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How losing my cat taught me that grief doesn’t always ask us to let go—sometimes, it asks us to create.
I met Mikado in 2014. He was a big white cat in a shelter in Paris, and at the time, I thought I was rescuing him. Looking back, more than a decade later, I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t the other way around. Maybe he was the one choosing me.
Just one week after I adopted him, Mikado became seriously ill. It was frightening, of course. But something unexpected happened within myself during that time. Caring for him became one of the catalysts that gave me the courage to question the life I was living.
Soon afterward, I left the corporate world.
I didn’t know it then, but this would become a pattern between us.
Every time my life shifted, somehow, Mikado was there. He came with me through changes of careers, countries, relationships, homes, identities. Eventually, we moved from France to Cambodia. And Mikado travelled. Easily and beautifully.
This big white cat somehow adapted to a life I could never have imagined when I first saw him in that shelter.
There were planes and new apartments and tropical heat and entirely new worlds.
And somewhere along the way, we started pulling cards together. I was just starting to develop my own spiritual practice back then, and Mikado had a peculiar way of becoming part of it.
He would sit beside me. Sometimes on the cards. Sometimes staring at me with that particular expression cats have when they seem to understand considerably more than they’re willing to explain.
For eleven years, Mikado became much more than my pet.
He became a witness to my life. A mystical, luminous, white presence. He always seemed to know.
Then, one day, he was gone.
Mikado died suddenly on May 6th 2025.
And his death happened at a moment when several other parts of my life were collapsing too.
There are periods when life doesn’t seem to remove one thing at a time.
It clears the table. And suddenly, you are standing in a life you barely recognize.
That window brought the most intense grief of my life.
For a while, I thought grief was simply the enormous absence left by someone we loved.
The empty places. The habits that no longer have anywhere to go. The strange silence where a living being used to be.
Anyone who has deeply loved an animal knows this.
And yet, we sometimes still struggle to give animal grief the legitimacy it deserves. We say, “It was a cat.”
As if the species of the being we loved determined the size of the space they were allowed to occupy in our hearts.
But love doesn’t seem particularly interested in those categories. Neither does grief.
Something began happening to mine.
I didn’t wake up one morning and decide to “transform my grief.”
I don’t think grief works like that.
It happened much more quietly. Holly Smee, illustrator and soul sister reached out and said, “Let’s make cards about him.” I had always dreamed of creating my own deck. I never knew it would be Mikado’s.
So, I began imagining Mikado. Curious. Wise. Ridiculous. Tender. On sofas, or hunting, adventurous.
I thought of all the cards we would include in the deck. Spiritual ones (reincarnation, destiny) and some connecting to the stages of grief (longing, the void, hope) to only name a few.
We started creating images. One became another. Then another. Mikado appeared among stars and candles. He appeared sleeping in lavender. He appeared beside other souls. He appeared in images about healing, destiny, ancestors, reincarnation, intuition. Pictures of us both became oracle cards.
Eventually, there were 50 of them.
And I realized something strange had happened. My grief had become a creative object.
I called it: The White Cat Wisdom Oracle.
But I’ve come to think that description gets the story slightly backward.
It isn’t really an oracle deck inspired by a cat.
It’s the true story of a cat that became an oracle.
Grief doesn’t always mean letting go.
We hear this expression constantly. You have to let go.
Perhaps sometimes we do.
But I no longer believe that healing necessarily requires us to sever our relationship with those who have died.
Sometimes the relationship simply changes form.
The physical presence disappears. Love doesn’t.
And perhaps our task isn’t always to leave the dead behind. Perhaps sometimes it is to discover how to carry them differently.
For me, that became creation. For somebody else, it might be planting a tree. Writing a book. Starting a foundation. Talking to them while walking alone. Putting their photograph beside the bed. Or simply continuing to love them.
There is no hierarchy in these rituals.
They are all ways of saying:
You were here.
You mattered.
What existed between us still is.
Sometimes I wonder what Mikado would think.
I imagine showing him the finished deck. His face everywhere. A whole spiritual universe constructed around the life of one white cat from a shelter.
He would probably stare at me and think I had completely lost my mind. And honestly, he might have a point.
But I also think he would recognize something. Love. Because beneath the cards, the illustrations, and everything else that has grown around this project, that’s all it really is. Love looking for somewhere to go.
Mikado’s little oracle is now preparing to begin its journey into the world.
And my greatest hope isn’t simply that people will use the cards.
It’s that perhaps someone will pull one beside their bed one morning and remember something they already knew.
That animals can be teachers. That grief and love are sometimes two sides of the same thing. That losing someone doesn’t erase what they gave us.
And that endings sometimes contain strange little seeds of beginnings.
I thought I rescued Mikado in 2014.
Eleven years later, I understand how profoundly he rescued me.
And perhaps creating something in his memory was never really about refusing to say goodbye.
Perhaps it was simply my way of saying:
Thank you. Our story continues.
author: Sophie Gregoire
Image: Author's Own
Editor: Lisa Erickson
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