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For some reason I’ve always remembered this photo of my Kublai from sometime in May, 1996, with my Pentax film camera, looking at me through the frame of the bishop’s weed stems along the front walk, the warm late afternoon sun highlighting the rich mahogany tint in his fur so he’d stand out against the sunwashed leaves reflecting on his eyes, the same shade of pale green. Yes, all those details. There are times when I wish my memory for visual detail wasn’t so deep, but most of the time, and at moments like this, I am deeply grateful for my rich visual memory of these moments.
Especially when for years I thought I’d somehow lost this photo. Sometimes favorite photos do get lost because they aren’t “stored” or kept together with other similar things in one logical place. They end up on the refrigerator and then when you clean it off they go in a drawer, or maybe they go in a frame in the bedroom, but then you move cat things to the living room and things are separated or organized differently.
But his intent expression, focused on me, communicating, in that lovely setting, I absorbed each detail and could visualize it as if it was in front of me every May and June, the months when bishop’s weed sprouted its Queen Anne’s lace-like flowers and the sun came around the spruce to illuminate it all and create longer dark shadows underneath and behind. And Kublai sketched into the scene with burnt umber as the sun brushed just enough detail to put the shapes together and realize a rather large black cat was studying you.
This past winter when I dug into my bins of photos, at least now all bins and envelopes collected into the studio, I finally found the whole envelope separated from where it should be because I had it out for the reference photo for A Rosy Glow, painted in 1998, and along with finally finding these two photos of Kublai found others of Stanley and Allegro and Sophie that are just daily cat things but so precious now in memory.
What was he communicating? He would travel on to his next life on September 19 that year. His will was strong but his muscular body was weakening with a condition for which there was no diagnosis at that time, and which responded to palliative treatments until it didn’t. I felt him slipping away. He let me know he was holding firm, and he knew I was doing all I could to keep him here. But we were both aware of what might be ahead.
Below, another angle of him at that same moment, and in studying the negatives I see that I took this photo first, then likely walked around to the right, around the rhododendron still monopolizing that corner of the porch, to see if I could catch him behind that leafy cover and purrhaps between the stems of its blooms…and so I did.
One of the reasons this image came to mind so often in the past decade was that Mimi loved the front walk, especially when the sun came around and she could nibble her catnip and then roll around, curl up and nap on the warm concrete. So many times I resolved to find that photo and then photographed Mimi, unknowingly in many of the same places and postures. Here she is from May 2024; especially sweet because she would leave for her next life on August 10 that year. I know I had always tried to get a photo of Mimi to match the photo of Kublai in my memory and I was pretty sure I hadn’t achieved that. But little did I know that as I took photos of her through the years, especially during the months of her last summer, that there was a rhyme scheme between the eras.
And there she is in one of her pauses between visiting individual catnip plants, moving in and out of the sun and shade as we knew, as Kublai and I knew, that her will was as strong as it had ever been, but I also felt her slipping away.
And sometimes when I followed Mimi, and I know she tried to match what I was visualizing as she always did, it had always been her little game with me to read my mind and resist, and then find the spot and the pose I’d been imagining, I thought of them both as one being, one continuum of guidance and protection. Bridging them was Cookie, who was never in the front but definitely in the back yard and especially the garden, the three were all one powerful presence for me.
Below Mimi gives it one more try though she’s tired by now. I know that I never sensed that continuum, that lineage of cats who came into my life and played that role as I rescued and fostered others and learned and still learn my trades and continue to make this house a home, the rhyme pattern from one era to the next, until now, when I’m kind of on my own, but by now I should know how to be a grown up and not need guidance, right?
They may only be with me in memory, but they are always with me in the sun sparkles and deep shadows of late afternoon, tending to evening when the veil thins and we are, in a way, all together.
Pet Loss in the First Person
From the time I began writing about my experiences in pet loss, relating what I was feeling and thinking about it as I moved through grief, readers have thanked me, often in private, for my honesty, grateful to know another shared their feelings as they moved through grief, or helped them make a decision.
Thank you for following our grief journey after losing three members of our feline family.
I hope sharing our experiences have helped you in some way, as sharing my experiences with you helps me.
Read more articles about Pet Loss in the First Person, my personal losses, about Pet Loss and other Essays on The Creative Cat.
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