Last Updated on May 31, 2026 by admin
June 1 begins Pride Month. It also begins, for a lot of people in this community, the season in which they have lost or are losing the cat who saw them through something nobody else did. So we wanted to start the month with three small stories about three cats and three caregivers who quietly meant everything.
None of these stories made the news. They do not need to. They will be familiar to anyone who has loved an animal through a chapter of their life that did not, at the time, look fixable.
Apricot, Damon, and Russell — Asheville, North Carolina
Apricot was eighteen years old and a brilliant tangerine orange. He had three white socks, a kink in his tail, and a habit of climbing into the lap of whichever of his two people was crying more.
Damon and Russell Pierce were both pediatricians. They had been together since their fellowship year at Vanderbilt. They had Apricot since 2009, the year they bought their small craftsman in West Asheville. Russell died in November of 2024, esophageal cancer, fifty-four years old. Apricot did not sleep on Damon’s chest the night of the funeral. Apricot slept on the side of the bed where Russell used to be, and looked at Damon’s face.
Apricot died in his sleep this past March, after a long winter of being a small warm presence in a now-quiet house. Damon, fifty-seven, said this to a friend the next day: “I think he held on until I could stand to lose him. I don’t know how I know that. I know that.”
Bluebell, Nadine, and a Long Phoenix Summer
Nadine Howell is a forty-three-year-old HR consultant in Phoenix. She came out as trans in 2019. She had Bluebell, a gray-and-white shorthair with one folded ear, since 2012. Bluebell was — Nadine likes to say — the only continuous witness to the entire arc.
Nadine’s partner Carla left in early 2022. Bluebell stayed. Bluebell, the next two years, became the thing on the couch that did not need an explanation. “She didn’t care what name I was using,” Nadine has said, in roughly those words, to roughly anyone who asks. “She cared whether I came home.”
Bluebell died this past April at age fourteen. The vet said heart. Nadine, who has now been out for seven years, sat on the floor of her Glendale apartment for the better part of a Saturday and did not, for the first time in five years, feel watched.
Persimmon, Cesar, Marshall, and a Kindergartner Named Kai
Cesar and Marshall Okonkwo live in Brooklyn. They met at a wedding in Trinidad in 2009. They got married in 2014, did IVF surrogacy in 2019, and brought home their son Kai in February of 2020 — three weeks before the pandemic. Persimmon, a dilute calico they had adopted as a six-month-old in 2014, was Kai’s first roommate.
Persimmon was twelve. She had a habit, for the entire five-year run of Kai’s life so far, of sleeping at the foot of his toddler bed exactly where his feet were. He had never slept a night in his crib alone, because Persimmon had never let him.
Persimmon died this past month. Kai, five, drew a picture of her at preschool the next morning. The teacher photographed it and emailed it to Cesar. Persimmon, in the picture, was orange and gray and three times the size of the family. Kai had written, in five-year-old block letters, “SHE WAS THE BEST” across the bottom.
The Bridge, This June
This is, for a lot of people in this community, a complicated month. Not everyone in it has been celebrated by everyone they came from. Some of you are about to spend June with people who do not entirely see you. The cat in the photo at the bottom of your screen probably did.
Happy Pride, all of you. And to Apricot and Bluebell and Persimmon, and to anyone whose small warm continuous witness has crossed the bridge in the last year: we are thinking of you.
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