I happen to be someplace where I have a bit of time to myself today….which I haven’t had in a very long time. I wanted to catch you up on the goings-on of the Messina family.

After 10 short and hard-worked days in Montana getting the house set up, Rich and I left to drive to Omaha and pick up Lily for a family reunion in Florida. We first drove to Kansas City (about 3 hours for those of you who aren’t familiar with flyover state geography). Michelle was supposed to go on this trip with us but had to bow out last minute. Don’t worry…it is a good thing. She got a promotion at work and had some schooling she needed to attend to and it started around the same time. Anyhow, from KC we flew to Tampa and spent a couple of days with Tammie (Rich’s little sister) and his parents. They have a house together in New Port Richey. Over the next 48 hours, family members started arriving from all over…Rich’s brother and sister-in-law and two of their kids from the DC area. Our son, Tim, from California, a niece from upstate New York, and a niece and nephew out of Boston. All-in-all, there were 14 of us once everyone arrived. We packed everyone and their belongings into three vehicles and drove to the port in Tampa and got on a cruise ship for a short, 5-day cruise. This was a celebration cruise because we had a lot to celebrate….Brittany (our niece) graduating with her master’s degree and her 28th birthday, Lily graduating from high school, Rich’s dad turning 80 (in Aug), Rich’s sister, Tammie, turning 50, and Tim getting a job at UCSD! (thank you prayer warriors! He had a phone call within 24 hours of me asking for prayers on this….offering him the job! God is good!) This was a shorter cruise….we weren’t sure how Rich’s mom would handle the upheaval in her life. She has moderate Alzheimer’s disease and it is just hard…on her and those who care for her. That was the idea around the trip. We wanted Rich’s dad and sister, her two caregivers, to be able to go on a vacation and have someone else there to watch over her. So there was 14 of us….ages 15 to almost 80. It was like herding cats a majority of the time. However, we spent the trip almost always all together. We ate our meals together and traveled off ship together. We almost missed the boat together at our stop in Roatan, Honduras…but alas, they waited for us. The couple in Cozumel the next day was not so lucky. They were on the pier as the ship pulled away. Yikes! In Roatan we went to a farm with macaws, guinea pigs, sloths and monkeys. We got to hold the sloths…they just snuggled right in. They smile….slowly. It was so very cool. The monkeys were hopping on and off of everyone in the cage with them. They really liked my camera. I have so many good photos on my good camera, but all these photos will be from phones so I can get this post up. I will post those good photos once I process them. We also went to a chocolate factory and then everyone went snorkeling off a couple of boats. Rich and I stayed back to watch everyone’s belongings and his mom, who spent a lot of the time counting the boats in the bay.

The next stop was Cozumel, Mexico. We did more snorkeling here and the obligatory tequila tasting at a local family’s compound. Not a fan of tequila….but they made plenty of money off our family! Rich bought a beautiful and very colorful beaded elephant from an indigenous artist there. They take fish bones and grind them up into a paste….harden in and then carve the animals. They slowly cover the animal with wax and then place tiny glass beads in brilliant cultural designs to complete the sculpture. It took the artist a couple of months to complete the elephant we bought. We had him sign the piece for us.

After being on the ship for 5 days, we disembarked and made it back to New Port Richey. Board games and card games were played. Joe and Heather taught us how to play dirty rummy. I think we’ll be playing it for years to come. Rich took his sister, Tammie, her son, Casey, our son, Tim, and Joe & Heather’s daughters, Tristan and Brittany skydiving. Then, just as they came…the relatives started leaving to return to their homes. We were the last to go. We were able to spend some time with Rich’s Uncle John and Auntie Joyce and later with their son, cousin John & Kim. Here are a few photos from that last day in Florida.

