Penned January 16, 2025 by Penny Sue Denim
He and I didn’t agree on much.
But, hand-in-hand, on September 5th, 2023, we left the regional cancer clinic after his 11:30 am initial consult. We went to Winners/ HomeSense where we walked around a while, browsing. It was an interesting place for a pair of minimalists to find themselves immediately after receiving a devastating prognostic timeline. I don’t know what else we may or may not have bought, but what we did pick up was a trio of comedic and gaudy paintings of cats portrayed in the style of Regency-era nobility. These portraits weren’t even on sale.
A month before, and incidentally, the same week Robben had been diagnosed with cancer, we’d moved out of our starter home and into our dream home. Well, mine anyways—perfect enough for the four of us that I’d never want an upgrade. I remember it as a time of washing walls and crying.
On the walls of our new home, these eccentric paintings of noble cats were going to thrill our girls—especially since we’d struck an agreement to hang the art in the traffic-rich stairwell to the basement without so much as a comment to them.
And I thought, these three cats, so faithfully resembling Pride and Prejudice characters, are as unlikely inhabitants of our home as terminal cancer is of my husband’s otherwise youthful & healthy body.
I remember wondering what tales they would tell upon so watchfully observing the coming days. What whispers would they catch? What tears would they witness, as the four of us, beads on a string, dangled precariously with an invisible knife threatening the knot holding us together?
A nominal minimalist, I feared a little that I’d never be able to part with these silly portraits, bought on the blind impulse of shock and despair, in a spirit of jest, poking back at a God who allowed the preposterous to actually happen.
After overly optimistic attempts at eating, we left the shopping district. I suppose I must have taken him back and admitted him to the hospital where they immediately began interventions to prepare him for chemo.
And then, with the cat portraits occupying the passenger seat and shoving me over into the driver’s seat where he should have been, I would’ve driven the hour home. I hid them somewhere in the house until he returned and, with resolve in the face of his starvation and weakness, tried to teach me to hang them.
That was back in the days when we believed that the best we could do was make me into the handyman he would no longer be for us.
Robben and I though, we weren’t alike. I wonder what the cats meant to him.
~ ps denim
Editors note: The images in this article are not replicas of the actual paintings described. They were created with AI; However, the writing never is.
Love cats? Check out my story The Little Black Moirologist.
Don’t love cats? That’s okay. It’s not really about cats.
Love these portraits and the bit of humor. Itw as nice to meet you!
These pictures reflect the journey that you described.