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As we go through life, challenges pop up like targets in a shooting gallery. Most times they’re small like running out of milk and others are large like a major car repair. The largest challenges we face the one we call grief. In some people, it makes them stronger and wiser. In others it leads to a breakdown of their life. Some people turn to the bottle to combat grief (which usually makes it far worse) and some turn to either themselves or God and are able to cope with the loss.

The challenge that I’m facing is writing about all of the deaths that I’ve experienced including one of my own (wherein my heart stopped during a medical test) and putting what I learned into thoughts and words that make sense and hopefully help others. As you might be able to tell, I haven’t done a lot of work on the book in a while and am forcing myself to address that situation.

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Writing about grief is a rewarding and difficult process. The most important part of this project is you! As you can imagine the cost of publishing a book can and does cost is signifigant amount of money and every little bit helps. I have set up an entire series of rewards for everyone who helps me with publishing costs. ALL donations will get a membership on this site – you can read Living With Them as I write it with all the revisions and extra notes I write! Other rewards include physical copies or the ebook version of the book when it’s finished.

Very important: If you donate enough to qualify for a copy of the book, we must, must, must have at least your email address. You can include that during the donation process -or- you can use the contact form below with the receipt number that PayPal generates.

Any size donation. Every donation is important to help publish Living With Them
Donation $20.00 to $50.00 US will recieve a ebook copy of Living With Them
Donation $50.00 US or more will recieve a physical copy of Living With Them

 You can also help through our gofundme donation page

contact form

[contact-form to=’[email protected]’ subject=’book site email’][contact-field label=’Name’ type=’name’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Email – This will also be used if you%26#039;ve donated over $20 to send the link to your ebook copy’ type=’email’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Your email address for your petgriefhope membership – comes with all levels of donation! THIS WILL BE YOUR LOGIN ID. A password will be emailed to this address.’ type=’email’/][contact-field label=’Donating over $50 US? Include your shipping address’ type=’textarea’/][contact-field label=’Want to add a personal note?’ type=’textarea’/][/contact-form]

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Mister Kitty on his very first night with me.

Living With Them is a book about so much more than the death of a beloved pet and what happened. It’s a book about what I’ve learned during my life from facing adversity, grief and the joy of life that came from the depths of dispair. It is about the strengthening of faith that comes from grief, about how God shows us the joy of creation, relationships and living. Living With Them is a celebration of what happens when you throw of the yoke of grief and grab the reins of life.
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The valley of the shadow of death thing – anyone who has been there knows that there are no words that can describe the depths of dispair in grief.
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Grief is a process of profound loss – grief is the emotion of our missing a loved one or even a loved object. It’s not about whom or what we’ve lost. It’s about us and should be embraced so that it can run it’s course naturally. It’s not about getting drunk or high to deal with it.
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Craig Johnson, a writer, penned a series of books titled “The Walt Longmire Mysteries” about a sheriff in Wyoming which is now a popular television series (which was picked up by Netflix and is now produced by them). Walt Longmire has a lot to tell us as he goes through his crime solving and has a wonderful and epic set of ethics that he does his best not to violate. Before the series started, Walt’s wife was murdered and much of the first few seasons revolves around that event.

In the pilot of the series, he has to inform a woman that not only was her husband murdered but he was murdered while he was trying to find his daughter that she didn’t know about. The wife asks him if the pain of the loss ever gets better. Walt answers her with this:

“Does it ever stop hurting? Not really. You see, the only way for it to stop hurting is if we forget about them. And that’s the thing. I don’t want to forget anything about them.” – Walt Longmire, season 1, episode 1
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As June rolls into July and August, we remember our fallen friend and companion of 22 years, Queen Theodora Maxine Lourdes Sphincter De’Catville. Also known as Ted Bird, the subject of the book “Living With Them”, Ted loved to lay on the deck in the oppression heat of the summertime, basking in the sun for hours and hours.

Cats are reputed to be originally from the desert and revel in the heat. Nearly no cats I’ve known like the  heat that much. But Ted did and we miss her.

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This is an old but still funny bit about giving a pill to a cat. The modern easy way is to put the pill in a syringe, pull in some water to disolve the pill and shoot the liquid into the cat’s mouth. So easy my wife could do it.

How to give a cat a pill … and a dog, too

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While writing the various chapters of “Living With Them”, I’ve come to realize something both wonderful and spooky. Writing the book, once I got ‘done’ (a book is never done, I’ve discovered) with the first chapters about animal spirits, biblical references to animals, scientific studies about human-pet relationships, I started to write about all of the pets I’ve known and loved.

Which is when I discovered something really, really odd. They all come back, especially the cats. They don’t dash outside and get lost and then come back, they die and then come back.

By some odd twist of fate or divine intervention, every single special cat has come back into my life and I have the photographs to prove it. It’s all pretty bizarre in that if you’ve read the book introduction, you find out that I’ve got a medical condition brought on by a reaction to an antibiotic and several life threatening infections which triggered the condition which caused a shift in my cranial cavity – my brain is damaged.

There is a section of my life that is almost a total blank. I can’t remember hardly anything from around 13 years old to my late teens. I don’t remember friends, what I did, what jobs I had other than generalizations. I clearly remember my life from the age of 2 on to about 13. My memory then picks up at around 20 years old or so, really about the time I got engaged to my first wife.

