It has occurred to me, one day late, that yesterday would have been the tenth birthday of my beautiful borzoi bitch, Jelly, CH Kasharra Bibikov, that I received about five years ago from Frances Wright of Cross River, NY. She has been gone one year, and my grief from losing her has been terrible. I almost did not survive it. My weight loss has been extreme. I was not planning on replacing her, but my physician and I agreed that a Silken Windhound might be in order to help me feel not so alone and be of comfort to me at this time. So, I purchased “Kinsey”, or Gr CH Wind ‘nSatin It’s My Party, from Mary Childs and the rest is history! She is an angel and a dream, and I am feeling much better. It is difficult for me to move on from loss, or from the death of one of my dogs, as we know. It does not get better. It stirs something primal, deep in my heart to lose a dog, something I cannot feel for a human. I have lost parents, two husbands, and many close friends to death, without feeling a twinge of anything amiss, and I can accept it as natural. However, if any of my dogs die, my heart is torn to shreds with an agony that requires a high dose of a serious anti-depressant. Recently, I was graduated to several hundred milligrams of Seroquel as maintence. Not for the faint of heart. Still:
“We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our
own, live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached.
Unable to accept its awful gaps, we still would live no other way.
We cherish memory as the only certain immortality,
never fully understanding the necessary plan.” —-Irving Townsend.
So I hold Jelly’s memory close and still. The longer we were together, the more she reminded me of Opal. I felt perhaps Opal had returned. I began to sense Opal’s presence with me. A great deal of my pain went away. However, it quickly returned again and grew stronger every day after Jelly died. Dear God! Let me be with my adored and beloved Opal again, and all the other Blyss borzoi, when You call me home!