But Love

goes on and on and on.....
source

"Death ends a life, not a relationship."

Jack Lemmon

I came across this quote by the late Jack Lemmon shortly after my father's death in 2002.

Ahhhhh, I thought....yes so true. 

All the love I ever had for you...all I ever admired in you...all I ever shared with you...does not end 

because you died. I still have all those feelings and I always will.

My relationship has not ended with you just because you are no longer of this earth.

This is Newman's grave in the backyard. A temporary headstone marking his resting place. 

I'll find something nicer but this will have to do for now.

I'm learning to accept that he is gone.

That I will never touch the softest fur again.

Never kiss his cheek while he squirms in delight.

Never yell his name for him to stop something he shouldn't be doing.

Never hold him. Never tell him he tastes like carmel when I kiss him.

I want to tell you that your comments and emails have gotten me through this time.

Those of you have shared your own tragic stories have made me feel not quite so guilty.

I'll be writing each of you. I just have not had time.
But know I have cherished each and every one of them.

I have had to go and go and go of late and I'd come in and read your comments and
emails and find the strength to carry on.

So much going on with me at a time when I just want to stop all.

This is my sister, Jamie. A favorite photo of her taken many years ago when she,
my Mom and I went on a vacation to Savannah, Georgia.
This day we walked the beach at Tybee Island.

My sister has had many struggles in her life. She has had epilepsy since she was about two years old.
Grand mall seizures that were never totally under control.
She'd have one or two a month no matter how much we tried to control the situations around her.
A seizure could be brought on by flashing lights, sudden change in temperature, excitement.
Even going to the movies was a risk.
For a child that loved to be into everything it was sooooo hard to keep her safe.
No roller skating, no running and playing games outside, only supervised tricycle riding...
the list goes on and on.
Every time she had a seizure and we watched her turn blue.....we feared this one was the one.

In her late twenties...we found new medication that for the first time completely controlled her seizures.
It was like an awakening for her. She could think clearly for the first time because she was off
the large doses of barbiturates that kept her safe.

Unfortunately, a side effect of the new drug was weight gain.
Coming from a gene pool where weight was already a struggle...this increased the situation.
She has learning disabilities but is very good with language and has a large vocabulary.
But her reasoning skills are not the best which has led to many times that she's had to be rescued from
a situation she gets herself in.
Seven years ago, a few months after the death of my father, she met her soul mate....Charles.
They married the following year on Valentine's Day. She wore a pink satin wedding dress made by my Mother.
My cousin, Shelly and I were bridesmaids wearing cream angora sweater sets and pale pink satin skirts.

Her weight has gone up and down but of late, it has soared. She is now over 500 lbs.
I have not talked about this because I have seen how she is treated because of her weight.
She is immediately judged and treated with disgust.
Despite this...she is a naturally happy person that finds much joy in the little things of life.
Those that meet her, never forget her and many people love her as she loves many others.

Yes, she leads a very sedentary life style.
Years of being told not to move around too much for fear of her having a seizure finally became
a way of life for a child that normally would have been climbing trees.

This summer her health became compromised in a way we were not expecting.
She developed bed sores from sitting in her easy chair too much.

(I had worried about such a thing....but it's pretty hard to tell an adult woman what to do.
She resents my suggestions on her life style. As I would resent her's too.)

Yes, we encouraged her to move...but her knees hurt badly and back too.

She does not eat large quantities of food. Does she always eat the right things? No.
Does she eat what I would eat? No.
I'm fat too and I LOVE salad and vegetables.
But she also does make periodic attempts to lose weight.
She'll lose quite a bit and then gain it back and more.
I know many people, many...that eat far worse than she and are of normal weight.

Her situation escalated to the point where she had to go to a hospital in early July.
She was in the hospital for a week and then sent to a rehab facility about 25 minutes from me.
It's about 40 minutes from Mother in the other direction.
We've been trading off days going to see her. And some days we both go see her.

Some of the nurses there are unbelievably kind and others there are sadists.
For awhile she did not tell us about the times when bad things were happening.
She thought that everyone was just too busy to attend her properly.
Once I found out last week, a few days short of losing Newman that she was being left for hours
in her own waste and sitting on her sores...I was livid!
I had to take matters into my own hands.
Which involved visits immediately to the facility to make sure she is getting cared for properly.
She now insists her phone be with her at all times and threatens to call her sister if she feels things
getting out of control.

Funny, how all are taking action now.....that they know I will come within minutes.
I am not a person that likes confrontation. But I will fight you...if you are doing someone wrong.

She had what we believed to be a urinary tract infection and we could not get a urinalysis done.
They kept asking her why she thought she had one.
And seemed to not believe her when she described her pain.
The doctor only comes one day a week and comes while she is asleep.
I finally got the night head nurse to agree to do it without the doctor's approval.
Although, she said...I know I'll get in trouble for this.
She got reprimanded for it despite the fact that the test came back saying she had a bacterial infection
and a staph infection!

It took a full week to get antibiotics ordered for her!

