Mr. Karl

This is Karl. He was 15. My wife and I had to put him down back in September. We adopted him when he was 6 months old from a local animal shelter in early January, 2010. In this shelter, most of the cats were loose throughout the facility. We had spent about an hour or so wandering around and looking at all the kitties that were available for adoption. None of them were really jumping out at us as “the one”. I ended up wandering into the facility’s conference room. In a chair about halfway down the long table, there he was. He was the only cat in the room. Just chillin by himself. When my wife and our kids caught up with me and saw him, we all agreed immediately he was going home with us.

We learned he had been previously adopted by somebody else and was recently returned to the shelter. He was apparently too much to handle for the lady who adopted him. To this day we never really understood that. Karl was special from day one. Easy to get along with. Friendly. Loved being pet and scratched. He was also adorable and mostly problem free. He did have a few quirks…

We were renting a 3 bedroom house in Redmond when we adopted him. At one end of the hallway was the laundry room. This is where we kept his litter box. At the other end of the hallway there was an 18” thick wall that divided the dining room from the living room. We had a calendar tacked to the end of that wall at about eye level. When Karl would take a shit he would usually get the zoomies. He’d tear ass out of the laundry room, accelerate down the hallway, do a wall jump off the calendar and then crash into the vertical blinds covering the sliding glass door in the dining room. It was sudden. It was loud. And it was hilarious. 😂

Karl was an indoor cat for the first few years. A year and a half after we got him we had to downsize. We moved from our large house with a two car garage in a cul-de-sac to a small 2 bedroom apartment in Bend. This is where he started dabbling in the outside world. He got along with most everybody. We ended up with really great neighbors. Everybody loved Karl. He mostly stayed close to our apartment but he would roam around and mingle here and there. I don’t know if it was because he spent his first few years indoors or what, but he wasn’t much for hunting/catching rodents or birds. We never received a “present” on our front door from him. Which we appreciated. Karl played with frogs and grasshoppers instead. He was that kinda guy. I feel like he was pretty interested in birds, but when he’d spot one, he’d chatter so loudly it would usually just scare the bird off. 😂

We bought a house in 2016 and moved again. Finally back in a place big enough for all the kids to have their own rooms and a place to put all our shit we’ve acquired over the years. This place also had a backyard that I fenced in not long after we moved in. A small lot, but it was ours. It took Karl a few months to adjust. It also rained the entire month we moved in, and during the move. That was fun. After he adjusted, he loved being outside, as long as it wasn’t winter. If it was snowing or raining, he was like; “no thank you silly human, I’m staying on the couch.” Karl now had a safe place to chill and chase grasshoppers. Or, so he thought.

Some obnoxious neighbors moved in a few summers ago. They reside in one of my neighbor’s juniper trees. Scrub Jays. From about May/June to August, they’re total cunts. Karl would be minding his own business, chillin like usual, being a bad ass lazy cat and this pair of Scrub Jays would swoop in, land just a few feet away from him and proceed to scream at him. He would just lay there and take it. Be it on the front porch, laying in the grass in the back yard, or in his lair under the back porch, nowhere on the property was safe from them. They would sometimes scream at him the whole time he was out there. All day. You could hear it from inside the house. He never once went after them. He’d just ignore em. We felt bad for him but he still loved to be out there.

Karl was never much for car rides. When we moved back in 2011, Karl, his food, his carrier and his litter box were the last things I grabbed when leaving the Redmond house. It was the last load. My 1995 Dodge Ram B250 van (that I still have and is called; “Van Bear Pig”, but that’s a story for another day) was packed to the ceiling with all of the last things you grab when you’re moving. You know, random shit that didn’t make it into a box or didn’t fit in previous loads. Lamps, brooms, cleaning supplies, guitars and even some outdoor items that I forgot were there and wasn’t even planning on having to take. So, nothing that stacks well. 😂

I was unable to get Karl into his carrier. He was much bigger now and was a bit freaked out by the whole situation. In hindsight I think we should have taken him in one of the first loads. Oops. 🤷🏻‍♂️ We live and we learn. I crammed his carrier, food and litter box into the last few holes in the back of the van. Put Mr. Karl in the passenger seat and started the van. I had the windows down about two inches before I started the van. It was July, it was fuckin hot, and the AC did not work too well, if at all. Needless to say, Karl got startled when the van started and bolted for the 2” gap at the top of the window. He squeezed through that crack, ran off and hopped the fence. I then spent two hours trying to locate him. When I finally got him back in the van (with the windows all the way up this time) he didn’t stay in the front passenger seat long. It was easily over 100 degrees in the van by now. He quickly fought his way to the back of the van, through the pile of random shit stacked to the ceiling and proceeded to yowl the whole way to the apartment.

As he got older and ended up with somewhat more frequent trips to the vet, his attitude toward car rides didn’t really improve. We did learn to keep the windows up though. Probably due to the stress of the car ride, we soon learned Karl would end up urinating during the drive. I started putting a thick (washable) blanket in the vehicle that was big enough to cover both front seats. He would still yowl for most of the drive but he would usually do so with his head laying on my lap.

The week before we had to put him down we had all the kids come over and say goodbye. We knew that his kidneys were failing. In June his bloodwork was normal. In August, the levels for his kidneys were 5 times what they were in June and he had lost 1 lb. One week later he had lost another lb. He had stopped grooming himself and he had stopped eating.

The weekend before he died he spent all day Saturday and all day Sunday at the vet for fluid treatments. We wanted to see if it was the fact that he was so dehydrated that his kidney levels were as high as they were, or if he had a significant kidney injury. They drew blood at the end of the day on Sunday. It wasn’t good news.

It was an incredibly difficult decision to choose when we should end his life. He actually looked pretty good after the fluid treatments for a short while. His coat looked less disheveled. He ate a little bit of food. In reality, he was very uncomfortable and he wasn’t going to improve. He was no longer able to greet my wife when she got home for work, or follow her around the house anymore while speaking a foreign language to her, like he loved to do. He also had no interest in going outside where he absolutely loved to be. He was no longer himself and he was uncomfortable. It was time. We put him down that Wednesday. It was not fun. At least for him, he’s no longer in pain, and the Scrub Jays have been silenced.

The weekend before, he had to go for quite a few car rides in a short period of time with all that back and forth to the vet. During those trips he was calm. He didn’t yowl. He snuggled up to me, rested his head on my lap, and he peed. When I got home both days, I took Karl inside, put the blanket in the laundry basket and returned to the truck. I was in the habit of checking to see if the blanket leaked through anywhere. There had been a few surprises in the past so I take a look. The seats are clean. Nothing on the console. Nothing on the floorboards. Then there it was. Right there between the seats. Karl had filled up my cup holder. He didn’t spill a drop. He was a good boy. ❤️

You will be sorely missed Mr. Karl. 07/04/2009 - 09/04/2024

The first picture is from the day we adopted him.

The second picture is him in the neighbor’s wagon.

The last picture is him in his backyard, before the Scrub Jay harassment began.

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Karl left a huge void in our lives. We recently attempted to try and fill that void. I am thinking about cataloguing their journey here. They are absolutely adorable. 😊