A photo montage with a blank notepad and pencil on the left and a bloack and white photo of author Emily Denaro and cat on the right.
Emily Denaro
I’ve never been a cat person.
But in the summer of 2007, I worked at Isthmus as a production artist and was tasked with creating an ad for the Dane County Humane Society using a photo of one of their adoptable kitties. I took my time scrolling their site, like an eHarmony for fluffs. Image after image I swiped left, as they would say today, until I came upon No. 72631.
This tiny tiger, standing tall and posing with his head turned to the side, had a presence. A toughness. Confidence. He was beautiful.
I saved his image for the ad.
And bookmarked his listing link. Even emailed it to myself.
And I kept clicking it: After errand runs at Cap Foods. Nights out at Cafe Montmartre. The doctor’s appointment that predicted my inability to have kids. This was not a passive social media boredom scroll. On Friday, July 13, 2007, at 2:17 a.m., I emailed Doug Brown at the humane society about No. 72631.
Brown replied that No. 72631 had been brought in as a stray from Cottage Grove on June 14. He “loves to be pet and brushed,” his email read, and is “chatty, always looking for attention — an all-around great cat who has a sweet and playful nature.”
When I met No. 72631, he sat on the far edge of an L-shaped desk in a meeting room at 5132 Voges Road and stared at me. Slowly, he inched closer. Closer. I offered him Easy Cheese on the tip of my finger. It was the first time I’d felt the warm, rough tongue of a cat. Then he hopped down and sat on my lap, his small body facing mine, and looked directly at me with massive green eyes.
At that moment I knew: This was my son.
Isaac.
A beautiful orange tabby with striking voluminous whiskers, he was riddled with issues: a broken canine requiring extraction, kennel cough, an upset tummy, cuts all over his body, and a shaved tail with a poof on the end.
Overwhelming for a 20-something just diagnosed with a life-altering chronic illness? A bit. That night, we went to sleep in my West Doty Street apartment, me on my bed and him on a small cat perch two feet away. When I woke up, he was lying alongside me atop the sheet, his body stretched long in July’s heat, little face blissfully pointed my way. All worries that adoption was an impulsive, poor choice disappeared.
Isy (pronounced “eye-zee,” the most popular of his 38 nicknames) had his share of quirks: He would sit upright like a human and curl his lip on his toothless gum like a true velvet Elvis. His default smell was oatmeal cookie. He loved lettuce, nighttime massages, Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly, and watching flora and fauna, especially swaying pine trees, chickens, and wild turkeys. (After I moved to Philadelphia, he romanced an orangey-pink lady cat with crusty crossed eyes. They would stare at each other for hours, he from our window, she from the abandoned lot next door.) He had distinct seasonal personas: Winter Beans, hunkering hygge kitty, giving moody stares from fluffy blankets despite a deep desire for hugs and cuddles. And Summer Beans, questing cougar, immersed in investigative discoveries atop the fridge, in backpacks, or the cup shelf, in pursuit of silly mischief.
Truth be told, I began writing this piece before he left us. Seventeen months before his diagnosis of incurable kidney carcinoma, Isy survived brain surgery to remove a meningioma. While he’d always been a warrior, my soul sank at the inevitable. I wanted to enshrine his memory, his essence — all of him — before he was gone. The full draft is a solid 10 pages, typed — and growing. I wanted to ensure his memory was more than the end days, and that even if my mind blocked out the joy with the pain, my words would not.
Isy transitioned in March 2023. His love is a warmth in my chest that does not leave. I can feel his presence around me still; the nearness ebbs and flows but never disappears. I still cannot shake the expectation of him jumping on the couch or bed, or waiting for me on his perch or at the top of the stairs. I yearn to hold him and nestle my face in his fur. (After six months, I finally remember how he felt.)
I see his things in the spaces where they once belonged. I put a small dish where his food bowls used to go in the dishwasher and burst into tears. These minor moments are forever changed. That’s the ache. I want to believe that the instances of beauty that peak out now and again are figments of what I always saw in his regal gaze and glances. How even in his sickest days, he still held himself with pride.
Isy taught me patience and perspective. Pets cannot discern a vase from a rock. It’s on us to move the vase, or, when it breaks, be grateful for the love of a little lion who seeks adventure versus irate at the loss of an inanimate object. When Isy began scratching my tweed work chair, I let him, each small thread ripped by tiny bean toes. Now, I sit and write this from his masterpiece.
Throughout the years, Isy imparted so many other lessons about kindness, confidence, perseverance, and how little things — even an ad for an alternative newspaper — can change your life. He also taught my husband and me the almost magical power of love: As a family, we built a language all our own — head nods, paw pats, care nibbles, even a series of hand motions — that this word count cannot hold. Most vitally, we shared “blinkies”: hard squinting of the eyes to communicate love.
In his final moments, Isy worked up the last bit of his might to return a blink, letting me know he was ready to go. And in response, I did the same, telling him the same thing I told him for 16 years that I still tell his spirit every day: You are my son, and my best friend, and I love you.
Emily Denaro now lives on the East Coast where she advocates for the arts and LGBTQIA+ community.
