"Dreams of Three", watercolor, 9" x 6" © Bernadette E. Kazmarski — “Dreams of Three”, watercolor, 9″ x 6″ © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

I regularly write about my personal experience of the losses of my own cats on my website The Creative Cat. I first published this post on The Creative Cat on January 5, 2026.

The strangest things, and where you find them, can be a touchstone for a flow of memories, of moments that show strength and love and bring a depth to our relationship with our animal companions though their loss is clearly imminent. Another in the series of “Attachments”, the bond we feel with everyday things that have some connection, however distant, with the life of and our relationship with an animal companion who’s gone on to their next life.

black cat — Notwithstanding the purple background, I was totally surprised by how many colors showed up in Mr. Sunshine’s eye.

My old violet fleece bathrobe has seen more than its share of times good and bad over the past 20 years or so. Yet every autumn when I slip it on for the first cold morning it’s as if I didn’t take a six-month break from it. It’s in the background of many photos with cats on my lap or hanging in the bathroom with cats on the sink or cabinet, as it was for Mr. Sunshine in the photo above from 2013. The thing is indestructible so I’m glad I like it, and also glad it’s indestructible for the memories it holds, physically and emotionally.

The first time I put it on this autumn 2025 I put my hands in the pockets out of habit and felt some little hard objects in the bottom of the right-hand pocket, the pocket I’d use if I was carrying something in my right hand and dropped whatever that was into the pocket to free up my hands. Often these things are little hardwares from some enterprising morning project, or something I found in one place that needed to go to another. I couldn’t determine what they were with my fingertips so I pulled out three of them and found they were Greenies dental treats.

My cats love the catnip flavor, and along with handing them out as regular treats with a purpose, they like them enough I also used them to test or entice appetites in the recent years of palliative care for cats. Because they would always take one the test was for how strong their appetite if they turned down a meal. If they would eat one treat or more I could just observe them presuming their inappetence was digestive, or give them some treatments for nausea which would pick up their appetite so they would resume eating. If not, I’d go to other measures, taking a temperature, checking hydration, looking for possible sources of pain.

I would have dropped a few in that pocket to take upstairs to one of the cats confined in the bathroom for observation, or overnight so they would have food available and a cozy familiar place, and so that I’d be able to check them first thing without looking for them. The treats were something they would crunch even if they had no appetite for regular food. I remembered the worry and sometimes fear associated with this circumstance: please eat the treat. Was it a bad morning? Was it one of a series of bad days that seemed to be leading to a conclusion? Or were they just a little off? So many mornings like this since 2022, who might have been the intended recipient of the treats who ended up not eating them?

Counting backward, not Mr. Max, I kept some in the studio just for him and Morty and he was never confined to the bathroom. Basil? No, the only time Basil was confined to the bathroom he managed against all odds to break out. Mimi? Her time of being in the bathroom was during summer, not the time I’d wear this bathrobe.

Mr. Sunshine's not feeling well today. — Mr. Sunshine’s not feeling well today.

It was Mr. Sunshine, and I felt instinctively this was true. And it was likely from his last day, March 1, 2024, when he did not come downstairs right away and I went back up with treats to see how he reacted to them. He didn’t eat them, nor any food that morning. I had dropped the treats back in the pocket after he had turned his face away from one I was offering. His temperature was slightly elevated, but he got up and came downstairs, before the chain of events leading up to his death that afternoon.

The treats remained in the pocket, forgotten, until the following autumn 2025 when I found them in there. I remember pulling them out then and looking at them in the palm of my hand, deciding to toss them in the trash because they’d surely be stale, but deciding instead to keep them for that memory of that day.

The treats are still in my pocket. They aren’t hurting anything. When my hand finds them in the bottom of the right-hand pocket I remember Mr. Sunshine, and then others, and those mornings, and days, overnights, that I carried a few to the bathroom in my pocket. I don’t remember my worry and fear or even their losses, I remember their strength, and their trust, and their determination to live each moment they could knowing I would help them do that, and the increasing depth of the bond between us as we faced this together.

In Threes

What Mr. Sunshine's flower looks like now. — What Mr. Sunshine’s flower looks like now.

So I remembered Mr. Sunshine this morning when I went out to the garden for my yoga in the bitter cold, my hands in the pockets of the robe, fingering the treats in the right pocket. I stood for my postures in front of Mr. Sunshine’s flower, feeling very connected to him, and then each of the others, and the four siblings in groups, from the photos I worked with the day before for my “Friday Four and More” photos.

Three Birds

As I worked my warrior poses, one hand down on my shin and the other stretched up toward the sky as I turned to look at it, a trio of birds flew overhead, headed west. Immediately I thought of the varied groups of three who would nap together. While the four siblings did often gather together, a selection of three was the second most frequent nap collection, and how many sketches and photos I have of three of them together—three of them curled together on the bed was the very first sketch in my three-year series of daily sketches.

I continued my posture, returning upright with my arms outstretched, then leaning down the other way looking up at the opposite hand in the air, and saw the three birds again flying above my rooftop and past my upraised hand heading east this time. They were circling overhead and I lost count of my moves for the distraction thinking about them as the three birds passed overhead again and I nearly tipped over as I followed them, looking up and around from that angle.

I moved to my tree poses, standing in front of Mr. Sunshine’s flower and smiling, thinking of those naps of three, watching the light cold breeze move the bits of tattered nylon on the petals, then push it around a bit in one direction, then the other, wondering how much longer this flower would be able to keep spinning. I got my answer less than a minute later when a quick little gust sent the flower spinning, then slowing, then back to fluttering tatters and little movements back and forth. I’m including this video I took at the time just because, and it includes the quietness of the moment, bird sounds and breezes, but there’s no reason you need to watch the entire 1:45.

How close I feel to them in those moments. It’s interesting how the strangest of things, and where you find them, can bring on a whole review of memories.

watercolor of three cats — “Dreams of Three”, watercolor, 9″ x 6″ © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

Dreams of Three

Giuseppe, Mewsette and Mr. Sunshine were all dreaming very deeply on my desk, curled and tucked neatly together. I saw swirls, and began to visualize how I would interpret those swirls. No heavy lines, I wanted the darkness of their faces, where the swirls began, fading in swirls and marbles and fading lines to the lightness of their shapes. Somehow, speckles would be a part of it. I took a photo, below, and pondered my assignment.

Little Visits

Stories of sensing my cats’ presence after they’ve gone to their next life

sketch of two cats — Two in Sun and Shadow, charcoal and watercolor, 9″ x 6.5″ © B.E. Kazmarski

This post on The Creative Cat includes the text as well as a video with my reading of the stories illustrated with photos and art.

Click the image to read and listen to Little Visits.

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”

All images and text © 2022-2025 Bernadette E. Kazmarski • www.custompetmemorialvotives.com

All images and content are copyrighted and may not be used or reproduced in any way without my written permission. Please contact me if you are interested in using any of my content.

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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.

Mimi, Mr. Sunshine and Giuseppe on the pallet and fence on a gorgeous October afternoon.

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.