Thanks all. It's kind of rough. We can only guess maybe a stroke or aneurysm. He was still very active and playful so it was shocking. We rescued him 6 years ago during Hurricane Ike and had become very attached to him and vice versa. He was a cool cat with a lot of personality. Seems so weird with him gone.
In 1985 I was helping my friend Jake remodel the second floor of his 3-family house in Brooklyn. It was June. I saw a cat, a manx, and played with her. She was cute, but Kathy (gf and the time and a real sweetheart) would have murdered me in my sleep, so I left her. We were young, dead-broke, and that was that.
After 4 July, Jake's younger brother Elvis, a full-fledged jerk-off ( he robbed Balducci's when he was 16 with an unloaded shotgun - got caught, of course ) he asked me, "Hey remember that cat? Someone put an M80 in its mouth and blew its head off." Not realizing yet that he was a psychopath (he really is) and was telling me this because he knew I would be upset by it, I asked who did it. He would not tell me. I was PISSED, and I will say no more on that point.
A couple weeks later, quitting time, I was in the car about to pull out, and what did I spy? The cat. Whole and intact! I drove up to her and saw, however, that something was not right. Into the car she went and home. I was a real sissy in those days - very upset and concerned about this cat. Kathy was at work and I called her, prefacing everything with apologies. She told me to take the cat to the vet, so I went to the Animal Medical Center on 96th street in the City. They told me she was pregnant, the fetuses all dead and that without immediate surgery she was a goner. $1400. Might as well have been $14MM. I called Kathy to tell her I had to put the cat down, but she told me not to. By that time I was very upset, but then relieved at the same time. They did the work and 3 days later I returned. When they brought her out she began going wild, pawing to get to me. The vets said they'd never seen a cat do this before and they were all smiling.
I grabbed that cat and I never let her go. I named her Fergie because the day I took her home from the vet was the day Sarah Ferguson get married to whichever of those silly so-called "royals" in the UK. I've never been good with naming my pets - I had a cat named "penis", no joke.
We had Fergie for 8 years. She probably died from her FIV infection. But she had 8 years she never would have otherwise experienced. She lived in a house in a state park (Monmouth Battlefield in Freehold NJ), had the run of the place, was spoiled endlessly, slept on the bed with us, and had a very happy life.
Similar were the stories of the other 11 cats in our household. In those days I was unable to say no and in the end, neither was Kathy. The last cat from that crew, Poo, died only 2 years ago and rests under one of the apple trees, alongside Tick, one of my wife's cats. They all gave me 100x that which I provided them. The deal was so very lopsided, yet they never complained.
Now we have two more, both rescues from the wilds of West Virginia, and three knuckle-headed dogs.
The house would not be the same without them.
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