Thanks for understanding, ladies... somewhere in my archives, I have a poem that starts out
"sometimes it hurts too much to cry, and emotions run too deep to get beneath them."
That first poem in the post encompasses my belief that she was in more pain than she let me know, for longer than she let me know, because she didn't want to leave me. I believe that she felt like she was letting me down if she left, or at least if she left before Nov (Nov would have been 9 years since she moved in with me). It also shares one of my favorite memories of her -- about 4-6 weeks after she moved in with me, I went home to spend New Year's with my dad (this was the year after Mom died). I was gone just under a week, I think. Came back and went to get the dogs.
Casey was in the livingroom at the dog-sitters. I was in the kitchen, talking to Dee, and Jon was standing right there. Casey had always avoided Jon (she was never comfortable around men, and it was only in the last couple years that she stopped barking at Jon). She walked past him, close enough to touch, because he was between us and she wanted to be with me. Before that day, she had never willingly been in the same room with him.
