1. In the house, the air was heavy with mourning today. We lost Maggie. Christy lost one of her cats, Lily, overnight.
I thought of the day Dad died and how almost the minute after the funeral home people removed him from the house, Mom went into their bedroom and started cleaning, taking the sheets off of Dad's bed, remaking it, putting away the jar of skin moisturizer at his bedside, and asking me to remove the television from the room.
Mom dealt with her grief by getting busy, cleaning things up, staying in motion.
I caught myself thinking of Mom when Dr. Cook left the house with Maggie resting on his shoulder. The first thing I did was gather up the sheet I'd put over our living room rug so shield it from Maggie's bleeding and I gathered up the towels I'd had on the bed and in the living room for the same reason and headed straight for the washing machine. Debbie wanted to left alone in her grief and so I performed tasks before we went to the Lounge.
I carried forward in the same spirit today. My old HP laptop must be cabled to the router in order for me to get internet service and so I retired into the tv room and edited the pictures I took on Monday, published some of them in my blog post, and put all of them on my flickr page. Later, I drove down to the animal clinic and paid for Dr. Cook's visit and his services and for the cremation of Maggie.
Maggie came from dust and to dust she will return. Maggie loved the back yard. When Debbie is done with her job in Eugene, Maggie's ashes will become a part of the back yard, of the lawn she loved to gallop on and the garden spots she used to love to sniff around in. Maggie seemed to find her own kind of solace along with great joy in the back yard. It is fitting that these grounds will be the place where her ashes will forever rest, feeding the very ground that nurtured her whenever she visited Kellogg and in these last eighteen months since we moved here.
2. In keeping with wanting to stay busy, I fixed Debbie an afternoon meal before she drove to Spokane to fly to Eugene. I made a pot of rice and cooked up a green curry with ginger, cilantro, tofu, broccoli, mushrooms, and cauliflower. It worked, both as a means of giving me a job to do in my sadness and as a meal Debbie enjoyed.
3. Debbie left.
Maggie is gone.
Suddenly this little house felt spacious, empty.
When Debbie is away, Charly never wants to be on the living room love seat where Debbie knits and works on school business, often with Maggie and Charly at her side. But, today, after Debbie drove away, Charly signaled to me that she wanted to be where Debbie had been. I lifted her onto the love seat. She stayed there for three or four hours until we went to bed.
Eating the rest of the curry I had fixed and going to indiewire.com and reading about overlooked independent films from the 1970s helped alleviate the feeling of emptiness in the house. Later, Debbie texted me, insisting I go out asap and buy a bicycle, a purchase I've been talking a lot about over the last few months, but haven't acted on. I'll do that and I look forward to riding on the Trail of the Cd'As and to returning to the Hiawatha Trail when it reopens.
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