I am playing catch up on all my photos right now…but I am getting there! A rainy and dreary day yesterday helped me stay inside and stay focused to get some of my photos processed. While we were in Tampa last month with family, Lily and I snuck away for a day at Zoo Tampa. We had a really nice time. We enjoyed seeing all the green…we went on St. Patrick’s Day. It was a little warmer than we were used to but we made the most of the zoo, traversing the whole thing at least twice. I wanted to make this a special occasion for both of us, so I purchased some “behind the scenes” opportunities. We did three of them: fun with penguins, feeding/training a Greater One-Horned Rhino, and watching them train an African elephant behind the scenes.

The penguins were fun. We went behind the penguin house and was able to meet one of their little penguins. She hopped around us and we were able to pet her gently on the back. They are wet and have dense feathers and feel just like you would imagine them to feel. She was obviously very enamored with her trainer, because she followed her around like she was in love with her. Lily is a puffin lover and this was the closest thing they had to a puffin. We had to sign a waiver that we were okay with being pooped on by the penguin…..evidently they can spray their poop up to five feet away. Thankfully, we did not have any issues with this.

The next encounter was with Jamie, the female One-Horned Rhino. She stuck her head into a hole in the fence and we fed her lettuce. We had a trainer with us and she had to present herself with her mouth closed and calm before she got her treat. We also had to sign a waiver with the rhino….not that we would be willing to be gored or anything like that – that we would be okay with having rhino drool on us. When Lily was feeding Jamie, she had a rope of drool to the ground that was pretty spectacular. Lily didn’t get drooled on though. A zoo photographer took some photos of us that I will try and share at the end of the photos in this post. Jamie has a baby rhino who is a couple of years old. His name is Gronk. I love it! I asked if Rob Gronkowski knew he had a rhino named after him and the zoo employee said, “Oh yes! He has been here to visit him several times!” How cool is that? I have to say that feeding a rhino was really neat.

From there we went to the African elephants. They are near and dear to my heart. Our zoo in Omaha has 3 baby elephants and the handlers at Zoo Tampa were jealous. Their “babies” are 9 years old! We got to meet Ellie. She is 21 years old, if I remember correctly, and she was super smart. They pulled in her former trainer to come and help her demonstrate for our group. This trainer worked with Ellie and the other elephants for many years but about a year ago, had moved to a different animal encounter. The chemistry between the handler and Ellie was palpable. There was a lot of love there. The handler had a huge bucket of roughly cut up apples, which she placed in the end of Ellie’s trunk. She also had whole squashes that she gave Ellie to eat. After a particularly arduous task, she threw a whole cantaloupe into Ellie’s mouth. She just crunched it down and then for about 20 seconds or so, there was cantaloupe juice running down the back side of her trunk and onto the dirt. Did you know that elephants only have 4 molars? They are big ones though! Ellie knows a ton of tricks. Some are to help with when the vets need to draw blood, etc. They do that from the back of their ears.

We learned a lot of interesting things at Zoo Tampa. Evidently they have their own show on Disney Plus! I don’t have that channel so I had no idea. However, people were often exclaiming that they knew the trainers or the animals and their stories from the show. I will have to try and look it up and see if we can see it on another platform. What do you think is the most expensive animal to feed at Zoo Tampa is? You’ll never guess…as I was shocked to find out it is their manatees! They had 11 when we were there last month. They eat 6000 lbs of romaine lettuce a day! That is A LOT OF LETTUCE!! It costs more than the big chunks of meat for the big cats…more than the food for the elephants. You will see in the photos of the manatees that there is just a halo of lettuce on top of the water for them to eat. Zoo Tampa also has koalas, which I am not sure I ever saw in person before. We were able to catch the McCaw flyover, when the group of colorful birds are let loose to fly over the zoo and fed peanuts by their trainers. We also saw a very interesting bird called a shoebill. They look prehistoric and are oddly beautiful. Lily loved them! We happened to be there at the end of the day when they were feeding them fish. It was really cool. Anyhow, we had a really good time. I look forward to going again when we are down there.

