#Shoutout to the time I was binging 'Ascendance of a bookworm' and I called him Benno-san for a while. He didn't deserve that comparison.

[ranty-ramblestein]

Eulogy for Benjamin

If you've read the eulogy for my first cat you mostly know about Benjamin already. He was the mellowed out orange cat that liked to be held like a human baby and didn't seem to totally know what's going on.

He was originally picked up by my dad and taken care of until my mom died and I moved in with him. He has this one story about how he used to play fetch with Benjamin when he was in the shower, throwing a plush mouse down the hall (since he was living home alone at the time). And of course me moving in stopped that. It's a cute vision, though.

It was just a couple years now he stopped grooming, so I took up grooming out his big mats... and not really in a painless way, either. At some point I just moved to start cutting them. Not parallel to the skin, perpendicular to it in the way the furt grows out. And soon he had mostly smooth fur again... until the next temp. change rolled around. I kept up grooming him some, but I did realize he didn't like his paws being touched during all that.

He had itchy ears that messed up his balance, so he was constantly scratching them. (I frequently helped him stand up if he was laying on my lap and started pulling out his claws to scratch.)

I did a lot of helping him, and it wasn't that long ago that he stopped going to the litterbox like normal and peeing on the stiff mats outside them (we still had two from when Cougar was alive, since he had a System™) so my dad got pee pads... and soon he had to put a lot more pee pads around the basement, where he was banished to because my Dad had gotten a Dog in the meantime. She hadn't like him, so that's what happened.

Of course, every time I came in from walking Frieda (the german shepard) today, I went over to pet him on the head, holding Fried tightly on the leash. She didn't try to pounce forward at all today, only sniffing him a bit. But maybe that was because I was holding her back so tightly? idk

Anyway, turns out Ben was peeing everywhere because of an unknown weakness, and he quickly lost weight, and all energy with it.

Here he was last night, unable to gather the energy to get back in his bed, which I had moved from the table to the left down to the floor just a few days ago. (Just like I stated in the last eulogy, it took me a while to realize he hadn't moved from the floor that day...)

Then today, at 2:20pm I carried him into my dad's truck and held him and comforted him as we headed to the vet...

I didn't realize until this moment, when he was on the exam table, just how angled his eyes were. It really gives him a mean look, but he was the sweetest cat in the whole wide world... 😭

Hopefully you can drink more water straight from the tap in Heaven, Ben.