Her sores are much better now, most of them are healed and she is trying to walk on her own.
Trying to get out of bed on her own.
Which for her is monumental.

I am praying we can get her out of there without something horrific happening to her.
The night nurse at the facility, Dorothy has been our saviour.
If it weren't for Dorothy...watching out for her...
I don't think she would be on the road to recovery.
Oh...I'm sure you are asking why we have kept her in this facility.
It was the only one that would take her that wasn't hours away from us because of her size.
We knew she had to be somewhere where we could see her each day and make sure she was ok.

So....I've been dealing with that....

She now realizes that she must take more action in her life.
She knew already and was water walking at the Y before this happened.
But now she knows it is a matter of life or death.
We pray she will be back walking at the Y soon.
Maybe within a month?

She needs your prayers.

And then my best friend and cousin, Shelly

She is in the hospital as I type this. She had her first chemo treatment this past week.
MD Anderson said their chemo would kill her.
She came home and went to a doctor here that said she should try the chemo again that she took 10 years ago.
You are only suppose to have this treatment once because it can damage your heart but after
the doctor reviewed her case, she said there was no reason to not do it because her heart was fine
and she had only had four treatments of it ten years ago.
It had wiped out her cancer coupled with another chemo and radiation.

She cannot have radiation this time.
So she had that last Monday.

This is her third round of chemo in this past year.

I've been with her after I got Jamie in a better space.
I got to spend lots of time with her for two days.
Wednesday night we watched a movie together.
A favorite of mine, "Larger Than Life" with Bill Murray.

I love it. If you haven't seen it, it is so adorable.
Bill Murray, a motivational speaker, learns that the father he thought was long dead has actually
just died and left him a large inheritance. When he goes to see the lawyer about it,
he learns that his father was a circus clown and the large inheritance is an elephant.

This is a road trip movie. He has to get the elephant across the country in three days to California
so that she can fly across the sea to be free and live in the Rain Forest.

You can watch it on Netflix as an instant view.
So I saw it a long time ago and loved it and then recently it was on a cable channel late one night and
I'd watched the whole thing holding Newman in my arms laughing and crying.
I had told Shelly I wanted her to see it.

So Wednesday night, she and her husband, Tim and I watched it in their big bed.
She loved it too. It was hard for me to watch knowing only last week, I'd watched it while I held
Newman in my arms but part of the healing process, I suppose.

Shelly is on oxygen and her voice is weak. She cannot laugh or cry because it is too hard for her to
breath.
She has fluid on her lungs. The cancer has returned on the outside of her lungs.
Fluid must be drained twice a day from both sides.
She says she feels like she is drowning.
Although, the breathing situation has improved this week from what it was when she was at MD Anderson.

So yesterday, I had to take a friend's Mom to doctor's appointments because my friend was out of town.
When I called to check on Shelly I learned she had gone to the hospital that morning.
She was dehydrated and had very low blood pressure.
I spent a long time with her and family yesterday afternoon and night.

I'll see her again today, hopefully.

She feels bad...but on Thursday she had an appetite and had said Thai food was sounding good to her
and maybe we could get it next week.

I'm afraid she is stuck in the hospital for the long weekend.

We should know today or tomorrow if all this sickness is the cancer or the chemo.
It's most likely both. But we are hoping she will start to feel better today or tomorrow.
Then she will have two weeks of recovery...before another chemo treatment.

She really needs all your prayers too.
The cancer is going to kill her....we are just hoping to push it away for awhile longer.

She is my best friend and is like a sister to me.

Life will be hard for me without her.

So....at a time when I'd like to do fun things and try to get my mind off Newman....it's not possible.

Harvey has been very sad. He keeps going back to bed. Not eating.
Which of course won't hurt him.
I have not been eating either although yesterday I ate a real meal for the first time in over a week.
I've lost my taste for anything sweet and can only drink water.
I am telling myself I am going to take advantage of my lack of desire for tea or dr. pepper and continue to drink only water.
I like water anyway...so this is a good thing.
Last night when I got home...for the first time...since Newman, Harvey wanted to play...
he tried his best to get Sally to play with him.
He'd pounce on her and growl and play bite....which would have gotten Newman to running all around
playing chase with him.
Sally was not interested.
She wagged her tail and didn't mind him wanting to play but she just didn't play.
I had gotten Harvey so Newman would have a playmate and those two loved to hop around and jump at each other and chase each other.

Violet has let Harvey snuggle with her a lot this past week.
Normally, she sleeps away from him but she has let him rest his head on her and sleep pressed against her.

She has been out of sorts too.
No one barking in my house...very quiet.
I now realize that Newman alerted everyone to everything going on outside.

Pretty boring here.

Sally is back to her old self. I've had a very hard time with anger towards her.
It's been hard for me to look at her because of what happened.
I am getting better.
I still don't understand why she attacked him that night when this is something that never happens.
I keep reminding myself of my vet's words that dogs have disagreements and a little skirmish like that
did not do the damage.
That this weakness in his brain stem was there just waiting to come to the forefront.

