loving oscar, 2011-2025

about a week ago, wonderful Oscar the cat, my best friend of 14 years, passed away in my arms in the garden. i caught him as a feral kitten living under my house when i was 21, and he was the sweetest creature anyone has ever known. this week has been awful, but i’m so grateful for oscar, so i want to write something about him.

in 2011, having caught a few glimpses of stray cats in the back yard of my sharehouse in coburg, i hatched a classic harebrained scheme: cardboard box in the back yard, food as bait, held up by a stick with a piece of string tied to it. road runner shit.

as it turns out, a cat moves faster than a cardboard box falls, but convinced the theory was sound, i swapped the box for the laundry room, which was separate from the house, string tied to the doorknob. i didn’t see who i was catching, and when i opened the laundry i thought i’d been too slow again, until i looked behind the washing machine and saw this:

enhance…

he was feral as hell, he could not be handled. i tried to pat him, wearing thick gardening gloves, and he bit so hard it bruised. i took him to a vet, and they told me to put him down; they said he was too old (estimating 4-5 months) and would never enjoy humans, “never be a lap cat”. i thought “not with that attitude”, and for weeks i took various approaches to calming him down. i made it cosy behind the machine, and sat and sang to him. i put a radio in there, just quietly, to get him used to human voices. i put his food out in the room so he’d have to come out to eat. gradually, using a gardening glove on a stick, i introduced him to the sensation of pats on the head.

i got my first really good look at him one day when the window was left open a crack, and he tried to escape, but got lodged between the glass and the flyscreen, unable to move an inch. i thought about naming him houdini.

i have so many beautiful pictures of him from around this time, i could go on forever. i did, actually: i made a thread looking for advice on a forum, gone now, where everybody loved him. there’s too much to cover here, but gradually progress was made: i sat in the room while he ate, closer and closer each time, moving the bowl further out into the room. i got my first head pat, and gasped at how soft he was. one day i put the food bowl all the way in my lap, and he trusted me enough to step onto me to eat it. not long after that, i had him sitting on me, terrified but trusting.

once this happened, i seemed to become his safe place. on his first trip into the house, he finally plucked up the courage to leave my lap and look around, but someone down the street slammed a car door and he ran back into my arms. he starting letting me pick him up and riding on my shoulders. and already he was a lap cat.

he had a heart murmur from the start, which worried every vet, but blessedly never became an issue. he had lungworm, allegedly from eating snails, but we got that cleared away fast. we were inseparable after this, and he quickly revealed himself as the biggest sweetheart in the world. when he saw another cat, he was never territorial, he just wanted to meet them. he was scared of anyone loud, but he’d be anyone’s friend if they were calm. for a while, he wouldn’t eat unless i was patting him, and after that he still never stopped loving that. he loved flowers. he loved catnip. we had a whole bush of it in the garden, and i looked away one time and he ate a whole branch, bigger than he was. we found him cuddling the bare stem.

at one point, i went overseas for a little bit. i left oscar temporarily with a trusted friend, but a few weeks into the trip, the friend’s landlord fucked him and oscar had to stay with a friend of an ex, who i didn’t know. this idiot only held onto him for a few days, then left a door open and he was lost. i was beside myself overseas, i never expected to see him again. when i got back, i started chasing up leads from people who had called in about him, but it was always just some superficially similar cat.

finally, after 4 months, he turned up next door to where he’d gone missing, stuck under someone’s boiler, and was identified via microchip. i came and got him, and found us somewhere to live. even though he’d been out on his own for months, he made friends with the two cats who lived there. there was truly no feral left in the lad.

he was extremely social. every morning and every night he’d come to see us in bed. if he heard laura and i talking, he had to sit right in between us. i wish i’d been able to give him a stable home, but we rent, so he had many, and he handled it well. for a once-feral cat, he handled everything well, even vet visits and baths.

that last photo brings us to just a couple of weeks ago, when he was still happy and okay, with no symptoms you couldn’t figure were just aging. content warning for the rest of the post.

we knew he had kidney disease since early this year, but recent blood tests showed all the “kidney numbers” in normal range except one – i don’t know what it was, but it was 20 when it should be 14. we took him for an ultrasound, to make sure there was nothing cancerous, and the ultrasound was clear. but the drug he was given to relax him for the ultrasound was supposed to wear off after ~12 hours, and 24 hours later, it hadn’t. he was still wobbly. we were told it can take longer when there’s kidney damage, so to wait longer. 48 hours later, i was told to pick up some subcutaneous fluids to administer at home, but when i got there and described his symptoms, the nurse said he needed to go to hospital. he was put on IV fluids, and when we visited, and got to cuddle and reassure him for a couple of hours, they told us that number was now over 700. with the fluids, it might come back down and he might have a chance. but it didn’t, and he was found to have pancreatitis and anemia. after some more fluids and tests and deliberations, we were told it would be inhumane to keep going.

we got to bring him home with a methodone shot in him, and a fentanyl patch on his leg that could last up to 3 days. we spent the night with him on the couch, then the floor, as he kept walking around. by morning it was clear we didn’t have another day. he was in and out of lucidity, and he’d twitch a lot, often in response to high pitched sounds. at one point, the twitching escalated and he had a seizure. i’ve seen them in humans before, but nobody had told us to expect this. he looked dead for about a minute afterwards, but was breathing, and then he woke up, more lucid than before; he knew us, and we were able to get him purring out in the garden. he was wobbly on his feet, but kept trying to get to his favourite places, so we’d put him there, and he purred. laura, incredible in a crisis, organised a short notice euthanasia vet, via hold my paws. oscar lay in my lap and we said goodnight to him. nothing hurts that much.

the vet was confused about the seizure until he’d gone pale, and you could see that he was yellow. jaundice, which means liver involvement. my boy’s entire body had been packing it in. there’s no way to know what issue came first, everything exacerbating everything else, but there’s something to be thankful for in the manner of discovery – from the moment anything was wrong, he was not in pain. by the time the painkiller/sedative from the ultrasound wore off, he was on IV pain relief, then methodone, then fentanyl. he was awake enough to know us and love us at the end, raise his chin for a scratch, push into me when i rubbed behind his ears. he went gently. my childhood cat went traumatically, so i know how lucky this was.

the week since has been awful, obviously, grief being what it is. but i’m very lucky to have laura, and to still have little daphne the cat, who we don’t think understands; she keeps looking for him. i haven’t worn black shirts out in years, because his white fur gets everywhere, and now i dread the day i can’t find any. any little memory can get us wailing, but it’s happening less often, a realisation which can have the same effect.

early yesterday morning i got up to pee, and when i came back, still half asleep, in the dark, no glasses, i checked for him on the bed, out of instinct; make sure i don’t lay down on him. i saw him. i reached down to give him a head pat, without thinking, and then realised it wasn’t real. but i saw him, moving and everything, sleepy, sitting like a loaf. i hope it never stops happening.