Rich, Lily, and I flew out to New England after 9 days in Florida. We landed in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and drove in the fog and rain to Salisbury Beach to see Rich’s Auntie DeeDee. We loved connecting with her again. Since Rich’s parents and sister have moved to Florida, we don’t get to see his extended family in New England very often. Have you ever been around Italian aunties? They take one look at you and deem you starving and they feed you anything and everything they have in their house. We stayed the night with his Auntie Cathy and Uncle Mike and they served us a very large breakfast the next morning. We spent the afternoon at our cousin, Dina’s house with the cousins. We celebrated Jared’s birthday (one of the youngest cousins) and just all got caught up. It was really nice. Lily met two of her cousins she had never met before who are the same age. We left Dina’s (in New Hampshire) and drove to Bath, Maine. We had that as our home base for a couple of days as we tootled around Maine. Our big task was to go on a 4-hour tour out of Booth Bay to see whales and puffins. The puffins were the most important thing for Lily and we were able to see them through the mist and rain. Lily can sleep anywhere…as you can see below. We also went to Freeport, Maine to see the original LL Bean store (the big rain boot), and to Kennebunk Port. Rich and I had lobster rolls the two days we were in Maine. We had a great time in New England…even if it was only 4 days. We spent our last night with cousin Jared and his wife Dawn, and family. They have a farm with baby doll sheep, goats, miniature donkeys, kittens, and dogs.

Auntie Cathy had let us know that there was major construction in Boston, so we flew to KC out of Manchester, NH instead. Of course there was a delay in leaving….which caused us to miss our connecting flight in DC. By the time we got to KCI and drove 3 hours north to Omaha, it was after 1 in the morning on Thursday. (yesterday). Tim flew in late last night and has been furniture shopping at our house with the remainder of our furniture we are selling and didn’t move to Montana. The little U-Haul trailer is packed, and he and I will take off in a couple of hours to start towards his place in East Palo Alto, CA. It is a 25-hour drive. Once we get to his place, we’ll load up the rest of his belongings and then start the drive to San Diego, which is 7 hours. He has found a place to rent with more space for him and 3 roommates in a 4000 sq ft home with a large yard only 15 minutes from his work. I am happy that he will be moving into a good situation and a nice neighborhood. I will start traveling back to Montana from San Deigo a week from now. So in 3 weeks, I will have been in 3 countries, and the four corners of the lower 48 states….Florida, Maine, Southern California, and Washington State (which I travel through on the way back to Montana). Rich and Lily will be busy getting loose ends tied up with the house in Omaha and the business. They will join me a few days after I get back. We then will have 3 glorious weeks to enjoy Montana before flying with her down to move her into her dorms in mid August. So it may be awhile before I post again, but know I am travelling our beautiful country and hope to share my experiences when I am back online. (and yes, I am tired. Wouldn’t you be?) 🙂

On June 10th, just two days before we left for Montana, I did a tour of the cheetah breeding facility at the Wildlife Safari in Ashland, Nebraska. It is part of the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, but located over 30 minutes away from each other. The Wildlife Safari has a huge acreage that houses herds of buffalo, elk, many wild birds, a bear, and a wolf pack. It is spectacular to drive through. There are some places to get out and hike to fenced areas, but for the most part, you drive through the grounds at a snail’s pace through the fields of elk, deer, and buffalo. I have been there many times but there are some behind the scenes programs there that are not open to the public that I just heard about recently. There is both a cheetah and a lion breeding program on the back forty away from the prying eyes of the people going through the safari. I had gone on a backstage cheetah experience the month prior at the zoo and that was when they talked about the breeding program at the Wildlife Safari. I checked it out and they had a tour the Saturday before I left for Montana and I signed up for it. It was worth every penny! We were a small group of maybe 7-8 people and we were met with two zookeepers who were so knowledgeable, they blew my mind. I learned so much about the cheetahs!

