Normal?

Normal around here is waking up by 7:00 to carry the pup outside, hope she successfully goes potty, then bring her back in to have breakfast (dry food mixed with a little wet food and warm water so she will eat it all) so she can then take medicine on a full stomach. (I repeated that feeding ritual three times a day to make sure she would eat her food because her medicine always seemed to upset her tummy.) Normal is getting Hana out of bed every morning and her saying hi to the puppy as we pass her by to go get a dry diaper on. Normal is going throughout the day worrying about the pooch and giving her her meds when the set alarm goes off to remind me. Normal is loving it when Hana Grace wants to love on her puppy, but standing guard so that she doesn't love on her too much.

Normally my life is really busy. I'm sure it still is from the outside looking in, but now I feel as though I have all this free time. The time that I used to spend helping Pagan in and out of the house, feeding her, giving her medicine, playing with her, loving her, bathing her, doctoring her, that time is now filled with missing her. Normal is hearing her tags jingle every time she moved a muscle, her barking at everything that passed by our front door because in the new house her pillow (is) was situated just so she can see shadows through the window of our front door. Normal is her barking every time the doorbell rings or anyone comes through the door. Right now my home does not seem normal.

All this normal talk makes me ask myself what is really "normal?" Normal is life followed by death followed by life after death. All of this really is normal, it just doesn't feel normal. The old normal has been replaced by a new normal which consists of Hana carrying around a doggy bone looking and asking for the puppy. It's me trying to explain to an 18 month old that the puppy is in heaven. It's constantly looking at an empty spot where her pillow was and thinking "I really need to buy a beautiful plant to put there to cheer me up when I look that direction," but not feeling ready to put anything there at all.

Her pillow has been moved but not put away. I washed it and want to save it for Guthrie when he visits, Pagan would like that. They always shared pillows. I just can't bring myself to stuff it in a closet yet. That also goes for her food and water bowls and her bone and toys. They're not where they always were, but they're not put away, they've just moved to the front room. That's as close as they've gotten to being put away so far. I've impressed myself with as much as I've done up to this point. Most things have been cleaned and washed and at least moved. But the house is so quiet. I had been washing doggy towels and old blankets and dog pillow covers (I told you her feet had oozing sores and we had to use towels to help her walk outside) just fine. It always takes a long time to do Pagan's wash because I wash it all on the "sanitize" cycle and that not only takes forever, but it basically washes everything in scalding hot water which will make colors bleed like crazy, so I can only wash certain things at a time. That's why last night I finally took the last load of doggy laundry out of the dryer.

Like I said, I had been doing her laundry all weekend just fine so it hit me like a ton of bricks when I went to clean out the lint trap and realized that this was the final load. What could Joe have thought when he walked in to ask me where Hana's (insert baby item here) was and found me sitting on the laundry room floor, holding a clean dog pillow cover and a lint trap screen full of dog hair and sobbing uncontrollably? I used to think it was so gross to have to remove all that hair from the lint trap and last night I smelled it. I wanted it to smell like her, but it had been washed and dried so it only smelled like Tide and Downy. I want to smell my dog. How insane does that sound?! I have to laugh at myself! All these years I tried so hard to make sure my house did not smell like a dog, and now all I want to do is smell her! Isn't life ironic?

One day this new "unnormal" normal will feel normal, but I'll always miss her and she'll always be on my mind. There will forever be reminders of her wonderful life and I am so grateful for that. I almost didn't write this blog entry because I personally hate reading or watching things that make me cry. But in the end I decided that this is my blog, my therapy, so you're just going to have to deal with it and deal with me coping with the loss of my beloved pooch! =) Once again, I thank you all for all of your kind words and your concern. I'm not ready to talk about it, but writing about it sure helps. She was like my first child and this loss has affected this family more than some of you could ever imagine, but I know most of you understand full well. Thanks for everything and please know that we're hanging in there and dealing with this in the best way we know how. And as I finished typing that last sentence I turned around to find Hana carrying Pagan's leash...

And on that note, I want to share some happy pics from Friday! Please enjoy!

Now I'm off to take Miss Hana Grace to her 18-month check up!