Thomas - December 1989 to 9 September 2008We had to let our lovely boy go last Tuesday as he could no longer eat in comfort
. It was very peaceful for which I will be eternally grateful to the vet and VN.
Thomas came to us from a local cat rescue with his mom (Kerry - semi feral I suspect) when we first moved to our house.
He was very young and had been separated from his mom for a while
and I'm afraid she never fully accepted him after that (I don't think she was quite as craazy as she looks in the photo!). She moved out some months later and went to live with our catsitting neighbours and their 2 gingers. We initially spent many weeks bringing her back home each evening but eventually gave up and she never came to visit again.
A few months later we got Tom a “pal”, Gandolf, who passed away April 2006. Unfortunately Gandie was a bully whose territory covered a large area but thankfully Tom was never a threat so Gandie stopped picking on him after a short while.
Tom never wanted for love and attention. His football skills were legendary. He could lose a table tennis ball in a nanosecond.
Despite friends trying to steal him when he was a wee un (I recall his head poking out of a friend's handbag when she was leaving once), he shared his life with us for almost 19 years. Not once in that time did he ever show anything other than the sweetest nature I've ever known in a cat. He would lick the vet in an effort to stop being examined. He always did as he was asked, came when called, purred like a motorbike as soon as you looked at him, never strayed, never any toilet accidents (he's the only cat I know that, in later years, would go to his tray to be sick; I am ignoring the time he was sick in my handbag last year and the many, many times in earlier years he would chew grass and be sick
). OK so we taught him the chewing fingers trick but that was our fault.
More recently Tom would pat OH’s face in the wee hours demanding food whilst shouting a little too loudly. He never did that to me of course. Before he began to lose his hearing he talked to us all the time, but only when spoken to of course.
We never could understand where his muscles came from coz he spent 98% of his life eating and sleeping (on OH’s pillow more recently).
He got a new lease of life when Aslan and Billy Whiz arrived a couple of years ago. He once actually came into the house with a (thankfully dead) mouse shouting about what he’d got. The last time he had done anything like that was many, many years before.
My catsitting neighbours always called him Tom kitten. He was a lovely boy throughout his life to humans and other cats alike. It just wasn’t possible to think of him as all grown up. We will miss him when it finally sinks in that he has gone but for now it’s still not real. Can only be grateful we have Noni, Freddie and Billy Whiz to keep us on track esp Billy W who strangely has gone all lovey dovey the last few nights
.
RIP our beautiful darling Tommie