I am going to try to remember as much as I can, but with chemo brain….grief fog….and just the utter busy-ness of my life in the last couple of weeks, I know I will forget a lot. You will notice that the keepers are wearing masks. Cheetahs are high susceptible to COVID. We had to stay at least 10-12 feet from the fence. The lions had all been vaccinated but evidently there is a shortage of cheetah COVID vaccine right now, so they have not been vaccinated yet. Male cheetahs have to be separated from their mother and female litter mates by age 18 months. The boys go off together and the group of them is called a coalition. The gene pool for cheetahs is very small. There was a time in history about 10,000 years ago where there were very few cheetahs and there was a bottleneck of the gene pool. There were so few that they bred with each other to keep from extinction. Almost all cheetahs are related by DNA to each other much more closely than you would think. Evidently there is a male cheetah from Russia who is in the breeding facility and he is highly sought after as a mate to the females within the western hemisphere because he is not closely related by DNA. He is the perfect mate for the gals on this side of the world. There is a group of zookeepers and scientists who work on figuring out which of the cheetahs should be mated and when. Cheetahs have very sensitive stomachs and they can only eat the really good beef that is raised just for them. There is a place in western Nebraska that creates the beef for the big cats of the United States. How cool that they are right here in the state! The Wildlife Safari also had “retired” cheetahs – cheetahs too old to breed and retired from being on display. They live out their end years in the comfort and quiet of the Wildlife Safari, roaming their yard and playing with toys. The zookeepers were very big on have stuff for the cheetahs to stimulate their minds in their environments. They have huge fields to run and play in. They also have indoor facilities that they can choose to come in an relax in if the weather is bad or they just need a break inside. I was very impressed. The keepers say that the cheetah breeding centers are run very similarly to each other all over the world so that when a cheetah is transferred to another facility to breed, they won’t be stressed out. Many cheetahs carry the herpes virus and it is relatively kept under control unless they get sick or are stressed out. Then they can get very sick, very fast. Told you I learned a lot! But that’s all I can remember tonight.

Here are some photos of the boys in the coaltion:

Here are some photos of a momma cheetah and her cubs. There are four of them and two are male and two are female. They were born Nov 14th, 2022, so were almost 8 months old the day I got to meet them. This was the first cheetah breeding program tour of the season and the first for this momma, Clio. She was a first-time mom and has done very well with her four cubs. She seemed pretty non-plussed by our presence and even just laid down with her cubs around her playing after they were done feeding them.

So those are the photos of those little cuties….who meow and purr…and cannot roar. They mostly chirp, which is so unusual to hear. I did get a few photos of some of the other animals at the park that day. Of course, there was a cardinal singing to loudly in a tree at the end of the cheetah area the whole time I was there….over an hour. I always see cardinals when I am at a zoo. I like to think that it is just a sign that Joe is there with me, enjoying watching the animals like I am. He would have loved this backstage encounter so much.

Well, after 10 short days in our beautiful new home….we drove back to Omaha. We borrowed the Play It Again Sports trailer and needed to return it and we have a Messina family reunion cruise planned out of Tampa on Saturday. So we came back to Omaha to get a few things done before we leave tomorrow again. Here are a few photos from our trip across Montana. We drove 12 hours the first day and 11 of them were in Montana. That was from the northwest corner down to the southeast corner. It’s a big state, people, but it sure is pretty.

We stopped in Deadwood, South Dakota the first night. We actually made pretty good time because we had left at 0600 that morning. After 12 hours in the truck, we wanted to walk around a bit in the gathering dusk. Here are a few photos from that. There is never a stream where my husband doesn’t attempt to try and fall in.

A couple of updates…good ones! I FINALLY got assigned to an oncologist in Kalispell and I even have an appointment. August 1st. Yay! Hurdle number one jumped over and cleared. And as of this morning, it looks like we will finally close on the house tomorrow via long distance. Also yay! Rich has worked so hard getting everything ready for this loan assumption. The company we are forced to work with has been pleasant but non-communicative and miserably slow. We were told underwriting would take 2-4 days. Four weeks later, we are finally cleared. We had to pull over on the side of the highway more than once on our way back to Omaha to submit more paperwork to these people. Arduous just doesn’t even seem to touch the tip of the iceberg on this venture. To make matters worse, they are in the eastern time zone and we were in mountain…so with a two hour time difference, we had short windows for phone tag…..and there was a lot of phone tag. So prayers lifted it all goes through tomorrow. The puzzle is starting to take shape. The only remaining missing piece is our Tim. He is currently working at Stanford University. He has been at his temp job for 18 months now. He has applied to several other jobs and one of them is in San Diego. He is a top contender for this job. I am praying multiple times a day that it comes to fruition. If any of you prayer warriors out there want to join me, I would be thankful. Hopefully he hears something in the next few days. I want him out of the living situation he is in and into something better for his mental health. What was supposed to be temporary ended up being 18 months…he deserves better than a $1000/month tiny bedroom at a boarding house where he lives with 9 other people he doesn’t know. This new job may give him the opportunity to have a better living situation….although San Diego is just as expensive as Palo Alto. It would also be a great stepping stone in his career. So please if you have a spare moment, lift this petition up for Tim. Thanks!

