Cats Like Quiet People

Each year I find myself crouched underneath the shadowy refuge of a lace leaf Japanese Maple tree, where I plant impatiens—the only annual that will grow under the tree’s shade. I work the soil hoping for earthworms, a sign of healthy soil. On one of these spring plantings, I discovered a constellation of white flakes — the cremains of my daughter’s cat. All I could do was sit on my heels and remember.

“There have to be daisies,white ones.” My twenty-six-year-old daughter had called to update me while she waited outside Kroger, where her bereaved younger sister was buying white daisies for our backyard funeral. “White daisies, like the ones in The Three Lives of Thomasina,” Susanna says.

Of course. The 1964 Disney movie has been a talisman for Liz. She returns to the film for the comfort of its repetition and for its feline personified. Thomasina, presumed dead, is laid-out on a bed of daisies in a wheelbarrow, where a local “witch” finds her. The woman detects a weak heartbeat and takes Thomasina home to a cabin in the woods. Disney-style moments of recognition and reversal will, of course, lead to a happy resolution.

Unlike Thomasina, Whiskers will not resurrect. Her mourners will NOT march to the moan-and-wail of a bagpipe dirge. Nor will they sing, “Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond,” lochside. This child-cat saga ends here, in our urban garden, below the lush umbrella of feathered branches under which Whiskers so often basked and will forevermore.