Saturday, October 06, 2007

: : : <3 : : : In Memorium : : : <3 : : :


Last Wednesday night, one of my two beloved cats passed away after a brief but ferocious battle with bone cancer. You'll notice that many photographs of my work, featured here on Nobodys Buddy, also often depict a certain white cat. Unfortunately, he and Julius, for that was this cat's name, never got along and, aided by my family's odd housing arrangements, they were kept apart. It is tragic because only one of these houses had enough space for me to spread out with my art/hwk, and so it was there that I spent nearly all of my time, out of reach of my fuzzy gray friend. You'll notice that there are no other pictures of him on this site. I can't express how much I regret that, or how much I was looking forward to spending more time with him when we move only later this very month. ;_;

BIOGRAPHY
We believe he was born in 1990, the same year I was born, but we don't know for sure because he moved in with us off of the street in 1998. We think someone may have abandoned him. :*( He was such a gorgeous cat that we thought he was a girl, so I (8) started calling him Jewl, a name I [then] recently heard, and liked, from the acted remake of 101 Dalmations. But, then, dun dun dun, the vet told us he was A GUY, so we tried to change his name to Jules, but Julius stuck and we couldn't shake it. X-3

In the year 2000, my mom, brothers, and I all moved to Laurel MD, taking kitty with us. There, suddenly an indoor cat, whereas before we still let him roam free, he got quite fat. Then, in 2002, we moved back where we came from, and have been here ever since. He lost the extra weight and was reletively healthy for another three years. Then, he started getting old. He became dangerously thin, and even though he perked up a little after we had him treated for thyroid problems last winter, we knew in our hearts our dear friend couldn't last forever.

Three weeks ago, Julius stopped eating. At first, when he began refusing catfood, we thought he was just spoiled. But then, better and better, higher and higher up the chain of classy gormet, he began refusing everything we offered him; cold shrimp, goat milk.....you name it, we tryed it. When finally he would take nothing but water, we tryed to force-feed him condenced milk with an eye-dropper, but none of us were very good at it, and he didn't like us for trying, anyway. At last there was nothing we could do, our cat was dying. He took to sleeping mostly under the sink and in our bathtub, but when he was found lying in a mess of blood, which turned out to be from a bad nosebleed, my mom took him to the vet, who said she's seen enough to know that it was bone cancer. The nosebleed was because it was mostly in his jaw, but had spread as far as his sinuses. ;_; No one deserves that. He lived to be 17.
Song: "Another Side"
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