I forgot my favorite outdoor spot at the house! I watch the deer from here and the hummingbirds flit around! We put up a feeder and they have figured out they can come here for food now rather than just spying on us. I see them in the front yard and in the back yard when I am doing laundry. They hover at the window and watch me. It has happened twice. Anyhow, Rich got us these lovely rockers and they will get some good use!

Alright…we have been here 10 days and we leave to head back to Omaha tomorrow morning. EVERYONE has been asking for photos of the house. We have been working really hard to get all the boxes unpacked and put away most of the things. The three bedrooms upstairs are still a work in progress, but all the other living spaces are set up. Thanks to Rich, we even have things on the walls. So here are a few photos of the house….inside and out.

Sorry for the crazy order in which I posted this…but it is a lovely house and we love it. Now if we could only CLOSE on it! I refuse to name on my blog who the company is until it is all said and done, but man, I do NOT recommend them! We are still waiting for our mattress to arrive, so currently we are using Lily’s queen mattress on our king size platform. It is a little hinky getting in and out of bed with 8 inches or so of extra wood on either side of the bed, but it will work until we get back. It should be in by then. Rich doesn’t have a desk yet. We have looked at the furniture stores here….all three of them. We have traveled around the Flathead Valley looking at desks on Craig’s list. Still no joy. We will get it figured out. Unfortunately, there is only the two of us and it is supposed to go upstairs, so it can’t be a beast of a desk.

We have met four of our neighbors in our little neighborhood. They are all a bit older than us and are lovely people. Two of them brought us loaves of bread, which was really wonderful. (It’s gone!) Another brought us cookies. I think we will go around and bring cookies to our neighbors and introduce ourselves once we get back and have some time. I was telling my mom tonight that we have really busted our humps trying to get this house set up…and we haven’t had anytime to sit and enjoy it yet.

We did go to the annual open house for the Bad Rock Volunteer Fire Department, which is just under a mile away. We had hamburgers and Rich had ice cream cones and we talked with the chief for quite awhile. We walked away with two applications. They meet for two hours every Thursday night for training. We will see if we have anything to offer to them. I may not be able to do the firefighting, but with my nursing background, may be able to help with the QRU (quick response unit) doing EMT stuff. We will follow up with them when we return. We also have attended St. Richard’s Catholic Church in Columbia Falls the last two Sundays. We enjoy the priest. He is more on the conservative side and is shared with St. Charles Romero Catholic Church in Whitefish. They don’t have daily Mass, but they do have Mass once a week at either parish and the Latin Mass is one of two Masses offered each weekend. We will see. We need to attend a few more times before we think about having to travel 25 minutes versus 10. Well, off to pack so we can take off bright and early.

