Thank you again everyone for all your support and well wishes. I do very much appreciate it and so does my boyfriend who read all your nice comments. It is very touching to feel such love from people who don't really know me very well. Thanks.
Things are getting easier. Summer died Monday morning and the whole day was very bad, especially with taking her to the vets and cleaning where she'd been lying (maybe TMI, but she had some diarrhoea on the carpet and had bled from her nose) and breaking the news to family (I still have to tell my parents when they come home from their holiday this weekend). In the evening we decided we needed to get out of the house and trekked through the ice and snow to a local pub for dinner - by chance Monday night is "hot dog night" so of course we took advantage of that, it seemed too poetic not to! I think it did us good to get out and we spent the evening talking over good memories of Summer.
I decided early on we needed to keep busy doing little jobs. Not so we'd forget, but to stop us from sitting around moping, and that's also helped. We've been tidying and cleaning and organising our messy house and it's encouraging to see progress. Today we took up the bits of carpet we'd put down on our wooden and laminate floors when she suffered from a balance problem and kept slipping about. Her bowls and collar and headcollar will be washed tomorrow and put away (I'm going to hang her name tag on my bag), and I have to decide what to do with her uneaten biscuits and the packet of treats my dad got her for Christmas. She only ate two of them.
We're now at the stage where we're still sad and missing her but it's not raw now. I keep remembering things she did and all the little things I loved about her, and we're now able to make jokes and remind each other of things and laugh at funny pictures of her.
I think we'll make and frame a photo collage of the best pictures we can find. It was so nice to look at pictures of her today.
