Dear Dan,
Chompers is very sick right now and I’m worried she won’t make it. Anytime someone has asked me, directly or indirectly, about anything related to her mortality, I’ve used all of my energy to stay grounded because I am not ready to entertain the possibility that she won’t make it.
Normally when I feel overwhelmed, I think about my Grandmas and I think about you as a place of comfort and support. Last night while lying in bed, as I began to formulate my internal ask to you and my Grandmas to make sure Chompie was okay, I unearthed a memory I had forgotten about. Scooter was very sick the weekend of the wedding get together we all pitched in to host for you and I had to make the difficult decision of canceling because I knew we were going to have to put him down soon. Before making the decision, I checked in with my friends to make sure that was okay with them. I remember you were annoyed when I told you the news and you made a bitchy comment to me when I said you and Tono were more than welcome to still use the hotel room we bought as a gift for you. We stopped talking after that. I just couldn’t move past it. Scooter was put down the next day, after howling in pain all morning. We didn’t talk for months. And it wasn’t just because I didn’t reach out, but I think you were also upset at me that I had “ruined” your day with something you thought wasn’t worth changing plans about. We didn’t start talking again until you were sick. And what I thought I could never move past, I did, so I could show up for you.
In some ways, that interaction shouldn’t matter, because we were in a much different place by the time you passed away, and yet I’d I still I found myself unable to call on you for support last night when thinking about Chompers. And, in fact, I actively avoided it.
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I let this draft sit unfinished. It’s now two weeks later. Chompie is still here, but I still feel unable to call on your support.
I took this picture at the ER. The let me sit with her in a room. They brought her in bundled up in blankets on a donut shaped bed because they said she couldn’t regulate her temperature on her own. I cried under the florescent lights.
