The Company of Cats: Pam’s Story

You can smell Pam Freed’s apartment at Summit Square before you even step inside — the cozy scent of fall, like cinnamon and baked apples, wrapping around you the moment you reach her door. Inside the studio apartment, it feels like an embrace — warm, inviting, and filled with life. Two small Siamese cats, Marlie and Charlie, dart across the room, batting at each other’s tails before leaping onto the window ledge.

Pam laughs, her voice as soft as the candlelight. “They were born just two days after my husband Charlie died,” she says. “I desperately needed something in my life. And I needed them, and they needed a home.”

Their timing felt like more than coincidence. “God watches after us,” Pam says.

For nearly thirty-three years, Pam and her husband, Charlie, built a life together in Waynesboro. They met by chance one day when he came by to visit his sister. “The house I lived in — I lived next door to his sister,” she says. “I knew his sister and his mom and dad before I ever met him. But he came to visit his sister one day, and I just happened to be next door.”

Pam was outside, working in the yard. “Charlie and his dad — they were into flowers, flower gardens and stuff like that,” she says. “His dad was teaching me how to garden, and he offered to help me.”

From that afternoon on, their lives fit together piece by piece. They were married thirty-three years, surrounded by the familiar hills and streets of Waynesboro, and eventually, they moved into Summit Square. Pam was a hairdresser by trade, and Charlie never had to go anywhere else for a trim. “He never had to get a haircut outside the home,” she says with a smile. “I took care of all that.” Charlie worked for Dominion Energy, often traveling back and forth to Richmond, but home was where he was happiest.

“When we first moved to Summit, we were in a room together in Assisted Living,” Pam says. “And probably, I don’t even know if it was two weeks we were together down there together. He had dementia and Parkinson’s. He needed more care, so we moved him over to Memory Care.” Pam went to an Independent Living apartment.

Even after they were in different parts of the building, Pam visited every day. “It was an everyday thing,” she says. “From morning till early afternoon.”

When Charlie passed away in April 2025, Pam says the quiet was hard. Then came the kittens. “Somebody had given the mama cat to a Summit Square employee that works here on the weekends,” she says. “They were born, and it was these two, and they had another Siamese brother. I couldn’t take three. The employee, Ruthie, kept the third one.”

The cats, now six months old, have become part of her daily rhythm. “They love company,” she says. “They like to go visit people. They do everything together.”

If you wander through Summit Square, you might see Pam rolling the pair around in a stroller. “They like to go visit people,” she says. “Charlie doesn’t want me to pick him up and put him in there, but when we come back from a stroller ride, I’ll open it up and they hop out and go do their thing, and then later on, they’ll get back in the stroller.” Sometimes, they even nap there. “They like it,” Pam says. “They really do.”

Soon, she hopes to give them a little more freedom. “I’m going to order them a harness,” she says. “Because they can’t be taken out of the stroller — they’ll run. They’ll get lost. But now they can take them out and hold them if they want to.”

One, she named after her husband. “Charlie down there is exactly like Charlie,” she says. “His temperament and everything is just like Charlie.”

After years of caregiving, Pam is finally feeling stronger herself. “When we moved in here, I was a mess,” she says. “I couldn’t hardly walk. I used a rollator for a little bit. My rheumatologist worked with me for years now, and we just finally come up with something to help me. And I needed knee replacements. I just recently have had two knee replacements.” She smiles. “Doing wonderful.”

Now, she divides her days between the quiet of her apartment and visits with friends downstairs in Assisted Living. “She calls me her best friend — Phyllis,” Pam says. “Phyllis keeps me coming down there. They all keep me coming down there. I’m not going to stop doing that.”

In the afternoons, she joins them for music or sits to watch Gunsmoke. “We’re Festus fans,” she says. “We watch Gunsmoke — it comes on at eleven o’clock, and it doesn’t go off until Andy Griffith comes on at four o’clock.”

Her home, filled with family furniture and a teddy bear made from one of Charlie’s favorite shirts, carries traces of the life they shared. “That shirt — we bought it at Goodwill like thirty years ago,” she says. “We called these ‘teddy bear shirts.’” The bear now sits in a chair near the window, where one of the cats often curls up beside it. “Charlie the cat gets up there beside him,” Pam says. “It’s like mysterious, but I love it.”

She pauses, looking around the room — at the cats, the sunlight, the soft hum of her television. “I’m better now,” she says. “God gives you what you need. And sometimes, He gives you two.”