It’s about a dog, and not about a dog.
The best advice I’ve ever received, for ending writer’s block, was this:
When you have nothing to write about, write about love.
I would amend it just a touch — when you have nothing to write about, write about: any strong emotion, guilt, lust, hatred, grief, etc.
My blog is about a dog, except it’s not about a dog. It’s about love and grief.
Yesterday we put our 10-year-old dog, Toffee Bear Tucker, to sleep. She had liver cancer, and she was ready to go. We, on the other hand, even as we did the right thing and knowing it, still fell apart.
To be more accurate, I should say that we put ourselves together and then fell apart many times during the past few days. We were not isolated. We were surrounded by a community of friends and family who knew what we were going through. Everyone knew what we were going through. People reached out through text, through calls, through responses to my husband’s Facebook post. We were hugged and comforted and buoyed from all sides. All this, considering that Toffee was not much of a people dog at all.
Toffee didn’t like people. From puppyhood, she had the heart of a junk-yard dog. To protect us, her people, she believed that she must go to extremes. If that meant that she had to protect us from children in strollers…
