Personal Blogs Do Relate to WA

byChristineDu1

1.9K followers

Updated 3 years ago

Yeah, as the title suggest, this is a personal blog, and for nearly a month I told myself not to post it as it is frowned upon here, but I thought "I'm not here to please a few select people's expectations". This blog is for me and the ones who care :-) And personal blogs can relate to our WA stuff and vice versa.

So, this blog willl cover 2 losses I suffered in the last month, and how helping others turned into monetary projects. Not that my reason for helping was based on money, far from that, but in some way it led to projects that will yield financial gain :-)

On 3 May 2021, my little girl, Lucy, a Poodle Maltese mix (see cover photo), passed away at the age of 15 and a half. She had been with me for 13 years. I knew that her time would come at some point, but when it happened it was still hard to deal with it. I was there for her, in fact, the whole furry gang (my dogs and cats) was there with her in her last moments on Earth, she died in my arms.

A few days before Lucy passed, Duke, a Belgian Shepherd mix, came into my life (dog on the right in below photo). Well, he came into my life a year and a half ago when he was a puppy but he still belonged to my neighbor who let him loose on the street where Duke got run over by a car and broke his leg in several places. The guy never cared. then he sold his property and had Duke living on a chain, abandoned on a parking lot. When I heard that, I offered to adopt him, and now Duke is here with us.

Tommeeh, my Pit Bull (on the left in above photo) became good friends with Duke, but he was a little jealous. A few days after Duke started living with us, Tommeeh got ill. it seemed to be a cold, but it turned out to be something else, which the vet didn't notice ...

Tommeeh, although he was only 4 years old, had heart issues. It was probably congenital. I tried to save his life, but I couldn't, and when it turned out that he also had liver issues, I knew that he didn't stand much of a chance. Tommeeh passed away barely a month after Lucy, on 27 June, and it broke my heart, it devastated me. I didn't post anything, not even on FB, because it ws so painful, and every letter I typed would have provoked a flood of tears.

I went through all the 5 stages of grief that were mentioned in the Kaminsky Method on Netflix - and which I already knew about - denial, disbelief, rage, slow and reluctant acceptance, depression, all of it. ...

I threw myself into working to distract myself from my sadness, writing articles, working on books, etc. Losing Tommeeh at such a young age has been hard on me. We had this special game that I loved playing with him. I miss playing that with him.

So, if you stop reading now, that's fine with me. I am writing this blog more for myself, not for ratings, or to get comments.

It is interesting that I chose to share my grief with my prison pen pals and not with friends and family on FB, probably because they were not much help when I went through burnout years ago.

So, anyway, segueing into my pen pal program. You´ll see how somethng personal can turn ito WA related stuff in a moment.

When I started being a pen pal to inmates I only thought of writing letters and being moral support, nothing more. Nonetheless, I ended up getting way more involved than I thought I would be. I ended up caring about them, every single one of them. And that's not all of it.

I created a website for one of them and also published four books he wrote (more are coming), he gave me publishing rights, they are published in my Amazon author account. I did it to help him with his case.

My other pen pal is sending me bits and pieces of his life story which he wants to turn into an autobiography and I'm helping him with it. I am also publishing his poems and short essays on one of my author websites. And another pen pal wants to write an urban fantasy fiction novel, loosely based on his experience and what he saw when he was growing up in the hood. He wants to have that achievement of publishing a book. I am helping him with that too. And I'm teaching him and another pen pal Spanish (first German, but we switched to Spanish)

I keep on thinking how super involved I got with them, but I wouldn't do it any other way. I'm happy I can help them.