Last Updated on May 24, 2026 by admin
Salt Lake County Animal Services has a long bench against the back wall. People sit on it to wait for adoption appointments. It is also the bench the staff use, sometimes, to take a breath.
On a Tuesday in mid-May, the woman on the bench was Sister Estela Marquez. She was wearing a navy cardigan, her name tag from the hospital, and the sneakers she walks the unit in. Sister Estela is sixty-four. She is a hospice chaplain at LDS Hospital. On her days off, she comes to the shelter and she sits.
She has been doing this for nine years.
What she does is this: she goes to the back-row kennels where the cats over fifteen are. She does not bring treats. She does not bring toys. She sits on the concrete floor outside whichever kennel has a cat who has been in the longest, and she stays for an hour, or two, or three, and she does not talk to the cat unless the cat indicates she should.
Most days, she goes home.
The cat that morning was a dilute calico named Honey. Honey was nineteen. She had been surrendered four weeks earlier by the granddaughter of her original owner, who had died. Honey was thin. Her bloodwork was bad. She had a heart murmur that was getting worse. The staff had been quietly preparing the paperwork for a humane decision the following Monday.
Sister Estela sat for two hours and twelve minutes.
At minute one-thirty-one, Honey got up from the back-left corner of the kennel, walked the four feet to the front, and put her head between two bars of the kennel door. Sister Estela’s fingers, on the other side, stayed where they were. Honey leaned in.
Sister Estela signed the adoption paperwork at one in the afternoon.
She knew. She did not pretend otherwise. The shelter staff did not pretend otherwise either. Honey came home with Sister Estela in a soft-sided carrier with a folded fleece blanket, to a sixth-floor apartment three blocks from the cathedral, where Sister Estela has lived alone for forty-one years.
Honey lived for eight days.
She died on Sister Estela’s lap on the eighth night, on the couch, while the news was on, with one paw on the inside of Sister Estela’s wrist.
Sister Estela was at the shelter again the following Tuesday. The kennel Honey had been in was occupied by an eighteen-year-old tortoiseshell named Stephanie. Sister Estela sat down on the concrete floor outside the kennel. She did not bring treats. She did not bring toys. She did not say anything yet.
The cat looked.
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