People take a while to recover

It's been over a year now since I left this level of living on earth with Polly and Lamb Chop. Polly still talks to me at least once a day, and calls out to me when Sirius (now renamed after me as Sirius-Churchill) blazes its blue light into the night sky. She kisses my pictures at night and touches my ashes in the small white urn; ceramic, because it breathes.

There is now another family member -- Jesse, a 50-pound Lab-Border collie mix who is pitch black with dark brown eyes. He has always been a part of our family as his family lived with us for a while. Now Jesse has diabetes and is a challenge to care for, for ordinary people, anyhow. But I nudged Polly a bit and reminded her that because of all the care she had given me she knew exactly how to take care of Jesse, and she wouldn't be afraid of the ups and downs of dealing with diabetes. And I was right. She begged to keep Jesse, and it worked.

Now Jesse is busy herding Lamb Chop and the other neighborhood dogs, and makes sure Polly has three or four long runs a day, as he needs lots of exercise. They go up and around all the paths that we used to take, through the woods and grass. Sometimes she talks to me then, as well.