Susie is our June 8, 2014 Pup of the Week

I realize this is going to be hard for many of you to believe but there was a time when I wasn’t the world renowned celebrity blogger that I am now.  In 2007, when I joined DS, I wasn’t sure what I should do.  Be funny?  Be sympathetic?  And how much of my own life do I share?

I decided to take a look around the place and found Moses’ blogs.  They were mostly written by his Mom.  He had recently become terminally ill.  She did not write as much as she opened an emotional spigot and let it flow.  She vividly described everything she went through:  The shock, the pain, the horror, the emptiness, the grief, the sorrow, the loneliness.  Joan Didion and Christopher Buckley may have written bestsellers about grief and loss but no one wrote about it with more honesty than Moses’ Mom. The first lesson I learned from DS, and I have carried it every day, is that Moses is love.

And the second lesson I learned is how to blog.  There is no moment that is private, as long as it is based on life.  Your job is to make the reader feel:  Happy, sad, thoughtful, motivated, it doesn’t matter, as long as the emotional spot the reader was in when they began to read is slightly altered by your words.  Moses and his Mom taught me this.

When I reached the Bridge Moses was one of the first dogs to greet me.  He gave me a hug.  He was the biggest dog I had ever seen.  After our hug he told me he thought I would be taller.  I told him I get a lot of that.  Since then he has been my wise and trusted council.

Like me Moses had a sister he overshadowed at least on the blogosphere   Her name was Susie, and this week we all gathered and cheered when Susie crossed the River of Life and reunited with Moses.  Dog reunions are only second to Parent and Dog celebrations here at the Bridge. Then comes cats, then cats and dogs, and then birds, and then, well, you can only get so excited over a ferret.

Then we went down to the River of Life to watch Moses’ Mom Miss Nancy and Susie’s sister Matilda.  This was an especially hard time for Miss Nancy to lose Susie.  She had lost her own Mom weeks before and her grief was as fresh and strong as it was when Moses had passed.  None of us heard the footsteps but we all reacted when a hand landed on Susie’s head and gently scratched her.

At first Susie didn’t recognize her, and the she realized it was her grand mom, Miss Nancy’s Mom. She was younger than Susie had ever seen her, and she told Susie that she missed her and was glad to have her company, and she asked me to let Miss Nancy know that she and Susie were together, and would always be by Miss Nancy’s side.

I saw Susie and her grand mom romping through the fields and meadows today, laughing together.  I know Miss Nancy may not be ready to laugh yet, but hopefully the thought of the two of them together will make her smile.