Last Updated on May 24, 2026 by admin
Berkeley Humane has a policy about cats over twenty.
It is not a written policy. It is a practical one. A cat that age is going to be a hospice adoption. Most adopters cannot face that. The shelter does its best to keep those cats comfortable in the back kennels and not put them on the public floor, where they will not be chosen and where the staff will have to watch them not be chosen, every day, for as long as it takes.
Marigold was twenty-two.
She was an orange tabby with cloudy eyes, a small kink in her tail, and an old scar across her right ear that the intake notes described as well-healed. She had come in three weeks earlier when her owner — an eighty-six-year-old woman named Pearl Akiyama — had moved into memory care, and the family had not been able to find an extended relative to take her.
Marigold sat in the back kennel and waited.
The shelter director was a woman named Camille Pereira. She had worked at Berkeley Humane for fourteen years. She knew that Marigold was very thin. She knew the dental work would be eight hundred dollars and that the lab work that morning had come back with kidney values that meant probably six months, possibly less.
Camille had a friend named Wendy Pham who had lost her own twenty-one-year-old tabby, Toast, three months earlier. They had not spoken about Toast.
Camille called Wendy at three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. She did not pitch it. She just said, “There’s a cat here. I think you might want to come meet her.”
Wendy came that evening, after work. She sat on the concrete floor outside the back kennel with her shoes off, which is what she always used to do with Toast. Marigold walked the four feet from her cushion to the front of the kennel and pressed her forehead against the wire mesh, slowly, the way old cats do — committing to it.
Wendy signed the paperwork at six-forty.
She named her Marigold Two. The first Marigold had been a cat she’d had as a kid, the one before Toast. There is a lineage now. Three cats. Forty-eight years of cats.
Marigold Two has been in Wendy’s apartment in Oakland for nineteen days as of this morning. She sleeps on the second pillow. She drinks tap water out of a coffee mug Wendy keeps on the windowsill specifically for her. She is, the vet said yesterday at the check-in appointment, doing about as well as a twenty-two-year-old cat with stage 3 kidney disease can be expected to do.
Berkeley Humane has not changed the policy about cats over twenty. The policy is still the right one for most of those cats.
It just was not the right one for Marigold.
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