Heartache and Compassion

I’m sorry for the crickets this last month. In my last post, Moving Forward, I was quite ambitious about keeping the ball rolling on the writing process, but sometimes life has other plans and if you don’t roll with the punches, you get snowballed under and can’t breathe.

Sometimes a friend calls and asks for help driving home across the country from visiting her parents with her three kids. I’m not sure how she kept her sanity driving to see her parents in the first place, but this is a lifelong friend of mine and she’s near and dear to my heart. I couldn’t pass up a week with her when it’s been several years since seeing each other because, well, you can probably guess.

Sometimes traveling turns into illness and when you get home, you spend a week on the couch just trying to breathe through a nose that’s threatening to run off your face and trying not to cough while you search for the box of tissues.

Sometimes you notice a pet’s sides are heaving in and out and she’s no longer purring, so you take her in to see the vet. But this is a feisty, ten-pound beast and to actually get a physical of her, or x-rays, they have to put her under anesthesia. And sometimes, when a small feline’s already fighting to breathe because of tumors pressing against her trachea and fluid building in her lungs, she simply stops breathing and there’s a howling hole left in your heart by the unexpected passing of a beloved pet.

And sometimes you have the opportunity to go on one of your husband’s business trips and see old friends, which gives you the distance you desperately need to process the new, aching sense of fragility in your world. So you go, and you let the normal world rest for awhile so that when you come back and pick up the ashes of your loss, you can sprinkle them around the roses in your garden and not feel like you’re going to lose it every time you hear the fantom click of your cat’s claws on the hardwood floor.

By then you can appreciate the vet who covered your expenses and the cremation services who gave you a paw print pressed into a ceramic heart. You can enjoy in a bittersweet way the blooming roses and the birds your pet loved to chatter at from the back porch. You’ve been reminded to cherish every small blessing while it lasts and acknowledge that life rolls on.

This has been my last month in a nut shell. You wouldn’t think the loss of a pet would hit so hard, but it does. I’ve worked some, but needless to say, it’s not been what I planned.

For now, I’m going to focus on finishing Hidden Mythics II, because that’s growing long in the tooth and has been giving me trouble, and I’m going to snuggle with the Writing Sidekick and be more intentional about enjoying each moment with friends and family.

I will try to post updates occasionally but am not committing to the ambitious schedule I hoped for last month. Thank you for understanding the ups and downs as I continue this writing journey. I am continually blessed by every one of you.

Blessings,

Jennifer

P.S. Just to be clear, the cat who passed is not the Writing Sidekick but his housemate. I’ve referred to her in the past as the Supervisor because that was her personality.