I was laughing while writing it! haha

Caleb, thank you for your compliments! I am hoping to write many more humourous stories down the road.

I also laughed a lot more than I should have at the “tumor on his toe” bit of your story. And yeah, it sounds like Shadow is definitely a survivor. Maybe he and Charlie are comparing notes in animal heaven.

So we had a black cat named Shadow for 13 years, and I think he had well over nine lives…He was an entirely outdoor cat. He survived a tumor on his toe and lived the last ten years or so with a missing toe on one foot. He got lost and would be gone days at a time, but then would somehow come back and be okay. He also survived the Waldo Canyon fire, when our whole valley was evacuated, and our whole family was not even in town for the entirety of it. We were gone for three weeks or so surrounding when that fire happened in 2012, and Shadow was here when we got back, after the fire had come within a mile and a half from our house.

Like I said, he was an all-outdoor cat, so he also survived winters of single digits and negative temperatures…that cat was a survivor. I don’t even remember exactly when he died, but I think it was a couple years ago, and he had just curled up peacefully on the deck and never woke up. He was well loved.