This week was terrible. I’m not sure there’s much more to say except to pass along the advice to never say something matters to you in 2020 such as, “Linus is the only thing getting me through the pandemic.” (Except he was.) Or “I cannot lose my pig.” (Because I will.) Or “My greatest joy right now is mornings with my pig. I show him animal videos and scratch his head. He curls up next to me while I read a book. He is my heart, covered in fur.” (Because it will hurt to encounter these sentences later on.)

It is hard to cry in a mask.

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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “We’re All in the Same Ocean” (My Path to Mommyhood)
• “My Aunt Called” (A Different Life)
• “Love & Eliza’s Library Wish List” (By the Brooke)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I found Stay at Home Meg substack because someone linked to it when talking about Chrissy Teigen’s loss. She writes about her miscarriage: “It was a work of loneliness. I didn’t get pregnant alone but I miscarried alone. Even with a supportive partner, even with emotional support, miscarriage like birth is a physically a solitary labor.” It’s a rallying cry for changing the way we speak about and support people through loss.

Project Progeny provides a little balance. She points out that we often come to our blogs to unload our hearts, making them a little heavier on one side than another. She balances things out by describing the good around her.

Lastly, A Half Baked Life tells a story that begins with texting pictures of cups of coffee, and how her friend makes her rethink things that she loves but never uses because they’re fragile. A coffee cup moves from being something bringing her joy to something bringing her pain, but it all loops back again. It was the perspective I needed to read this week.

The roundup to the Roundup: Losing a fur-covered friend sucks. Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between October 2 – October 9) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week? Read the original open thread post here.

Linus died in the afternoon.

We saw him in the morning. The vet told us we could come see him; he thought he might perk up and eat if he could hear our voices and feel us. They brought him out to the hospital porch, and we got to sit with him for a long time.

He was not himself and he was himself, both at the same time. The Wolvog always got him excited, and Linus tried to play with him when he stroked his head. But he gave up on the idea of play wrestling after a single head nod. And he perked up when ChickieNob asked him if he wanted a spiky leaf (which is what we call frisée with him), but he just gently moved his teeth up and down without really chewing it. He accepted two timothy treats from me, and we thought he was eating them, but he was just moving them back and forth over his tongue. He was so tired.

We went home in the morning believing that he just needed the anesthesia to wear off. That he would be a different pig at the end of the day.

I called the vet for an update at 1:30 pm, and he told me he had just given him fluids ten minutes earlier and he was resting. He asked if we wanted to come back and visit in the evening, and we made plans to go down there at 4 pm. We were going to try to feed him again and say goodnight.

But the vet called at 3:30 pm, sounding stricken, and he said that Linus had just died. He had been syringe feeding him, and he looked up at the vet, let out one sigh, and died. No warning. It was peaceful, and he wasn’t in pain, but it was sudden and unexpected.

It was a hard afternoon. We cried for a long time, and told Linus stories. Like how he used to dangle one piece of bedding outside the bars of his cage, waiting until I looked over so he could drop it. And I would say, “Linus. Stop it.” And he would pick up another piece of bedding and dangle it… Or how he wheeked every single morning when I went into staff pose during yoga because he knew that kicked off the final sequences of positions, and he would soon be getting his beloved vitamin-C tablet.

He would go “full pancake” when he wanted his side rubbed, seemingly going boneless while he blissed out with his little feet kicked to the side. How he always tried to suck the plastic duck from inside the water bottle, or fight his woven hay carrot (named, uncreatively, Mr. Carrot) instead of eating it, or pick up his food bowl and throw it. We called him the ringmaster because he would flip his food dish upside down and stand on it, so damn proud of himself.

The ChickieNob commented at one point that she was glad our goodbye was not a goodbye. When we left him in the morning, we thought we’d see him later in the day or the next morning. So we said a very loving goodbye, but when the vet brought him back inside, we didn’t have the weight of wanting to hold onto him one last time. It was truly a good goodbye because it was an unencumbered ungoodbye.

My heart hurts a lot tonight.

