As you may have read, March heralded in with worry that my mother had cancer. She had to have an ovarian cyst removed and we all feared the worst. Just a short time before her surgery, we found out that Flash, our beloved golden, had bone cancer. He was limping on his front leg, and after a trip to the vet and a specialist, xrays revealed just how deteriorated his shoulder and leg bones were. It was a shock.

I believe 100% in the the Holy Trinity. They have come to my aid so often that it’s as if I carry them around in me all day and night, calling on them when needed and saying Thank You (though not as often as I should). I read somewhere where a lady used her laundry room as her altar place to talk to God as she washed clothes. That’s how I feel about him too. There are several wonderful moments during the day when I talk with him. One evening I was rocking in my chair, and I felt someone whisper deep down in my soul that Flash had the cancer so that Mom wouldn’t.

While I was at Mom’s helping out for the couple of weeks during her surgery, Flash became gravely sick. Slobo called me in tears, and we decided that we needed to let him go. Several times, I’ve tried to post about it, but couldn’t. Slobo did a very loving tribute to him that summed it up for all of us. We were talking just the other day in the car about how we still hear or feel Flash around. Slobo and our Middle Son have heard him sigh. We have all smelled him from time to time and I’ve felt him.

I had a really hard time accepting that it was okay to put Flash down and I’m not sure I’ve really accepted it. I’ve spent years fighting the notion of euthanasia, either for animals or humans. After having a sister like Pooh, who has been told she wouldn’t live so many times, and next year will turn 50, It’s not something that I felt people had control over. Either it’s time or it’s not and God decides that. Slobo and I took Flash to the vet while the children stayed at my parent’s house. We went in, sat on the floor with Flash and said our goodbyes and Thank You’s to him. He passed as if he fell asleep with his head in my lap. I didn’t even know he had gone. That was in March and it still feels like it was last week.

A couple of weeks ago, my mom called me in tears because her sister, my Aunt Charlotte, who is 52 was just diagnosed with stage 4 serous cancer (cancer is in the fluids of her stomach and started with ovarian cancer). At first we heard she had been bed ridden with the flu, then maybe was bleeding from some advil she had taken for a stomach ache, then a blockage, then a mass in her stomach that was causing her kidneys to shut down…. She weighed 90 lbs. when she went into the emergency room and when she was sent home last week, she weighed 75 lbs. She says they won’t perform any extraction surgeries because she weighs so little, they told her to gain weight and then they will do the surgery. We know when they opened her up, it was everywhere, they did a few biopsies, put in a large port in her back to drain each of her kidneys and closed her back up. Her daughter is talking of taking her to a Cancer Institute in PA. - in any case, she sees two doctors this morning to begin chemo. She is really looking forward to starting chemo and beginning her fight. I find it strange, from what I’ve read about this stage of cancer, that they did not go ahead and remove it, but I think they know something the rest of us are just guessing at. But who knows, as Mom says, Charlotte is stubborn and that may work in her favor, but she is having a tough time in her personal life anyway, so that will make it harder to fight. Their house has gone into foreclosure and I just pray they stay off an eviction until she gets through this - one way or the other.

Cancer deaths aren’t something new to me or my family. Several relatives have passed from it, some slow - some fast. My maternal grandmother passed just two weeks after the same type of diagnosis as my aunt. I wonder what makes us know when it’s time to let go, do we even have control over that? or does that Holy Trinity whisper to us that it’s time to let go because it’s going to happen whether we are ready or not? I can’t help but chuckle and wonder if it’s an eviction notice from God himself?

Springtime - New beginnings from a soil made up of the past - maybe that’s the recipe for peace. Heck, maybe that’s what Heaven’s garden soil is made of. Maybe our lives are just compost for Heaven? lol.

Please, just say your prayers for Aunt Charl. I know the keeper is listening. Maybe he just wants to know we are too.

In any case, think I’ll sit on the porch swing out at Fort Hoochenu today and knit a chemo cap or two for Aunt Charl while I consult with my three docs up in heaven today.

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