Chelsea the cat

My mom just called me from the vet's office down in Texas with the news that she had to put our cat, Chelsea, down. He fell in the pool last night because sometime yesterday he went blind. My parents said he was walking around the house running into furniture last night. His kidneys were failing and he wasn't going to improve so the vet told my mom that if it were her cat she would put him down.

So, in memory of Chelsea I am going to write down a few highlights of his 18 years with our family:

-We almost didn't adopt Chelsea. They were giving him away at the general store in Francestown, NH and we resisted at first and went home with no kitty. A little while later two kids came by the house and told my mom their dad would kill the kittens if they brought them home. That was enough to convince my mom to adopt him.

-We named him Chelsea because we thought he was a girl cat. When my mom took him to get him spayed the vet told her he couldn't spay the cat because it was a boy. Oops.

-It turns out Chelsea was too young to be away from his mother when we adopted him. He started nursing from our Golden Retriever, Cali, and amazingly enough Cali started producing milk for Chelsea even though she had never had puppies. To stop the nursing we started giving Chelsea milk to drink. 18 years later he still would meow very angrily at the fridge for a saucer of milk every morning.

-Chelsea lived in NH, Alaska, California and Texas. In NH he would hunt the frogs in our pond in the back yard and bring them to the window. He also killed a bat that got into our house when he was just a kitten.

-In Alaska he would fight the local cats and had a bite taken out of his butt and his ear. It happened right around when Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield's ear. He thought hunting Canadian Geese was a good idea. He stalked them and when he went to attack they turned the tables and instead attacked him. That was entertaining for the family.

-He slept with Cali on her dog bed until she died about 5 years ago. After that he couldn't be in the house without a lap to sit on. He just walked around the house crying until someone picked him up or sat down so he could cuddle. If my parents were out of town or not giving him the attention he deserved he would just go to one of the other three houses in the cul-de-sac and make himself at home, usually entering through their cat doors and ending up on one of the beds.

-Most recently he started losing a lot of weight and wouldn't eat the dry food my mom was feeding him. So, she started buying him salmon- only the best after he grew up eating Alaskan salmon. She kept this up to try to get him to gain weight until at a dinner party at the neighbor's house she found out he had been eating at the houses on both sides of my parents and just not eating at our house. Sneaky.

He was 6 pounds today at the vet's office, 1/3 of what he used to weigh. He had a great life and I know my mom will miss him. Mom and Dad buried him in the back yard in Texas, his favorite place to hunt snakes, squirrels and mice.