Sick Puppy and Lieta

Well, here I sit at 1:38am in the blessed morning... attending to a sick puppy. She's 8 years old, so not technically a puppy, but she has a puppy face and plays like a puppy... even sleeps like a puppy.

Baby, I call her Pookie, was a blessing in disguise almost two years ago. Not quite two months after my brother's sudden death, my sister calls and tells me of her grandmother-in-law being in bad health (not expected to live) and owning a dog that is half Jack Russell and half Chihuahua. She asks if we might be interested as the dog might help pull mom out of her depression. We talked a little and I called her back, arranging a time to go see the dog. Little did I know that roughly two hours later, this little bundle would come home with me... and a few hours later I'd see my mother smile for the first time since my brother's death.

This was all in January, and come the end of April, mom's depression as well as osteoarthritis got the better of her. She fell, breaking three ribs. A week after taking her into the hospital, she died. While the death certificate says, "pneumonia", it was really "a broken heart complicated by three broken ribs". While my world was spinning beforehand, it went topsy-turvy. This little bundle of a dog, just over 20 lbs., would be my reason to come home at night, my determination to get up in the morning and keep a routine. I think I have as many pics of her on my computer and camera phone as what most parents and grandparents do of their own flesh and blood.

Tonight, though, is the first time she's been sick since we got her. She has sinus problems as well as allergies and while I had the windows open all day, I never once gave it a thought that it might affect her. It hasn't in the past. Evidently today, it did, as I sit here now waiting for her to stop initiating my carpet, sofa, and chair. With not having kids... I guess this is about as close as it gets to "being up all night with a sick kid".

I talked with my cousin, Lovera, Friday night about her sister. Twyla Lieta Lynch was a very special young lady who was cut down in life all too suddenly. One of ten children to Rufus and Katie Mae Minter Lynch, she had a specialness about her. Born in 1925, she learned to play the guitar and sang southern gospel music with some of her cousins as she was growing up. Pictures show Lieta, as she was called by family, most always with a smile or a grin on her face. When she graduated from Irvington High School, she became a teacher, teaching at the one room school house in High Plains in Breckinridge County. It was while she was teaching that she found out she was sick. Today's term would be leukemia. Cancer.

One of her sisters begged to stay in eighth grade another year so she could spend time with her big sister. She was allowed to, and spent the year helping her sister with the other students. In January of 1944 Lieta was taken to St. Joseph's Infirmary in Louisville (there's apartments on the location now). She never came home once she entered the hospital. I can only imagine the devastation her parents felt, but know that their faith in God is what carried them through burying the second of two children that had died by this time.

Lieta is who I am patterning a minor character after in the book I'm presently working on. While I haven't come up with a last name as of yet, I will be drawing from Lieta's experiences and her personality when I write on the character of "Alexandria". The name of Alexandria is of someone dear to my heart and I wanted to save it to use for someone special... and the memory of Lieta and her life is perfect.

Whether a person, or a puppy, you never know when life will throw your a curve you least expect. Sometimes it's just missing hours of sleep. Sometimes it's missing years of a life that should have been.