Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched The World

As I struggled with a divorce, welfare, and college, Steven struggled with cancer. By 1979, he had lived longer than anyone in Iowa had ever lived with stage four non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The doctors had given him so much chemotherapy, he had no blood left in his extremities. There was no hope left in chemo, so Steven enrolled in an experimental treatment center in Houston. He was scheduled to start in January, and before the trip he wanted a full-scale, no-holds-barred Jipson Christmas. Steven wanted the clam chowder Dad always made on Christmas Eve. He wanted me to make his favorite caramel popcorn. He sat under a blanket and smiled along as we played our homemade instruments in the Jipson Family Band. It was eighteen below zero on Christmas Eve; Steven couldn’t even stand, he was so weak, but he insisted we all go to Midnight Mass. On his last night at Mom and Dad’s house, he made me drive him to Aunt Marlene’s house at two in the morning to say good-bye. Afterward, he wanted me to stay up with him and watch Brian’s Song, a movie about a football player with cancer.

“No thanks, Stevie. I’ve already seen it.”

But he insisted, so I stayed up with him. He fell asleep in the first five minutes.

A week later, on January 6, Steven woke his wife at 5:00 a.m. and asked her to help him down the stairs to the sofa. When she came back down a few hours later, she couldn’t wake him. We found out later he hadn’t been enrolled in an experimental treatment program in Houston. The day before Thanksgiving, the doctors had told him there were no more treatment options left. He hadn’t told anyone because he wanted one last Jipson family Christmas, free from crying and pity, before he died.

My parents took Steven’s death hard. Death can drive two people apart, but it drove Mom and Dad together. They cried together. They talked together. They leaned on each other. My father converted to Catholicism, Mom’s religion, and started attending church regularly for the first time in his adult life.

And they adopted a cat.

Three weeks after Steven’s death, Dad bought Mom a blue Persian and named him Max. Those were terrible days for them, just terrible, but Max was a sainted cat, full of personality but not wild. He would sleep in the bathroom sink; with the exception of snuggling up against Mom’s side, that sink was his favorite place in the house. If ever a cat changed a couple, it was Max. He raised my parents’ spirits. He made them laugh. He kept them company in their empty home. The children loved Max for his personality, but we loved him more for taking care of Mom and Dad.

My older brother David, my dear friend and inspiration, was also deeply affected by Steven’s death. David had dropped out of college six weeks before graduation and after a few false starts ended up in Mason City, Iowa, about a hundred miles east of Spencer. When I think of David, though, I think of Mankato, Minnesota. The two of us were so close in Mankato. We had a wonderful time together, simply wonderful. But one night, shortly before he dropped out of college and moved away, he knocked on my door at one in the morning. It was ten below zero, and he had walked ten miles.

He said, “There’s something wrong with me, Vicki. In my head. I think I’m having a breakdown. But you can’t tell Mom and Dad. Promise me you’ll never tell Mom and Dad.”

I was nineteen years old, young and stupid. I promised. I never told anyone about that night, but I know now that mental illness often strikes young men, especially bright and talented young men in their early twenties like David. I know David was ill. He was as ill as Steven had been, but it wasn’t as obvious. Slowly, his condition pulled his life downward. Within a few years, he was a different person. He couldn’t hold a job. He couldn’t laugh, even with me. He started taking drugs, downers mostly, to combat depression. He fathered a child out of wedlock. He called me every few months, and we talked for hours, but over the years I heard from him less and less.

When Steven died in January 1980, David coped with drugs. He said he couldn’t function without them. His daughter, Mackenzie, was four, and her mother cut David off from contact with her until he kicked his habit. Eight months after Steven died, David phoned me in the middle of the night to tell me he had lost his daughter.

“You haven’t lost Mackenzie,” I told him. “If you’re straight, you can visit her. If you’re high, you can’t. It’s that simple.”

He couldn’t see it. We talked about a million things that night, but nothing I suggested was possible. He had a blank wall in front of him. He couldn’t see any future at all. I was scared to death, but he swore he wouldn’t do anything until we talked again. He loved his daughter, he assured me, and he would never leave her. But sometime later that night or early the next morning, my brother David, my childhood buddy, picked up a shotgun and pulled the trigger.