We arrived in Columbia Falls, Montana a week ago. It was not a smooth move….however, we are now here and we have not found anything broken yet. We took the first half of the day off to go to Glacier National Park. The weather has been cold since we arrived. We opened all the windows the first night we slept here (last Friday) and it dropped down to 40 degrees that night. It hasn’t been above 63 degrees since then and the nights have been pretty cool. This is not normal for this time of year, but it is what it is. It has also been raining off and on…. which meant it was snowing in the park up on the pass. Today it was 10 degrees warmer, and the sun was out in force, so we took a break to enjoy it. In all of our trips to Montana, we have never been able to make it all the way through Glacier National Park on Going-to-the-Sun Road. Today we were able to make it to the section we had not been to before. We were rewarded with gorgeous views and some rocky mountain big horned sheep and some mountain goats. We also saw a lot of mountain prairie dog-like critters and marmots. Marmots can be quite large. We met a man on a trail who swore he just saw two wolverines. Nope. Marmots. There was even a park ranger nearby who said it was most likely marmots….as one scampered out into view right on cue.

We have had a few hiccups with this move, as I mentioned. We moved ourselves and the packers (hired to pack the furniture and wall hangings) were done in less than 90 minutes and said the movers loading our U-Haul would do most of that. Well, they did not. Rich finally, after a frustrating morning of them not doing a stellar job, just asked them to leave. We also found out we had a leak of axle grease on our new driveway in Omaha. Not only did the stain on the driveway not come out, we had to drive the U-Haul to a garage to have it repaired with all our stuff in the back of it. It took them 3 hours. Then Rich repacked the back of the U-Haul….allowing for lots of other things to be added. I thought we would leave by about 1 p.m. to start heading to Montana. After several setbacks, we finally pulled out at 7:45. I drove Rich’s humongous truck pulling a 16-foot trailer from the store. Rich drove the 26-foot U-Haul truck. We drove 22 hours to get here. We tried to avoid major cities and such with our long loads. We arrived last Thursday afternoon. We got our keys to get into the house on Friday. We are currently renting the house until closing. The company we are working with (we had no choice whatsoever), is miserably slow and bad with communication. We would love to close prior to us having to drive back to Omaha early next week. We shall see. We have had some furniture we ordered delivered already and that has helped make the house seem like home. We have another delivery tomorrow morning and we plan to work hard on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to get things situated and have everything pretty much set for when we return in a few weeks with Lily and Tallinn.

We finally got our post office mailbox keys yesterday so Rich could get his cards from the kids. I have yet to be able to pin down an oncologist here in Montana. They are not making the transition easy and because of that, I am missing a shot this month. I am trying not to let it worry me, but it is frustrating that no one seems to care. I will reserve judgement until after I meet them. So far I have yet to be able to get past the person who deals with new patients. Hopefully she will call me back tomorrow and we can get the ball rolling. Maybe I will just pop in and say hello tomorrow and perhaps she won’t be able to blow me off if I am standing in front of her face.

Our house. I absolutely love it! It is so spacious and airy and light with so many windows and so much room! I know we will be very happy here and when the winters come and we are homebound for days at a time, it will be something enjoyable. Rich got us rocking chairs for the front porch. They are lovely and just in front of my office window….forever tempting me to come out on the porch and sit and rock for awhile. Joe’s windchimes are hanging there….our American flag, and as of last night, a hummingbird feeder. We have never had one before but we have a LOT of hummingbirds flitting around our house so I thought I would give them a reason to stay for awhile. We have seen hummingbirds and deer everyday in our yard. It has been very neat. Haven’t seen a rabbit or a squirrel since we came into Montana though. There are also no cardinals….but hey…there are stellar jays and robins and bald eagles and hummingbirds! Our grass was up to our knees when we arrived but the realtor group we are working with had it cut for us yesterday, which was one less thing to try and do. We had a couple of issues with our fridge and freezer….it went into demo mode and turned itself off just a few hours after we put food in the fridge and freezer. Thank goodness for Google! Our internet also had a glitch in it overnight a couple of nights ago and wouldn’t recognize our password anymore. Luckily, it was nothing we did and a phone call to the cable company got it fixed on their end. So there have been some hiccups, but I still love the place and can’t wait to be here full time. We have two family trips, back-to-back coming up and then we can be up here for a few weeks before we have to leave to get Lily to college in mid-August. It is supposed to rain the next three days, so that is a blessing to make us really hunker down and get more of the house finished.

