Always On My Mind

I wrote that late night post on my phone when I was tossing and turning thinking about Ralph. After I had gotten the girls to bed and Blaine was not home yet from driving my mother to the airport. I was winding down getting ready for bed I watched a clip from the movie A Dog's Purpose which I have not seen yet. Rewind, today I felt particularly strong I've been able to think about Ralph, look at his pictures, watch his videos throughout the day without even feeling like crying. I think of happy memories yet I always miss him. In the movie the dog Bailey is reincarnated several times into different dog lives but the clip I saw he finds his way back to what I interpreted as his deeply connected soul person. So at that point I just lost it because the thought of being able to see my Ralphie again made me so emotional. I can't say if that emotion was sadness, happiness or hope. Maybe it was all of those feelings at the same time. I should have known better than to click on that preview for the sake of my own night of sleep.

Someone on the Rainbow Bridge group posted about being afraid that the memories she had were all from seeing photos and not actually remembering. Another person commented the following which I find to be so true. "I think it’s really fear of loss, intensified by grief. We’ve already lost them physically so we try to recall every single memory and then panic when we can’t. So much of life gets in the way of preserving our memories during the time they’re here with us. We become overwhelmed by everyday life, with work, paying bills, our health and modern day stress. All the things that interfere with our relationship with our pets. And then one day we try and recall them at a specific time and we can’t- because maybe we were grappling with other things in our lives at the time. We know they were there with us but the actual memories remain hidden because life got in the way! I wish we could replay those days again in slow motion; they were the best of days - we just didn’t know it..."

Today I am going to reach into my mind and come up with a memory not jogged from a photograph. (I will also share my amazon photo memories later) When I close my eyes and let my mind run free with the purpose of remembering Ralph I imagine my thumb nail fitting into his paw pads. How I would touch his soft pads and roll them in a circular motion. They would be slightly rough but have a gentle softness about them just the right amount of moisture. I think about his dew claw pad. How in his early days he would let me clip his nails but in the later years I had to take him to petco because I couldn't bare to hear him yelp. His nailed used to be clear when he was a pup so it was easy for me to make sure I didn't get him when I clipped. But they turned black and dark impossible for me to tell at a fairly early ate. He had perfectly wispy ear fur and a main that gave him the regal presence of a lion pup. He used to kiss me vigorously on the lips and I let him. I think other people were mortified to see me open mouth kiss my Ralph but it just felt so comfortable and right. Ha - and I used to be a germaphobe too. Sometimes he would kind of nibble my lip with the front of his teeth in an affectionate way. Probably like how I used to nibble the top of his head and ear when I thought he looked especially scrumptious. I actually understand how the expression "cute enough to eat" came to be. So our feeling towards each others cuteness felt pretty mutual. As I got older we didn't have time to be cuddly and kiss like that but I do miss the feel of his scratchy tongue and tickle of his whiskers against my face and even the saltiness of his kiss.

Family bonding time in (this day in 2015)

A sight I often saw was this fossil pup as we called him (this day in 2005)