Rosie's Rose Garden – Life!

I have no pictures to post of our Rosie Girl today.  I can’t bring myself to download the last set we took at the hospital that day.  A week without Rosie?  I feel like she needs to be picked up from somewhere, is she at my mom’s house, is she at the animal hospital, is she with daddy?  Where is she?  We know she is not in any pain any longer.  We know she is not aware of all the pain we’re going thru missing and grieving for her.  We realize even more now after a week without Rosie, how big a part of our lives she really was.  Everything we did we thought about Rosie and taking care of her. 

Getting home to let her out, feeding her, playing with her, taking walks, going for a swim, walking around her in the house, getting up in the morning and going to sleep at night.  All Rosie Times!  Her toy’s miss her, the house misses her, the cats miss her, we miss her!  Life will never be the same without our “Rosie Girl” .   As each tragedy in the past we have dealt with passes we always would say, it’s a “New Chapter” of our life beginning.  So we have a new beginning, even thou it is without Rosie, we have to figure out how to start over again, start a new part of life without Rosie.  We have our wonderful 12 1/2 years of memories to bring Rosie to life in our minds.  The mind is not enough right now.  I need the hugs and the kisses and the love Rosie gave to us and we gave to her.  She was my little something to love.  And we still need something to love.  There is a huge empty hole where I used to poor that love out to. It was her. 

We decided to have her cremated as we’ve done with all our animals.  We can’t handle the burial part.  It would have been too hard for us.  She was privately cremated and they put her ashes in a really nice wooden box with her name and dates on a little plaque on the front.  We received her box yesterday.  I didn’t get as upset as I thought I would.  Because I looked at the box and said “That’s not Rosie, that’s just a box with her name on it.”  It’s really not her.  But the box symbolizes her and who she was.  And it reminds us that we had a dog called “Rosie”  and the years in which she lived and that we loved her so much!    This way we can look at the box and always remember her and what she went thru and how we loved her.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned thru all this is to cherish every moment and hour and day you have with your loved ones and loved pets.  I thought we were going to have a little more time to say good bye.  I imagined this serene goodbye where we had time to hug her and be with her without the stress of the impending emergency in the background and her distressing condition.  That ruined the goodbye.  She was so tired, and she was loosing her battle.  It was a bad dream good bye.    We will remember the Sunday before, we had taken the whole afternoon to be with her stopped everything else on our agenda and just spent the afternoon with her.  We took a walk, sat out on the porch in the evening.  Played with her toys.  Rolled in the grass and she sniffed around, we took pictures of her sitting pretty and sitting with us.  We had fun with the timer that snapped 3 pictures at a time of the 3 of us sitting in the grass.  Like one of those photo booths, it was fun!  Rosie was tired, but she let us do all that with her.  Her last real day of Life with us.  Sept 19th, 2010.  After that the nightmare began.  So I’ll always try to remember that day instead of the day she died, because that was truely a “Dogs Day”! 

The Dr. called me yesterday too, the same day her ashes arrived.  So it’s all done now, all the things we had to do to for Rosie.  It seems like a closure process to saying goodbye.  But he confirmed that she had a very aggressive sarcoma.  They think it was a form of Oesteosarcoma but may be a whole new lession that formed on her chest bone. They said there are different kinds of Oesteosarcoma, this was an aggressive kind.  He is leaning towards that instead of Hermangeosarcoma.  But he said either way when it get’s that aggressive, it takes over the blood and makes it DIC whichmeans it does not coagulate any more.  He also said that ordinarily a core biopsy of a Sarcoma is safe, and that they did not expect it to bleed like it did.  He said she had a Rare condition that they haven’t seen much before where they bleed out like that after a biopsy.  So whatever it was it was nasty and aggressive and wanted to take Rosie away.  She didn’t have much time, even if the bleedout didn’t happen.  Her chest was swelling up every day as it had been bleeding inside the tumor.  I just can’t get the image out of my mind of her belly in the end.  I don’t even want to tell you.  But she endured well, she never cried, she just layed there and looked at me and ate a cookie.  I just feel so bad that she had to endure that final pain of her condition bleeding out.  I’ve got to move on and get that out of my mind.  She is out of pain now and that is what I have to focus on.  Peace and Rest for her.

Thanks for listening.  Love your pets.

Rosie’s Mom