I promised to myself that I would not write any sad entries in this blog. That is a promise that I will keep as best as I can no matter what.

Last night my cat, Nelson Bubblerub Wischnewski passed away. It’s like losing a family member when it’s an animal who you’ve seen and held and loved for 15 years. I will not post the details of his sad end here though. I will not post things about when he was sick. I petted him gently last night and told him I loved him when I realized I might not see him in the morning, and that is the saddest thing that I will write here.

I am writing this post to honor the memory of a loving, and very funny cat.
Nelson was a stray that I used to feed from time to time. He looked like a sort of bully/tom cat, so I named him Nelson. (I told everyone I named him Nelson because of the bully character from the Simpsons, but the real reason - and this is the first time i’m letting this out publicly - was that I was in love with the band ‘Nelson’ from the early nineties. You can laugh if you want, at least I didn’t like the New Kids On The Block! :P)

I can’t tell yet if i have the worst or best luck in the world, but I begged my mother to let me take Nelson in and she would not let us get another cat. (Our cat Daisy had died in the middle of Christmas Dinner the previous year, and we had just gotten a new cat named Otis shorly after. And that isn’t a joke. Right in the middle of Christmas Dinner…) I would go out to see Nelson every single day when he would come to visit.

One day, I saw him and another cat fighting and I, being extremely stupid, went over and tried to break up the fight. I got severely bitten by Nelson and we took him to the vet to determine if he had rabies or not. Whether he did or didn’t, they were going to destroy him if we didn’t take him. There was really no choice at this point. Nelson because a member of our family.

I remember the first day we brought him home. My other cat, Otis, was hissing and slinking around and hiding under things. He was absolutely appalled that we got a new cat.

Nellie, which is what we ended up calling him after not too long, was a very far departure from the “bully” that I had once thought him to be. After he got neutered he became this docile creature that would lie in the grass and watch butterflies fly by. Every once in a while though, his hunter instincts would cause him to bring us a dead bird, hummingbird, or even a shrew once. I had to look the shrew up on the internet cause I had no idea what the hell it was. It looked like a mouse-mole thing. Once I caught him in the back yard with a bird pinned down by it’s wings and his mouth 1 inch from it’s head. That one got away though. Whenever Nellie would bring me some dead thing, I think of the one line from the family guy where Brian says “What, it was a gift for the family!” … Heh.

At night, he used to go “bug jumping” in the back yard along with Otis. They looked really funny doing it, because they would intently look at these bugs they would find and then jump up and then down really hard. I don’t think they ever caught anything though.

One year we took Nellie to the vet for some reason and he came back smelling like tuna fish. I don’t know how that one happened, but it was pretty great.

Oh, and I bet some of you reading are wondering about why I called him Nelson Bubblerub. My dad gives all my cats weird last names. Shady has the most normal one. It was Nelson Bubblerub, Otis Gravelpuke, and Shady McShaderson. We were sitting there one Easter morning and my dad just went and said that. He said “Hiya, Nelson Bubblerub”

I remember one occasion when Nellie was running after another cat and he didn’t see our swimming pool and fell right in. I got a phonecall from my mom who was drying off the cat through bits of hysterical laughter. ^_^

My mom, about 4 years ago, started giving Nellie a can of cat food every day as a treat. Nellie got so dependent on it, and when my mom went into the nursing home, I was the one to feed him every single day. He would wait for me to get home and then come up to me and make a noise that sounded like “SAAAARA! NOW!” Patrick and I would laugh about it, because it really did sound like that.

Nellie had only one tooth in his mouth and so when he bit you it felt like nothing. He would go up to my 3 year old cat and try to bite him really hard on the neck. Shady would look like he was getting a wonderful massage because he could not feel anything. They would fight and knock each other into the cabinets.

On New Years Day we were at the pet hospital because Nellie was at death’s door. He was diagnosed with some sort of cancer that originated in his stomach. They gave him shots of something to fill his belly and to slow the cancer. I really thought he was going to die then. I stayed with him every day and told him I loved him. Miraculously, he got better in a week and was eating probably 3 times what he ate before (he was a very round, portly fellow) We laughed about it, because after he got the injection, he always wanted 2 cans of food a day, rather than just 1.

Those are some of the best memories I had with that cat. He had these beautiful green eyes, when he purred, it created a sonic boom it was so loud, and he seemed like the happiest cat that ever existed. I will miss him a lot, but I can always look back at this entry if I get sad. I will end it here, and I will leave you with my favorite picture of him. Nelson Bubblerub, Rest in Peace, buddy. I love you.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 23rd, 2006 at 7:30 am and is filed under I Love Cats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.