I wanted to share some photos from Glacier National Park today. The field of yellow is from around the corner of our house. It is a field of canola. It is so vibrantly yellow, you almost need sunglasses to look at it!

I wanted to empty out the photos on my camera prior to leaving. I had a few shots from my long walk in the Overland Park Arboretum with my daughter-in-law, Michelle a few weeks ago. There is also a few photos of “The Embrace” statue at the Omaha Memorial Park at sunset at the beginning of the week. I had a fun excursion this morning which I will post about in the next day or two before we head out to Montana on Tuesday. Even at the arboretum, cardinals followed and sang to Michelle and me. Even on today’s excursion, a cardinal sang overhead to me as we listened to the animal keepers talk. Joe is always showing me that he is with us.

At this point, you must see that I am procrastinating packing the remainder of the house. We are supposed to pull out of here on Tuesday afternoon, if all goes well. I have several hours of packing left…but will get a lion’s share done tonight and tomorrow afternoon.

Something I haven’t shared much about with you all is what I am doing to help me with my grief. Notice I did not say “combat” my grief, but it isn’t something that I should be fighting against. It is something I am learning to live with. I have used this analogy with a couple of groups of grieving friends. One groups thought it was great, the other group thought I was a fruit loop. Choose your camp. I used to care what people thought of me. It is no longer a priority in my life. I see grief as a linebacker; a big, burly 350 lb guy that grunts and the ground squeaks when he walks under the weight of his massiveness. This linebacker called Grief is holding my hand. We are forever entwined in my life. Somedays, I am not paying close attention to where I am headed and I trip over Grief and he falls on top of me….and the pain I feel as he is literally crushing the very breath out of me is all-consuming. I don’t think I will survive it. There are days when we walk easily hand-in-hand, talking about Joe and laughing about the antics he got up to during his life. We reminisce about his smile…his inability to spell words so creatively with his dyslexia. It is a give and take relationship with me and Grief. He does have a firm grip on my hand and we are in it together. That is how I see grief. For my rugby friends, Grief is a huge 8 man that is from New Zealand and most likely a Maori guy with swirling tattoos and built like Dwayne Johnson (the Rock).

So what have I been doing to work with my grief? I spent the last year meeting with a Stephen Minister from a local Methodist Church. I have come before my parish leaders several times telling them how much this is needed in our own parish, but it appears the Catholic Church in Omaha has not caught on to this phenomenal program. My mom and dad both served as Stephen Ministers…my mom is the Stephen Ministry leader for her very large Lutheran Church in Texas. Stephen Ministry is a listening ministry. The people who go through the program have a year or more of intense training. If someone is going through a hard time….a death…an extended illness….a divorce….an estrangement….a loss of a job….so many things that can cause a lot of stress – they can ask for a Stephen Minister to start meeting with them. A woman is matched with a female Stephen Minister and a man meets with a male Stephen Minister. They typically meet in their home or at a set location where there is privacy for just the two of them to talk for about an hour a week….or whatever they decide. My Stephen Minister’s name was Laura. She would ask me questions and just listen. She never gave me advice or anything like that. She would just ask more questions. Listening to what I was saying out loud helped me sort through everything. She often let me talk about Joe unceasingly….she would ask me how I felt close or not close to him that week. She asked about family dynamics with our complicated sudden grief along with my terminal illness mixed in. Laura was a safe place for me to just talk. I always was so amazed at how much I had to say each week. We then ended each hour with a prayer between the two of us. I met with Laura for the last time this past week. I will miss her a lot. Stephen Ministers typically cannot have more than one care receiver at a time. She has been assigned a new person. I have no doubt she will be a blessing to her as she was to me.

