Coping with future loss

This week has been tough. I have learned that a lot of loved one's deaths and illnesses I have never dealt with. Sadly what brought this about was when I found out my dog, Mia has cancer.
She does not look like she has cancer except for the ugly sore on her lip.

Mia and I have been friends for her entire life. I met her a few weeks after she was born. She was a sweet rolly polly Cocker Spaniel with her eyes barely opened. She had a family then, her mother Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (Macy for short) was licking her face. She was so cute rolling around in the puppy pen with her sisters and brothers. I could not resist.

My grandfather, George Truett Cates was still alive then in the beginning stages of Parkinson's. My grandmother still raised Cocker Spaniels that were shown all over the world and they still lived on their 60 acre farm outside of Austin. Mia was granddad's favorite of the puppies and so he decided after she was about a year old she needed to come home with my family and I. My parents were not entirely excited about having another dog right away (our previous Cocker Spaniel, Poppy, had died the summer before) but they let Mia come home with us.

When I went off to college about two years later. At that point my granddad has passed and my mother and father knew Mia would be spending most of her time with them during the next few years. Mia would come up periodically and stay with what remained of her family at the Ranch with Grandma and I would visit her from school. Since I was in Waco, the Ranch was half way between school and home.

That was even short lived. During my sophomore year of college I went to visit my grandmother and see how she was--at this point she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's and the disease was taking a hold of her. She could no longer care for her dogs so sadly my mother and her siblings had to find new homes for Mia's brothers and sisters and the 100 so other dogs that lived on the Ranch.

That might help you understand the events that underskirt my sadness in the past few weeks. Mia in a lot of ways is all I have of those childhood memories of puppies at the Ranch, of my grandmother before the disease made her angry and mean and unable to communicate.

I'm named for my grandmother--as a child we were always really close. Now she does not know who I am or who most people are that were close to her. Mia and I are really close. She is my confidant and friend. I'm her closest one except for when the ball's around.

Mia's been to the vet a lot recently. She has the tumor on her lip and in her lymphnodes, but she seems fine to me. The vet said she will most likely be happy until her body can not take it anymore and then she'll go downhill fast. Then I'll have to make a really difficult situation.

Anyhow I know this is really sad, but it helps me deal with stuff.