This morning, I drove Linus over to the vet by myself, and I was actually calm. I narrated the journey because Linus’s carrier needs to be closed while the car is in motion. (He likes to stand up with his head out, looking around, whenever we’re parked.)

When we got there, I knew that we had chosen the right place. The nurse was organized and caring. The surgeon came outside to speak to me in the parking lot and meet Linus. He won points for remarking that Linus is such a cute pig. (He is such a cute pig. This is his hopeful, “maybe there’s a second treat?” face that he made before he went into the hospital.)

I got to have a few final moments of cuddling and whispering that I love him, and then the surgeon brought him into the building, telling me that he would likely do the surgery in the late morning, and Linus would go home around 7 pm.

I went home to try to work.

His surgery got pushed back a few hours because of other surgeries, but the vet called to let me know they were starting. Soon after he called to say that his testicles looked abnormal, and they were recommending removing them because they were likely cancerous. At this point, I was concerned but also felt lucky that we caught this other problem early. I agreed that we should remove the testicles while he was already under general anesthesia.

Then the surgeon called back to say that they knew there was a stone because they had taken new x-rays, except it wasn’t in the bladder anymore. The surgery had become a lot more complicated. Another doctor was brought in and two nurses. They needed to reconstruct his urethra. He was under anesthesia for over three hours. The vet told me he had never seen anything like this. But he was one strong pig. And he’s currently waking up slowly.

This was not the aftermath we thought we’d have. We thought we’d bring him home and coax him to eat and drink. But he can’t come home tonight. The vet told me that he would bring him back to his house when he left the hospital so he wouldn’t be alone with the other animals and he could have someone watching him if he made noise in the night. We may be able to bring him home tomorrow. We may not. I guess we won’t know until he’s ready to go home. In any case, he said he’d call me a few times this evening with updates.

I am so grateful for people who care about animals. Who understand that caring about animals is one way to care about the people who love them.

Linus is having surgery this morning for the bladder stone. It has been… a lot of stress. We needed to find a different surgeon to perform the surgery, which meant a miserable weekend of trying to coax Linus to eat a few leaves of spring mix while he whimpered. ChickieNob was particularly adept at getting him to accept food. The Wolvog was adept at getting Linus to show glimpses of his old self and stand on his hind legs, sniffing the air to see if the Wolvog was about to give him a treat. I cried a lot. I worried a lot. I second-guessed myself and ran through worst-case-scenarios and didn’t sleep.

But Monday morning, our top pick for surgeon returned my call and walked us through what would happen. He is going to do the post-op care, but the main surgeon will be a vet I saw many years ago with my high school guinea pig. He was kind and gentle then, so I’m hoping that the man is kind and gentle now with my boy. I am so grateful this hospital fit him in.

The vet spent 18 minutes on the phone walking us through facts about the surgery and preventing bladder stones in the future. He put Linus on a low-calcium diet, which meant the end to his alfalfa treats. Our local pet store let me exchange the unopened bags for orchard grass, which he loves. It felt good to take care of the things I could take care of.

Because this past weekend was so defeating. I didn’t know how to convey how much my pig meant to me. He’s the center of our family—of course, like any pet—but he is also my stand-in baby. He is my morning coffee companion and meditation interrupter. He is this small, hairy beast tethering me to sanity during COVID-19. But I sense that yesterday’s surgeon got it, and he’s in good hands today.

Hopefully, he will be home tonight. I cannot wait to have my happy boy back.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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A friend posted a link to an article about the four stages of comfort that correspond to the four states of distress. In other words, the best way to give comfort changes on where the person is in their processing of grief.

So people start out feeling shocked and confused, move to feeling bad (and not ready to feel better), then enter feeling bad AND wanting to feel better, and finally, open to solutions.

While it’s helpful in early days to encourage them to talk things through to wrap their brain around what happened, it’s not helpful to jump to fixing things when they’re still reeling from grief. Whereas validating feelings needs to come after the person understands what they’re feeling.

What do you think of their theory?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.