{"id":7305,"date":"2013-09-08T17:52:22","date_gmt":"2013-09-08T22:52:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/?p=7305"},"modified":"2013-09-08T17:53:08","modified_gmt":"2013-09-08T22:53:08","slug":"keeping-blood-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/7305","title":{"rendered":"Keeping Blood Time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This afternoon was better than this morning. \u00a0 This morning I was still flashing back to the moment I discovered Claudia had been hit. Yesterday it was happening to me constantly. \u00a0 Now its much less often, and when it happens it isn&#8217;t as excruciatingly painful. \u00a0 I&#8217;m still grieving badly over losing her, but it&#8217;s not overwhelming me so often. \u00a0 Perhaps tonight I&#8217;ll actually be able to rest in bed without repeatedly flashing back to it.<\/p>\n<p>Over the past couple days I&#8217;ve watched the few small drops of blood on my front porch slowly fading away. \u00a0 They fell from her as I carried her away from the street and to my house. \u00a0 When I cradled her up off the street I could feel that her body was all broken up inside. \u00a0 I remember I kept trying to be careful so as to not to hurt her more, as if it would have made any difference at that point, but I was out of my mind. \u00a0 I&#8217;m still not altogether right.<\/p>\n<p>On the front porch was a little pet bed I&#8217;d bought for her, not knowing if she&#8217;d like it but figuring I could try something else if she didn&#8217;t. \u00a0 She had a spot on the front porch she liked and so I put the bed there and the next time I looked out she was fast asleep in it.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/IMG_8067.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7306 aligncenter\" title=\"IMG_8067\" src=\"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/IMG_8067.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"426\" srcset=\"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/IMG_8067.png 600w, https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/IMG_8067-300x213.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>She loved that thing. \u00a0 I eventually bought another one just like it for  the living room, and of course she seldom used that one, preferring  instead a spot on the floor just in front of the sofa.<\/p>\n<p>So I took her broken body over to the little bed she loved  and laid her down in it. \u00a0 Then I went inside and got a cloth and covered  her with it, and that was how I eventually delivered her to the pet  cemetery for cremation, bed and all. \u00a0 When I came back home I noticed  the blood on the porch and I couldn&#8217;t bear to clean it up because it  felt like erasing her and I wasn&#8217;t ready to start picking up all her  things inside the house and putting them away, let alone tend to the damage outside. \u00a0 Some neighbors  kindly washed off the street for me.<\/p>\n<p>A few more days and those  little spots on the porch floor will probably be gone. \u00a0 Maybe by then  the worst of this will have passed too.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This afternoon was better than this morning. \u00a0 This morning I was still flashing back to the moment I discovered Claudia had been hit. Yesterday it was happening to me constantly. \u00a0 Now its much less often, and when it happens it isn&#8217;t as excruciatingly painful. \u00a0 I&#8217;m still grieving badly over losing her, but [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[166,167],"class_list":["post-7305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-claudia","tag-grief"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}