Again, I am playing catch up with my photos. When I go someplace and take a lot of photos, I will tell you that term “a lot of photos” usually means over a thousand a day. Usually, I try to wait a few days to go through the photos, so I have a “clean eye” looking at them. I have to cull out the ones that I don’t like and then go through the process a second time when processing them through lightroom. It is an arduous process, but one that I enjoy doing. It is just time consuming. This is why I am always playing catch up. I am blessed to have the pleasure to travel to wonderful places. I try to capture some of that in photos. If there are animals involved or beautiful vistas, I am sucked in and I start clicking away, trying to capture the essence of what I see and feel and put it into a photo.

In mid-March, Rich, Lily, and I flew down to New Port Richey, Florida to spend some time with Rich’s parents and sister. Bonus visitors were there as well: Rich’s Uncle Joe (his mom’s younger brother) and his family, and a family friend from Sarasota. We had a really nice time. Rich and I decided about 2 years ago that we were going to make a concerted effort to spend more time with our parents. His mom has Alzheimer’s, and my dad has dementia. My father is in a memory facility as of the end of January. My mother-in-law is still at home, but it is not about good and bad days now as much as it is good and bad hours. Watching a parent fade away mentally is so very hard. Growing up, you depended on them to raise you to be successful adults. When Joe died, we naturally wanted to turn to our parents for consolation. That is hard to do when your parent doesn’t even understand who has died. Even in our grief, we have tried to visit our parents – to spend time with the parents who are losing their memories, and to give support in however we can for their spouses – the caregivers. Lily had a few days off of school, so we flew down from a Wednesday to a Saturday. On Thursday, the whole big crew of us went to Busch Gardens to spend the day. We didn’t really think about the timing of our trip – it was spring break for a lot of the country, and they were all headed to sunny Florida. Unlike the time when Michelle and I were there in the off season in January, this time it was packed with visitors. We were there all day and I wanted to share a few photos of the day.

I should probably warn you that the next day, Lily and I went to Zoo Tampa. However, there are a lot of animals I had not photographed before that reside there. I am still plodding along in Lightroom working on those. Then the next week, Rich and I flew to California to spend 6 days with Tim. We went to several national parks. No animal photos in there besides a few birds and sealions. However, if you are tired of the zoo animal photos, just remember that I am moving to northwestern Montana in two months or so and there aren’t any zoos up there!

When the boys were in high school a decade ago, they used to have to take the ACT on Saturdays. Now it is a part of the junior curriculum and they are given during the school day. This past Tuesday, Lily’s school gave the ACT to the Juniors and sophomores. If you were a freshman or senior, you had the day off. Lily had big plans to get her hair chopped off. I wanted to get some traditional Chinese dress photos prior to said haircut. We made a deal – that if she would do the whole photoshoot thing with me, I would then drive her straight to the hair salon to get her hair cut. Thankfully, midday on a Tuesday, there aren’t a lot of people in the Old Market passageway in Omaha. It was deserted and we were there about an hour just having fun. I had envisioned these photos for over a year, so I am glad we got them done!

Well, it has been one year today since our Joe was killed in a car accident in Colorado. My life has so drastically changed since that moment. I had no idea how much pain there was in losing a child. No idea. I didn’t realize that grief stays with you. It isn’t something to be gotten through, like a dense fog. It is now holding your hand for the rest of your life. You just have to decide from day to day…. sometimes hour to hour if it will drag you around to places you don’t want to be, or if you will walk companionably together along your life’s path. I can say there has been a fair amount of dragging with me and grief this year, but I am hoping it will be more of the latter…. walking together and experiencing life. I never know hour to hour which it will be. I also didn’t realize that “early grief” is typically defined as the first 2 years after a death of a loved one. I now realize that someone who is only three months out from a death is still in that protective fog of grief. It is when the acceptance and realization that this death is truly real, is when the true pain really starts. That fog lifts and stops protecting your mind and heart and you have to really start to feel what it is like to lose your loved one. Everyone’s grief is different. I never know what is going to activate my grief…. send my brain into a “grief burst”. It can be a song, a thought, a photo that pops up on Facebook or my echo device on my desk. Early on it was a simple as someone wearing a shirt with “94” on it to one of my cardio classes I attend. That was the year Joe was born. I would have noticed it before, but after his death, that was all I could see. I also have learned that the death of a child is particularly hard. I have learned that if you haven’t also lost a child, I can stop listening right away to your “friendly” advice. (And I have gotten plenty of friendly advice about how I should grieve).