My mother put together a large photo album of my life – as I suspect many parents do for their middle age children – that has some really cool photos in it of my life which are kind of cool to look at but at the same time it’s like I’m looking at a strangers life. And this is where the cats coming back rears it’s divine intervention head. Tuxedo cats. These guys are following me around, popping up when I least expect it.

We have a cat, Ambrose Butterbutt, who is 16 and has a thyroid condition and has to take medication twice a day. No worries, slashed hands, spitted out pills, growling cats or emergency room visits, see the Canadian Veterinary Journal for more. I just take the pill, shove it in a syringe, dissolve it in some water in the syringe and squirt it into Ambrose’s pie hole. He doesn’t even object to it since he gets Temptations and raw steak afterwards.

Getting back to the divine intervention thing, while looking through the album and my photography over the years for image scanning candidates for the book, there is a Tuxedo cat that has been following me since my childhood. Right now his name is Ambrose Butterbutt but in his last incarnation he was known as Oliver North. Before that, I cannot remember his name.

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When Little Tedbird (Tedbird 4) came to live with us, she was barely 5 weeks old, an orphan that had been rescued by a nice lady. From the very first night, Little Tedbird has slept with me. She starts the night off by snoozing in the office chair next to the bed but a 1AM every night, it’s cave huggie time!

Snuggling with a kitten is one of the most wonderful feelings in the world. Kittens are sweet and cuddly and soft. I’m pretty sure that simply holding a kitten can help lower your blood pressure and reduce your stress level.

But kittens are also wild and crazy — and they are frequently likely to be both in the middle of the night or very early in the morning. They like to pounce on anything that moves, including whatever is under the sheets, and their little claws are sharp! And because kittens are basically babies, they might not have their house manners down pat just yet.

In general I suggest that new kitten owners hold off for a while on sharing the bed with their furry friend. Waiting until your kitten is more mature to snuggle him in your sleep has a number of benefits, for you and for him. Here are four good reasons to keep your kitten off the big bed — for now, at least.

Read more….

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The military is adopting out military members sercvice dogs without informing the soldiers and allowing them to keep their dogs.

A Congressional investigation is underway.

Read more….

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You’ve heard the humorous axioms about doing something while chewing gum while doing something else.

“It is my indignant opinion that 90 percent of the moving pictures exhibited in America are so vulgar, witless and dull that it is preposterous to write about them in any publication not intended to be read while chewing gum.”
–Wolcott Gibbs

In my apparent series of articles about writing a book and what I’m learning along the way – using WordPress to write a book, my research library, what I’m learning about myself at the same time – is that this book writing thing, specifically the non-fiction category is fraught with pitfalls and research. Research I don’t mind doing but the number of mind numbing articles on the internet about any particular subject can be confusing, especially when you’ve spent an hour doing what you think is learning only to find out that all you’re reading is a marketing ploy designed to get you to buy chewing gum. Even with the massive reading library that I’ve developed for you to read, there are rabbit holes and false trails that abound with poor information. Thus, I have turned my attention to developing some rules for myself on the topic of research.

• How does one know whether or not one is finding accurate information?
• Is there a marketing ploy behind some scientific information?
• Are there politically correct motivations behind definitions?
• Does the scientific paper have good quality citations?

What I’ve found is that when you’re researching a particular topic to learn about is that one of the most important search terms to use when looking for good quality musings and research papers are three simple letters to include in the search.

PDF

Most missives that you find on the internet are like the one that you’re reading right now. Blog posts. Opinions, No basis in scientific fact. To get to the meat of a topic, it’s important to peel away the skin before biting into the research topic. What I’ve found is that most writings that are scientific in nature – that is written by someone that has actually done science to get to a conclusion – are available as a PDF document.

Blog posts and opinion writings are not typically done as a PDF. Live it, love it, learn it.

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A major study has found that consciousness continues after a person is clinically dead. Many of us want to know the answer to the question about whether or not we continue on in some way, whether it’s a matter of faith or a matter of curiosity. While this might not seem related to the topics of pets, there is a tie in with my book “Living With Them” and the examination of the biblical references to animals having a spirit and what God tells us. There are a significant number of us who also believe that our pets not only have a spirit but are also conscious of their lives and when it ends.

There are situations that we all face where something happens or has happened that we observe or experience that we know is different from what we expect. As I write “Living With Them”, I have been speaking with many people that have had experiences after the death of their pets that indicate to them – and they believe it – that there is something that continues after death. Whether or not you are a Christian and believe in the afterlife, there is certainly something going on.

The shock research has also uncovered the most convincing evidence of an out of body experience for a patient declared dead.

It had been believed the brain stopped all activity 30 seconds after the heart had stopped pumping blood around the body, and that with that, awareness ceases too.

Lead researcher Dr Sam Parnia said: “Contrary to perception, death is not a specific moment but a potentially reversible process that occurs after any severe illness or accident causes the heart, lungs and brain to cease functioning.

Of the 2,060 patients from Austria, the US and the UK interviewed for the study who had survived cardiac arrest, almost 40 per cent said that they recall some form of awareness after being pronounced clinically dead.

Read the rest….

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