I watch her and yes, when she is excited she is very wiggly. And she is strong.
But she does not jump on the others. She shows no signs of aggression.
She actually looks scared of Harvey when around the food bowl because he huffs at everyone
to leave his food alone.

So strange to only have three.
I realize that I must have worried about Newman constantly because I have this strange sense of calm.
Like now I know no one is going to get out and run down the street.
I don't have to worry about one of these finding a hole in the fence or fighting a opossum or climbing a ladder.
I'd love to have those worries again, though.

Most of my grass is dead in the backyard.
We are still having days of temperatures well over 100.
They say it will cool tomorrow.
We've had a over two and a half months of temps over 100.
105, 107 even 110
It's been exhausting. I have bushes and trees that have died despite me watering them every day.
Everyone around me is experiencing this though.
If this was our normal climate....we'd all have to switch to cactus in our yards.

My last photos of Newman as he explored the yard, one day last month.

Oh...that precious face and feet and ears and nose and eyes.
I am not crying constantly any more...but it doesn't take much to get me going again.
Over the past two months I've held him and told him I could get through anything as long as I had him.
I did not think....I would not have him soon.
I was fully prepared to lose him in four or six or eight years, not a few weeks.
But life is fragile and unfair and we just have to appreciate each precious moment as we have them.
I do have comfort in knowing that I fully appreciated and loved him.
That every inch - millimeter of him was admired and loved.
I have found myself saying..."I should never have loved anything that much."
But I know that is wrong.

I keep telling myself....if the day I had picked him up for the first time...
If the breeder had said..."You can have this one....but he will only live 8 years."
Would I have taken him?
Yes.
I would without hesitation trade 8 years of my own life for another 8 years with him.
But that cannot be.
So I must just be thankful I had 8 years with him and that I loved him more than anything on this planet can be loved by another living thing.

One day this week, Amy of Maison Decor sent me a box of shells she picked up for me
on her recent mini vacation to Martha's Vineyard.
I opened the box and smelled the sea.
Amy and I spoke for a long time one morning last week.
She and I have spoken through email lots over the past year and my tragedy pushed us to talk in person
for the first time.
She was everything and more that I thought she would be.
I would start the conversation crying and by the end was laughing which gave me hope that some day
I'd be ok again.

Also a very dear friend Cindi of Old Black Cat Boo has called me twice to spend hours on the phone consoling me.
Cindi has many little dogs that she shares her home with and recently had a scare herself with one of her
little dogs who was hurt.
We email each other a lot and I'd recently written her to give her words of hope that her little Rosie would fully recuperate.
It does look like she will.
I never ever thought my Newman would be in just as bad a shape and worse so soon.

Cindi and I have lots in common and again conversations started with crying and ended with laughter.
Unfortunately, I'd feel better, then hang up the phone and face the loneliness of my house again.

But I am improving...I will learn to live with this as I learned to live with the death of my father.

I had only recently been feeling like I was coming to be ok with the fact that he is gone
and it's been nine years.

I cannot be in a dark place again. I must not let all that is happening with the death of Newman
and Jamie and Shelly's illnesses destroy the happiness I have created for myself.

So.....I am going to try my best to get back in the happy groove which is this blog.
Open House Sunday will resume tomorrow unless something awful happens and
Mod Mix Monday will start up where I left off on this Monday again unless something happens.

This blog is a very happy place for me. Even if things are not perfect in my own life...
I know I can come here and forget all and create my vision of how life should always be.

I'm going to get back to that.
At least give it the old college try.

Thank you to all....that wrote me.
I will be writing you. I would have already...just no time to do it this past week.

But I want you to all know how very much it meant to me.
I notice eye rolls when I mention my blog friends to my real life friends, but they have not experienced
this world. In the blog world you get to know people that have common interests and dreams and
in some ways you become even more connected.

Not to diminish how much my local friends helped.
I have two friends named Shannon and both talked to me all night the first night I brought his body home.
I had to be on the phone the whole time till morning.
Shannon M brought me food. She picked out things she thought I would like...salad and vegetables and fruit.
I nibbled on these things when I would have never gone and bought any food or eaten otherwise.
I got calls and cards from friends here.

My Mom held me up when if I had not had her....I would have just layed on the floor and cried.

But I would come to the blog when I was all alone in the house and it saved me.

Those of you that never comment and only read, who wrote to me to tell me how much you enjoy my
blog and how sad you were and so you were leaving a comment for the first time....touched me so.

The woman that wrote and said...she liked to read my weenie stories to her grand children.
Oh....to know that Newman was appreciated and loved....made me feel so much better and a little worse too.

I hope weenie stories continue. Newman was the ring leader. I hope things of interest happen again.
We'll just have to see.

Thank you from the depths of my soul for being there for me.

You with my Mom and friends here, have saved me.
But to know late at night...I could come in and read words of comfort...what a gift that is.

A gift I can never repay.

Thank you.