Let me tell you about my cat. He was born somewhere around New Florence PA, a barn cat, or at the very least a cardboard-box-on-a-porch-by-a-barn cat. He was the runt of his litter and nobody wanted him. They were going to let him wander off into the woods if we hadn't taken him. 
We got him in early August 2005, two months before we got married, living in our shitty Altoona apartment. Up until now Bethany and I were never without him as a family. It was always us and him from almost the very start.
He didn't stay small for long. He got huge, just about all muscle and fur. The vets would be like yeah he's like 17 lbs and it's almost all muscle so that's one tough cat you got there. And he'd sit like this a lot which was never not funny.
He made the move with us to Pittsburgh in 2006, enjoying our slumlord apartment in the Southside. Birds hatched right outside one of the windows. There was a big red fox squirrel in the tree branches outside. Ico would chirp back at the mourning doves.
Ico was never graceful. He plodded around everywhere. He landed with a thud. You could hear him clomping across the floor. He demanded to sit on you, and was just huge. He was a very sweet and loving grouch, which is one of the best personalities for anyone to have.
He was always ready to come sit on whatever it was you were working on.
He was with us through our extremely broke times, with us when we got jobs and when we lost them. Always there. Always this constant. In the past couple days we've been finding all kinds of ways our lives were subtly ordered around him. It's an empty space now.
Ico found his way into our creative output. Count how many big wooly black cats, or just cats in general show up in our work. There's no Mae without Ico first.
Famously, when I passed out cold and whacked my head on the floor the week before NITW shipped due to intense stress and overwork, I woke up to a bleeding head and Ico sitting next me, yowling. Bekah from our publisher thanked him for that onstage when we won the IGF grand prize.
As he aged his coat went from being straight black and white to this dusky color where even the dark fur had a silver undercoat.
In the last few years we finally moved for the first time to an apartment that wasn't falling apart, in a quiet neighborhood where there was lots of sun for him to lay in. Ico loved it here. And he was getting older.
I've always been a night owl and Ico would hang out with me. For most of his life that meant saying hi while I worked late. For the last couple years it meant sleeping on me as I chilled on the couch, me having stopped working so late due to taking my health seriously.
He was a complete baby around Bethany. Big stuffed bear with no concerns about her space. With me he was always a bit more bro-y, less likely to just snuggle up, at least until the past few years. But he would always seek out where I'd left clothes and sleep there.
In the past few years Ico's asthma, long misdiagnosed, got much worse. We started him on steroids to keep his airways open and it turned out that nothing else worked. He was well, mostly, for a good year and a half after that. But nothing else made him feel better.
He went from 15-17 lbs down to 11 and lost some of his fur. When we'd take him off the steroids he stopped eating and moving much and had harsh asthma attacks multiple times a day. Turns out he had a pretty bad lung disease. And the steroids gave him diabetes.
In the end we knew he was on a short time table and both our vet and a specialist confirmed it. His lungs were shot and he his back was going. We could start a big thing of stressful treatment for him and maybe buy a few months.
We're moving in the next month. He gets really stressed out during moves, and he'd have to learn a whole new house with a big staircase, which he would have trouble climbing. And he was, though always a trooper, clearly not enjoying life beyond cuddling with Bethany and I.
Several times in our lives Bethany and I have watched people and animals kept alive far longer than they wanted to be. Ico was going to eventually take that one bad turn and grow afraid, start hiding maybe, lost his ability to wander around and bite me for fun.
So we made the decision to put him down while he was still enjoying us, still enjoying laying in the sun. Before his state made him miserable. It would be a stressful month for him. No need to make his last days miserable just so we didn't have to make a hard call.
On our last night together he slept on me for like 5 hours. I put on old MST3k season 8 episodes we used to watch when he was younger, up late with me while I worked. It was a great last night.
I'd taken to like scientifically documenting him while he was still alive. Gorgeous dude, even at the end when his body and coat had been so ravaged by his illness.
Loved this guy.
The vet cam at 4pm. He got in one last long nap in the sun before the clouds, rain, and snow rolled in hard. Hilariously cliche weather, dramatic like he was. Bethany held him when he was sedated. I was there in front talking to him. Last thing he saw. He went peacefully.
The sedative cocktail was called "Kitty Magic". I said it sounded like a weed strain. The vet said well it is designed to make them feel really good. Ico went out apparently hella blazed.😎
After he was extremely deep asleep the vet took awhile to actually end it because he apparently took so much of the killer drug. Enough for "an 80 lbs dog" She ran out and had to switch to a new bottle. We laughed. Good job buddy, make them work to stop your heart.
She also told us as she was performing it that he was actually in much worse shape than we'd known. Hard to tell with cats, even with multiple vets checking him in the past couple months. She told us we'd done the brave, right thing. We had our time with him, and then he was gone
We cried a bunch and then went and got tacos.
This was a long sad thread but fuck it, it's in honor of my cat. And it's helpful to talk about what happened, and how good he was, and the life he had, and how he changed ours. We had that cat for almost 40% of my life. We still have him in some ways.
This is one of my favorite pics of him, when Bethany grabbed him up out of the basement years ago and he wasn't having it. In the end he wasn't having dying, even as he was dying from shot lungs. We miss him. But he went out happy and peaceful and what more can anyone want.
So remember Ico Benson. He in a roundabout way touched millions of lives, way beyond the hills he was born in. He was fierce and loving, ready to comfort and throw down. The best kind of person. Love your friends deeply, don't take shit, and make the vet work to stop your heart.
RIP buddy. See you around.
Hey everyone thanks for all the kinds words and stories of your own cats over the past couple days. They've been a big comfort. Here's a video of the boy Ico from 9 years ago that I found while looking through old pics.