I have been to a class at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Elkhorn called “Jesus Wept”. It is a day long retreat which really helps me to focus in on Joe and my grief for him. I met some wonderful people there….couples who are also grieving for their children. Some of them I will have long lasting relationships with because they are the people I feel safest to just talk to around. They GET IT. (and I am so sorry they do). They are my new tribe. They come to the table with their big linebackers holding their hands as well. Some of the moms get together via zoom for about 90 minutes once a month to go over a chapter in a book we are all reading together on grief…or to hear a guest speaker talk to us about how to help our living kids deal with this horrible loss. I love this group so much. There are a few of us Catholic moms who have spun off and meet in a coffee shop in Gretna every now and then. One of the moms said it best when she said,”I knew I had found my people when the first tear fell and everyone pulled out their kleenex from their purses and threw them in the middle of the table for us all to use.” (and we did use them all up that day).

All of these groups are great…but they are not meeting very often. I knew I needed to have more help on a more frequent basis. I joined a program online called Tender Hearts. It is run by a grief expert named David Kessler. Yes, I pay something like $34 a month, but I have the ability to sit in on zoom grief meetings four times a week. I also get a 10 minute video and homework to do each week. I have gotten to know a lot of the other grieving moms from all over the world who are on the site. We let each other talk about our ups and downs, and about our kids who have died. There is no real cross talk…we just witness each other’s grief. I have been so impressed with David’s program, that I signed up to take his grief educator’s course. He only offers it once a year, and the timing was not great, but I am almost done with it now. The course ends at the end of June. I spend maybe 5 hours a week working on class work or doing labs, which I really enjoy. I hope to take what I have learned and be a peer to peer grief educator up in Montana. We already have met and bonded somewhat with a family in our new neighborhood who also lost an adult child. I would like to hopefully get involved in Compassionate Friends (which is a nationwide program for grieving parents, siblings, and grandparents). We’ll see how that goes. Right now, I know that almost everyday of the week I can hop online and zoom with fellow grievers who are learning to live with grief. It is a safe place for me to share my feelings and thoughts and to be witnessed and not judged. It has really helped me a lot. The number of “aha!” moments I have had is embarrassing. I was a perinatal grief counselor when I was in the Air Force as a nurse. I took a LOT of coursework on how to deal with people in grief. Yet I was totally immobilized by grief when Joe died. This has really helped me realize a lot about myself, my family, my friends, and my former friends. I am hoping to pretty much turn over a new leaf when I move. It is a scary thing, change. I have had a lot of it in the last few years and in the process I have been hurt very deeply by a lot of people who probably don’t even realize that their silence was deafening to me. I have a lot of good, solid people in my life. I don’t necessarily need all the ancillary ones anymore. I just can’t carry friendships that are mostly one-sided anymore. I am so very tired. I now have defined what I need for my own journey going forward…and people pleasing just isn’t in the cards anymore. Crazy that it took getting stage IV cancer and then enduring the death of a child to wake myself up to all of this. So I am tightening my tribe and moving on….with Grief holding my hand as I move away. I feel healthier emotionally than I have in a long time and I am so very thankful for that. That doesn’t mean that I don’t break down and cry a lot….because I do…and that is okay. The tears cleanse my soul so I can pick myself up and continue on. Joe would want that for me.

I cannot even begin to tell you how much this zoo has meant to me. When we first arrived back in 2010, we hadn’t been to zoos in many years because we lived overseas. The Henry Doorly Zoo looked quite a bit different 13 years ago…as they are always under construction it seems, to grow the zoo and make the place bigger and better for the animals and the people who come to see them. I remember taking the three kids to see the zoo and it was AMAZING. We went back the next weekend, we loved it so much. It was our go-to place when we were bored and Rich was out of town with the Air Force. Both Tim and Joe went through phases of wanting to be zoologists. They grew up with Zoboomafoo (and the Kratt brothers) and Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter…and then Jeff Corwin…another biologist who was on TV during their childhood. They grew up loving animals…wild and domesticated. When Joe died, we became patrons of this wonderful zoo in his name. I renewed with the awe of the animals and realized I felt very close to Joe and his spirit when I am at the zoo. I usually go by myself…sometimes with Lily tagging along to photograph the animals. When I am alone, I almost always will see a cardinal…even at other zoos in other states. I feel like Joe is letting me know he is there with me enjoying the animals.

