No one will really notice except me, but a good friend of mine is dying

By David McElroy · May 7, 2012

I have an old friend who’s dying. You won’t read his obituary in the paper when it happens. I’m the only one who’ll notice or care. But my world will feel a little bit empty when Thomas leaves me very soon.

Some of you who have dogs or cats know the incredible attachment that many of us feel for the furry friends in our lives. They’re not just animals. They’re family. We feel real love for them — and they they need us, many times in ways that make you certain they’re capable of feeling more than some people believe.

Thomas is about 18 years old. I told the story last August of how he came to live with me, so I won’t repeat it here. He wasn’t supposed to end up here. If a woman had done what she promised to do for him, he would have ended up spending his life on a farm not too far from here. But since she didn’t, I ended up scooping him up in my arms and carrying him half a mile or so home. He’s never left — and he’s spent a good deal of the time since then in my arms.

He’s been going downhill badly since January. He’s always been a jumper, and even in his old age, he still jumped to the top of the bookcases to sleep and be alone. One day in January, he apparently fell off the top of the bookcase. He had done that many times, but this time he fell behind it, jamming his body between the wall and the bookcase almost all the way to the ground.

I don’t know how long he had been there, but I found him when I came in from one of my many doctor visits before surgery this past January. I pulled him out and put him down. He seemed wobbly, but basically fine. For a couple of days, he kept to himself and was slow. But there was never anything visibly wrong. Maybe that didn’t even really do anything to him. I just know that it seems as though he’s declined a lot since then.

A couple of days ago, he quit eating. At first, I could get him to at least sniff food if I’d try something unusual that I knew he loved. Soon, though, he wasn’t even interested. He just wants to go off under the bed or crawl into an old piece of furniture where he can be alone. I’ve seen this with other cats before. He’s just a little old man who’s dying.

I weighed him late Sunday night and he’s down to just 6 pounds. He was never a huge cat, but he was probably 10 or 11 pounds in his prime. He’s slowly wasting away — and there’s not a thing in the world I can do about it.

I was looking at pictures of him a few minutes ago and I came across the one above on the left. It’s from last summer. When I posted it to Facebook, here’s what I said about it:

Thomas sat patiently next to my keyboard purring for a long time until I finally let him climb into my arms, where he’s now purring himself to sleep. It cuts my typing speed roughly in half to have him here, but which will I remember when he’s finally gone — the slower typing or the joy of holding a happy, purring cat as he sleeps?

In an odd way, that sums up a lot of what it’s like to love cats and dogs and live with them. They need us — and we come to count on that and it’s a mutual need. There are tradeoffs. They can get in the way or create problems we have to solve or demand attention when we’re not ready to give it.

But the tradeoffs are worth it. I’ve lost a number of cats and dogs over the years and I’m sure all of them made nuisances of themselves at one time or another. But for most of the time they’re here — and all of the time once they’re gone — all I can remember is the joy of spending time with a creature who needs me as much as I need him.

Thomas been a very good friend. I’m going to miss him very much.

Note: Here’s a short video of Thomas late Monday morning. He’s still getting weaker quickly, but I still think he’s regal and beautiful.

Update: Thomas died shortly before 5 p.m. on the day this story was published.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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