Monday, December 23, 2013

Three months

It's been three months since Katie's death from lymphoma.

I think of her (and of our other two departed greys, Alex and Nikki) every day. And there are many days where I browse through some of the several thousand pictures that I took of her. She was with us for nearly nine years, and even now those thousands of pictures seem inadequate. Oh, most are terrible and not worth sharing with everyone, to be sure, but I saved them.

I cling to these pictures as a way to hang onto her for as long as I can. I won't say that looking at these pictures always brings me comfort — it doesn't. But when it does I go back and think of how well she recovered from her amputation. We were so pleased and happy for her that she gained weight during her chemo treatments because it can cause appetite loss and Katie was never really food-motivated.

I'm rambling now and I can't write a coherent train of thought, so I will leave you with this picture of Katie as she was back in 2008, a couple of months after Nikki had died:

I used light coming in through a window to get this. I added +0.7 exposure compensation because I didn't want the light meter to render her in a dull gray. She had this wondering look on her face as Sadie was standing in front of her. Katie's eyes were wonderful and I tried to capture that.

(Shot with the Nikon D300 and the 18-200mm zoom; aperture-priority with aperture set to f/4.8, ISO 1100 at shutter speed of 1/30 second; cloudy-weather white balance; +0.7 exposure compensation; normal JPG.)

8 comments:

  1. We had Stella for 9 years. In that time, I have clicked the shutter on her the most. So like you, I have thousands of pictures to look back out. And I won't be deleting a one of them either.

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    1. i have a few picture of katie on my iphone still that i need to download to my desktop. i took them several hours before her death. incredibly she doesn't look like there's anything wrong.

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  2. Katie was so beautiful. I am constantly looking through pictures of my hounds. I fear that I will somehow forget them.

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    1. there is one kind of picture that i never got the chance to take of katie: playing on a deserted beach at sunset. katie would've loved it, as she often dug holes in my in-laws' backyard. i really should try to do that with sadie.

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  3. You've got a wonderful storage of memories of your beautiful Katie. Most of them are happy memories, I'm sure :)

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    1. if only the pictures could bring her back. that would be perfect.

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  4. It was a really rough year for osteo. I was really cheering for Katie, since she started limping at the same time as Blueberry and we never even got a chance to fight it. We had her for eleven years, and it wasn't long enough. A hundred years wouldn't have been long enough, truth be told. Katie was absolutely gorgeous and I never saw a bad photo of her! I still love the one of her with Sadie playing bitey face (I think, they were both looking fierce).

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  5. There are no words to express the size of the hole they leave in our hearts when they go. Guess the lucky thing is that our hearts of so much bigger for having them in our lives. What beautiful memories of a beautiful girl.

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