This was my last trip to the Omaha Henry Doorly Zoo for the time being. I signed up for a behind-the-scenes encounter with an adult cheetah. There were 6 of us in the class and we went to an open-air auditorium and got to see a male cheetah. So cheetahs in Omaha….there are several groups evidently. There is a female and her siblings who are the wild ones on display at the zoo. One of these wily cats actually escaped their enclosure a month or two ago. She was kind enough to just patiently be corralled by the zookeepers back to her enclosure. There is another group of adult cheetahs who live at the zoo but are not on display. This was who we met on this day. At the Wildlife Safari (in Ashland, NE – part of the Omaha Zoo but located about 30 minutes away) they have a cheetah breeding program. It is not on display at all but is a breeding program in that large area. I am actually going to see the baby cheetahs tomorrow morning (yay!) at a separate behind-the-scenes encounter. But back to May 10th…I got a chance to see a very large male cheetah. He had two zookeepers with him and had two separate leashes on for the safety of everyone. Evidently, he is a larger male. He was able to purr on demand (and rewarded with meat). He was a sweetheart. He meowed and sounded like a tiny house cat. We all laughed so hard every time he meowed as it was so high pitched and tiny sounding. After we got to ask questions to the zookeepers, we were released to walk around the zoo prior to it opening. That was interesting to see the zookeepers getting the areas ready for the animals to be brought outside in their enclosures. They were cleaning and mowing, and spreading around food and toys for them to play with. I also spent a lot of time at the elephant enclosure. Duh. I just am so in love with those baby elephants! There is Mopani, the youngest male, born in March, and then Sonny and Eugenia, who are now 17 months old. They were born two weeks from each other. All three of the babies are half siblings. They have the same dad with different moms. There is another two elephant moms pregnant now. There will be another little one born in late summer and then another in the spring of 2024. I have a photo or two of the very pregnant elephant in the herd. She is the matriarch of the herd’s daughter. The matriarch is the one due in the spring. I will be surprised if this little one doesn’t come early, because mom is already very wide. With her ears out and flared…it barely covers her sides. You’ll see the photos below. The three little ones were in rare form. It was a hot day and Mopani’s mom, Lolli, was trying to teach him how to roll in the mud hole. Mopani wasn’t having it. He did get stuck there, and momma had to use her trunk to help him out. She is such an attentive mom. The toddlers had the zoomies and were all over the place. They are so close in age and are always together. They are pretty tolerant of their little half brother, but at times, they seem to tire of him trying to be “with the big kids”. There is 14 months between the older two and Mopani….but you can see the size difference. Mopani still has a lot of “baby fuzz” on him. Sonny and Eugenia are getting more smoothy and wrinkly like their parents. I may have to make a special trip back to see the next little one. Capturing photos with the three littles is amazing….four would be amazing. Five would just be CRAZY. So I will have to see if I can come visit. The dad of all these cutie pies is Callee, and he was moved to Sedgwick County Zoo in Wichita, KS….another one of my favorite zoos. I guess having gotten 5 female elephants here pregnant, they thought he should take his virile self to another group of ladies. Anyhow, here are some of the cute photos I was able to capture about a month ago. Enjoy!

There has been a lot of packing going on in the house. This is stressing out Tallinn. He is never far from my side. I do slow down and am watching the NBA playoff games. This is Tallinn sitting next to me, snuggled up with his lovey. He is one of those dogs that enjoys watching TV. If there is any kind of animal…even a cartoon of an animal….or any kind of automobile….he is up and in front of the TV ready to get whichever he things needs chasing on the wall.

Tonight I took Lily to Memorial Park here in Omaha. There is a new traveling statue here called “Embracing Peace”. It is recreation of the famous photograph taken on VJ Day where a sailor got caught up in the celebration of the war ending and grabbed a random nurse and kissed her soundly. It was caught on camera and put on the cover of Life Magazine on August 14th, 1945. The statue is 26 feet tall, and weighs 35, 000 lbs. It will be here in Omaha until November, where it will be reloaded onto a flatbed truck and sent on to the next lucky city. I absolutely love it!