Last Updated on May 30, 2026 by admin
Three named cats. Three chosen families. One thing in common.
Marlowe
Reuben and Casper Holloway were three weeks engaged the day they walked into the Asheville Humane Society in October 2011 and asked for the oldest cat on the floor.
The volunteer brought them Marlowe — a black-and-white tuxedo with white socks, a notch in her right ear, and a sign on her cage that read “Adult, Quiet, Has Been Here Eight Months.”
Reuben sat down on the concrete with his back to the cage door. Casper, who is six-three and built like a high-school football coach, sat down beside him. Within four minutes, Marlowe had walked out, climbed into Reuben’s lap, and pressed her forehead against the inside of his left wrist — the wrist with the small Roman-numeral tattoo of his and Casper’s first date.
Marlowe is thirteen now. Reuben and Casper have been married for thirteen years and three months. Marlowe sleeps between them every night, with her chin on Casper’s shoulder and her back paws on the small of Reuben’s back, like a furry hinge holding the two halves of their bed together.
Velvet
Janelle Park adopted Velvet — a brown-tabby kitten with one slightly droopy eyelid — from a Macy’s holiday adoption event at Union Square in San Francisco in December 2015.
Janelle had begun her transition the year before. She had not, at that point, told her family. She did not, in December 2015, have many people in her apartment.
Velvet, who is now eleven, has been the cat in the photograph at every step Janelle’s life has taken since. The first time she signed her real name on a lease. The first apartment with a window seat. The night her mother called for the first time in three years. The morning her sister flew in to meet her, ten years late.
Velvet was on the bed every one of those mornings.
Janelle says it like this: “Velvet was the first person in the house who knew my name and used it.”
Kit
Theo Marchetti’s husband Henry died of pancreatic cancer in October 2020, in their fourth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn, on the last warm Sunday of the year.
Their orange-marmalade tabby Kit — seventeen now, twelve at the time — had been Henry’s cat from the beginning. Henry had adopted him the year before he and Theo started dating. Kit had slept on Henry’s chest for nine years. He had slept on Henry’s chest through every chemo cycle and every transfusion and the last forty-three days of the hospice nurses.
The night Henry died, Kit walked from Henry’s pillow to Theo’s pillow, and slept there.
He has slept there every night for five and a half years.
Theo says Kit is a finite number of nights now. He is seventeen. His kidneys are not what they were. The vet is honest with him. Theo is honest with Kit.
What Theo says about Henry, and about Kit, and about the apartment that has held the three of them and now holds the two of them, is this:
“Cats don’t ask who you are. They just decide you are theirs.”
The same thing
Pride Month starts on Sunday.
It is a month that means many things to many people. For Reuben and Casper and Janelle and Theo, and for the millions of people in households built out of choice rather than blood, it means — among other things — that the small warm animal asleep at the foot of the bed has been there through every step of the long and not-always-gentle work of becoming yourself.
Marlowe is thirteen. Velvet is eleven. Kit is seventeen.
They were all chosen. They all chose back.
That is, as Theo says, the whole story. 🐾