My baby Shelby Sue (my Sheltie I'd had since college) passed away last week. It was horribly traumatic, and I'm heartbroken. I'm definitely not ready to blog about that day yet, but when I am, I definitely believe it will help me heal. In the meantime, I'll post some more uplifting stories. Here's one from the day after Shelby died. I'd cried for the entire night, and much of the morning before dropping my son off at preschool and going to my pottery class. I knew I needed to be around people who loved their dogs as much as I do...
The last day of each session we have a potluck for lunch in class. This week, I wanted to bake a cake and decorate it for our instructor's birthday. Ron, a retired fireman (about 60 or so) usually makes a chocolate cake, but I really wanted to try my hand at baking this new recipe. So he let me take the task.
I walked into pottery, and he immediately asked, when I plopped down a Farm Fresh cake on the table "Where's this great cake you promised? I thought you were going to bake and decorate all morning for us?"
Let me make it perfectly clear that Ron is one of the kindest, sweetest men. He's in a class with 10 women ranging in age from 31 to 89, so he's heard it all and laughs every bit of it off. All I could squeak out was "I had a bad day."
I had my back turned to him, so he continued to make fun of me. Until I turned around, tears streaming down my face. He felt so bad that he grinded down all of my sharp edges of my pottery.
My instructor told me the story of when she smothered her favorite bird in a pullout couch, and she cried.
But here's the absolute best story. Definitely the best. Peggy is pushing 80, and the first time I met her, she asked me "so what's the deal with crystal meth?" Like I would know. Then she proceeded to describe the nude cruise she and her husband had just taken. Told me she was tired of private parts right next to the buffet line.
Anyway, Peggy told me the story of her friend, who's husband had passed away. She'd invited a man to live with her, and he was also 80. She was slowly backing out of her garage, when she hit something. Hard. And something big. It was her boyfriend. This woman ran OVER her 80-year-old boyfriend, who had collapsed and passed out from a heart attack.
I asked Peggy if he'd died, and she said "yes. I'm sure it was a combination of both a heart attack and being run over by a car. Either way, it's pretty damn funny when you think about it."
That was the first and only time I smiled that day.
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