Sunny. Sunny and Sophie have a lot in common with one another and that makes Annette and I very happy.
So we all got together and were introduced and of course it was always going to end the same way: Ollie came home with us. Now there are few things to keep in mind here, in case the picture above doesn’t make it obvious. Ollie was a rather large Maine Coon. I think at the time that we got him he was at least 25 lbs and after moving in with us, he eventually peaked at 30 lbs. Over the years that we had him this weight began to take a toll as he had more and more trouble grooming himself which required us to brush him regularly as well as cut his claws every few weeks because his tendons had been cut, which means he couldn’t extend or retract his claws at will. Whereas he used to once sleep with us on our bed in the master bedroom, eventually he stopped doing that. We believe it was because getting up and down became too hard for him. We even went so far as to install special steps to relieve him of that pain, but alas only the other more capable cats ended up using those stairs.
If you are going to take one thing away about Ollie from this post, let it be this: He really was the sweetest cat. We called him “the Sheriff” as he seemed to keep the other cats calm and in line merely by the force of his presence alone. Occasionally he’d get into tiffs with the other cats, especially Tony as Tony used to try and ambush him despite the fact that Ollie was double his size and weight at his peak, however those moments were relatively rare. Ollie, unlike almost every cat I’ve ever had, would greet visitors at the door when they came to the house. As my mother put it to me in a recent text message, “Ollie never met a stranger”. He impacted everybody who walked through our door, even those that came in with a grudge against cats. That’s because in so many ways, Ollie was more like a dog in terms of the emotional support and companionship that he offered. This seems to be a general trait associated with Maine Coons and to some degree that is also true with Tony, after he gets a chance to warm up to you first. Ollie really underscored it in a way that left an impact on his previous family as well as on us.
My favorite things about Ollie were these: His striking green eyes and the fact that he was my couch buddy. Nearly every time I sat down on our living room couch to play a video game on the big screen (an activity that I sadly spend less and less time doing nowadays), Ollie would plop onto the couch beside me. He was my constant companion for video games and was my right hand cat during countless virtual battles. He also had this way of looking at you that just you feel like he really truly loved you. Maybe that was just a side effect of those beautiful eyes. I choose to believe otherwise.
Earlier this year, Ollie started to run into real problems. He was drinking a lot more water than usual and peeing quite a bit more than usual, so we took him to an off cycle vet visit and after running some tests, they determined that he had diabetes and after some more tests they figured out how much insulin we should give him and how often. Now for any of you out there who have ever had to give a cat medicine, you probably dread it and I don’t blame you for feeling that way. However when it came to insulin shots, Ollie was a champ. He almost seemed to enjoy them because, and given the events of the past week I’m making a conscious choice to persist in this belief, they did offer him at least some level of relief at the time. In time his water consumption and pee output returned to normal levels.
However when he took him for that visit earlier this year, he had already lost a good bit of weight. At his peak mere months earlier he was 30 lbs and earlier this year he was down to 25 lbs. That was a striking loss. In the next picture I’ll share from a few days ago, he was actually down to 21 lbs, so whatever the core problem was, we hadn’t actually diagnosed it:
Within 36 hours of this picture being taken, Ollie had passed. He seemed fine after he got his vaccination shots at that vet visit. The vet thought that upping his insulin dose would curtail the continuing weight loss as he thought it was just a sign that he needed more. A blood glucose test seemed to confirm that. After I gave Ollie that first increased insulin dose later that day, things started to go south, but I think at this point we had already passed the point of no return as a blood glucose test the next day showed that his glucose levels were close to optimal levels. He was having trouble walking and seemed lethargic and he wasn’t eating. Annette was deeply concerned and I wrote it off as just a side effect of the vaccines as I had seen many cats react that way in the past. I figured he would sleep it off by sometime tomorrow. He didn’t. I was wrong and there probably won’t be a day in my life that I won’t regret the choices I made in those few hours.
By lunch the next day I was legitimately concerned so I took him back to our vet early that afternoon. By the time we got there Ollie was breathing through his mouth instead of his nose, which is not something cats typically do unless there is a really serious problem. Our vet ran some tests and determined that whatever was going on, Ollie needed care that they were not equipped to provide. So they sent his file and the test results to an emergency vet about 30 minutes away and we raced to get him there. At that point it was clear to us that he was going to die. Annette was convinced that he might’ve passed more than once over the course of that drive. When we got to the emergency vet they immediately took him back and asked us if we would authorize resuscitating him if he needed it, which we did.
Mere minutes later they returned to tell us that his heart had stopped and that they were trying to bring him back. They asked us what we wanted to do and confessed that much like our vet, they had no idea what was actually wrong with him so they couldn’t provide any real sense of what actually came next. It was that point that Annette and I made the choice to end Ollie’s suffering. We went back and petted him and told him how much we loved him as they gave him that final injection even as he was intubated. Seeing the life leave those striking green eyes of his is a memory that will likely haunt me for the rest of my days.
I’ve had pets die before. They didn’t hit me like this one. I think a lot of this is because unlike with Ollie, most of our other pets where obviously ill for some time beforehand and this gave us time to come to terms with what was happening and how it was going to end. With Ollie we didn’t see it coming, despite the fact that in retrospect, there were things we should’ve picked up on. It was a slow insipid progression that lurked just beneath the floor of our observational skills and thus we weren’t at all prepared for it. But it’s also more than that though. I once had a cat named Katie, who went outside one morning, got hit by a car going up our street and then promptly stumbled back into the yard and dropped dead. I loved her too, but it wasn’t quite the same. Of course we hadn’t had her for as long either.
I’m probably going to grapple with these feelings of grief and the second guessing of my actions over the last few months of Ollie’s life for a long time to come. But being as big a believer as I am in self-expression, I have decided to write about those feelings because to me sharing is a form of therapy and something that tends to help me process things.
…and goodness knows that I need help processing this one.
P.S. It was my intent to film a YouTube version of this post, but I just can’t. I hope you all understand.