Hart Van Denburg/CPR News
Esther Lucero holds a picture of her late wife Cathy in Denver’s Cheeseman Park on Thursday, Jan. 21, 2021. The two were married in the park three years ago.
On one of her many days in the hospital in 2017, Cathy asked her partner not to tell the nursing staff they were married. She’d been diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia, and Cathy feared the care she got would suffer if the staff knew she was a lesbian.
“She says, ‘Don t tell the nurses that we re married,’” said Cathy’s wife, Esther Lucero. “And I said, ‘Why?’ And she says, ‘Because they re treating you differently. They re treating me differently.’”