I regularly write about my personal experience of the losses of my own cats on my website The Creative Cat. That includes Mr. Sunshine who once stood on this fence and sniffed this flower pinwheel on a day he was feeling great, a few months before he died on March 1, 2024.
This post is an entry in my series “Attachments” on www.TheCreativeCat.net about the things with which we develop attachments because they have something, however distantly connected, with the life and loss of one of our animal companions.
I first published this post on The Creative Cat on October 12, 2025.
Last Wednesday morning I looked once again at the increasingly tattered state of “Mr. Sunshine’s flower,” the flower pinwheel on the picket fence by the garden that I associate with him. A sweet breezy morning would normally have the flower spinning madly, instead it had a number of false starts before it actually began to spin. Still, the flower brought back the memory of that magic October afternoon in 2023 when Mimi had hopped up on the fence in the sun, then Mr. Sunshine and Giuseppe followed. I took a series of photos and brief videos, but one of the photos was immediately a forever memory, its brilliance still held in this ragged nylon and wire pinwheel flower, the memory always warming my heart and making me smile. You can see the cat in the middle, Mr. Sunshine, blissfully sniffing the flower pinwheel. He was so cool.
And a respite in the line of losses; we had already lost their siblings/daughter Mewsette and Jelly Bean in June and July, and this was shortly before the symptoms of Giuseppe’s meningioma started neurological symptoms and we’d lose him a little less than two months later, Mr. Sunshine would join them the following March, and their mother Mimi the following August. But this one perfect October afternoon all were well and happy, playing in the sun, exploring in the shade, enjoying their time out here.
The flower had survived since 2022, outside the entire time, but on this day a twinge of sadness mingled with the joy knowing the flower wouldn’t last much longer before all the petals were tattered and it stood, still, in its place on the fence. The word “metaphor” came to mind followed slowly by “memories” as I thought about all the times I’d looked at that flower, checked to see it was still there, stopped to watch it spinning, feeling Mr. Sunshine’s presence and visualizing him in image after image, but always knowing it wouldn’t last forever, and how the flower’s decline in many ways was a metaphor for his.
This essay began writing itself in my head and even as I began to open the notes app on my phone to use voice to text to record my thoughts as I often do now I was headed into the house and just went right to my computer and began writing. When it was finished I decided to record it and make an accompanying video and title the whole project, “Metaphors and Memories” which is linked immediately below, and the essay itself below the video. It’s been a while since I’ve had the time, the focus and presence of mind to be able to produce one of these little videos, but I knew it was just as important for my own healing that I take the time for that creative effort. I hope that in any way it’s helpful to you too.
Metaphors and Memories
The essay
This breezy, sunny, post-rain morning in the garden I noticed that Mr. Sunshine’s pinwheel flower was having a little trouble starting to spin.
For nearly two years since that wonderful photo of him and Mimi and Giuseppe on the fence where he is coolly sniffing the flower in the sun and color of October, that flower, tied to the fence post where it can always be seen and catch the breeze, has been spinning at the slightest provocation, and I feel Mr. Sunshine near me. It has always had a little regular squeak when it spins and when I was indoors at my desk, even at night with the windows open, I could hear that squeak and smiled to think of Mr. Sunshine out there, doing his thing. The flower had become one of my “attachments,” those inanimate objects I come to associate with cats I’ve lost so that the things become precious to me as a stand-in for the feline I’m missing.
But as with all things in my garden and in life, someday the flower will slow down, falter, and then, eventually, stop, just as Mr. Sunshine did after two years of holding off the cancerous masses in his abdomen so he could support each of his siblings in their last steps and get every last moment due to him in this life.
This once-colorful flower now has a fourth tattered petal which is probably why it doesn’t catch the breeze as well as it has, even recently. In September 2024, about six months after he’d left us, one of the petals was ripped through and it wouldn’t spin for missing that resistance to the breeze. I had a second flower that had gotten pretty tattered in its first summer and winter so I put it into one of my planters where it could be colorful even if it didn’t spin. I pulled one of the petals from that flower to replace the damaged one on Mr. Sunshine’s flower.
For a few days after a windy, icy storm in January 2025 it was lost under ice and snow, only the plastic stake that held it left tied to the fence; I was bereft and a little panicked. But I saw a scrap of color when the snow began to melt a few days later and revived it, slipping it back on the stick and replacing yet another petal.
By early spring I regularly found the flower on the brick path between the garden beds at an angle that told me it was blown off and landed face down. When I slipped it back on I could see that the center of the flower that gripped the spike it spun on had worn out and no longer tightly gripped it. I slipped a bit of a broken plastic knife I used as a plant marker into the tip of the post that it spun on and that has held it in place through storms and bird landings since then.
But four petals have tears in them, and I have no more petals to replace the one that no longer catches the breeze. I no longer hear that endearing little squeak. I know the time will come when the flower will cease to be able to perform its task of colorful entertainment in the garden and memory for me. But my intention with everything that goes into my garden is to love and support it while it lives out its natural life. Life is a cycle, the vegetables I plant, the bricks I pick up free from others who no longer need them, even the wood of the raised beds and plant stakes, untreated, it eventually breaks down and becomes part of the soil.
The metaphor matches Mr. Sunshine’s journey, and mine with him. He put everything into continuing life, and I found working treatments as palliative care, both of us working together, until life was no longer sustainable and he joined his siblings in their next life.
As with Mr. Sunshine, I will no more keep that flower beyond its abilities nor hasten its demise than I did with Mr. Sunshine. Knowing me and my attachments, when too many of the petals are ripped and the flower no longer spins at all, I will move it to a safe space to hold as a vessel for memory until such time as I no longer feel that connection with Mr. Sunshine through the flower.
And a note from “The Creative Cat” where I originally published this essay, and where I write about pet loss just about every Sunday…
Thank you for following our grief journey after losing seven members of our feline family.
I hope sharing our experiences have helped you in some way, as sharing my experiences with you helps me.
You can read all the articles related to their losses by tapping one of the images here, in the side bar or in articles about pet loww. You can also read all my articles about my own losses in the category “Pet Loss in the First Person”
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