100 Days

Allow me a moment to rant before I return to our peaceful trip. I called in some routine prescriptions for K to pick up from our vet. One is her thyroid medicine which we've always picked up in batches of 100 pills. The tech wanted to know if we "really wanted 100 pills". Clearly, she or someone else there thought that K might not live 100 days. I kept my tone even and confirmed that we wanted 100 pills. I'm not giving up on my girl yet.

Here's that same photo from the other day but with a different white balance setting. I love this photo of my little angel standing in front of the setting sun.

The desert shows you what a small speck in time a human or dog lifetime really is. Erosion reveals millions of years of layers of rocks. Imagine how many primates and canines have lived and died over the time that it took for the rocks in the photo below to be shaped into their amazing forms.

My first experience with how the world keeps turning even after a death was when my mother died. I was fairly young when breast cancer took her from us. In the days following her death, my dad, brother and I stuck together like glue. We went to the hospital where she'd died, and I was given the job of picking up the bag of her belongings. My irrational thought was that, since she'd been wearing her watch when she'd died, it would have stopped at the exact moment of her death. I quickly rifled through that bag, searching for my mother's watch.

Of course, I was completely wrong. The tiny gold watch was ticking, with the second hand still going in circles. It hadn't even paused at the moment of my mother's death. I stood there in the hospital hallway, tears streaming down my face, as I realized that the world stops for no one. The world keeps spinning. And, the lives of others go on. The same will be true after K dies and after I die.

Rocks like this one will keep being weathered by the water and rain, making increasingly intricate patterns of holes and waves. I wonder how many living things have passed through this world while this huge boulder was being weathered.

The sun will still rise every morning, making the brown and black dogs of the world hot in the spring and summer.

In the meantime, even though some vets may question whether I should invest in 100 days of thyroid medicine for K, she and I will keep romping for as long as we can.

We'll revel in the sunsets and how they make the world glow with warmth and beauty.

And, we'll revel in the stars, knowing that we are part of a huge and beautiful universe.

We'll seize each day. But we'll also keep hoping that we get more than 100 more days together.