Yesterday we had an open house at our home for those who knew Joe to come and gather and honor his memory and the fun life he lived. We had about 40 people come, and it was a beautiful day. The weather was in the low 60’s and sunny. Not bad for early March in Nebraska. We actually had to turn on the AC because it got so hot in the house. I think we had about a 50

Yesterday we had an open house at our home to bring together those who knew Joe to celebrate his life. I know his friends in Missouri get together often but we wanted to include the folks here in Nebraska as well. I think it was a 50/50 split of locals and out-of-towners. He had military friends here from his guard unit, Delta Chi brothers, and high school classmates. He even had a former employer stop by. We were blessed to have his wife, Michelle, here as well, to be surrounded by love for her as well as for Joe. I have been contacted by his OFD brotherhood, and a couple of them were headed to the crash site today along with some firefighters from Virginia (they are all in a firefighter class in Colorado together). It shows how deep the red line courses and what a brotherhood it is. The OFD firefighters are being supported by their classmates who didn’t even know Joe. It bowls me over every time…. this love these firefighters have for each other. I am so glad that Joe was blessed with that brotherhood, even if it was for such a short time. I also got a message from one of the FF/EMTs who responded to Michelle and Joe’s accident in the snow storm a year ago. He has been following my blog and felt that he and Joe were a lot alike. It was such a wonderful thing for him to reach out to me. God bless him as he continues his work as a FF/EMT.

Today Mass was celebrated in honor of Joe at our parish at St. Gerald in Ralston. We were greeted after the Mass in the narthex by several of our good church friends. They stood in a big line, and we went down the line hugging them as they gave us words of encouragement and a sunflower. We ended up with 30 sunflowers: 27 for Joe (one for each of the year he lived) and one each for Rich, Lily, and me. Sunflowers are my jam….I will travel a long ways to just take in a good sunflower field. I made it through the Mass without a lot of tears (Sunday morning Mass was different – I was a hot mess then). I looked up and saw all these beautiful people with these sunflowers and totally lost it. It was one of the most kind things. Thank you to everyone who played a part in that. It is making me tear up now just thinking about it. Thanks to everyone who came to the open house as well. I don’t know how we’ll celebrate Joe up in Montana, but it was so nice to get everyone together this year. Thanks especially to my brother-in-law, Joe, and his wife, Heather, and her son, Kevin, for coming from Virginia to be with us this weekend.

So here is to another year of beautiful memories of Joe. I have told a few people this, but wanted to mention it here. When Joe was alive, I had to wait to talk to him about things that happened to me or that I thought about. I don’t have to do that anymore. I have access to him all the time now, in my heart and mind. I have a book I write letters to him in quite often. I can talk to him out loud, which I do often because I am usually alone, but can also just think to him and know that he is hearing me. Sometimes I can hear his reply right away…or that wonderful laugh that he had. I no longer have to wait until he is off shift or not at BJJ or worry about interrupting time with Michelle. I have his attention whenever I need it. His death dropped me to my knees, literally and figuratively. I will miss him until my last breath. I want to live a life to honor his. I want him to know I eventually found my smile again and even though I was so very sad to be without him, I honored him by continuing to live mine until I see him again.

Have you ever heard of the Japanese art of kintsugi? I have seen and heard about it for a long time but just learned the name of it today. The Japanese make beautiful bowls of lacquer and pottery. But life happens. Earthquakes come or other accidents occur, and these bowls fall and shatter. The Japanese don’t discard these broken bowls though. They pick up the shards and using the art of kintsugi, they put the pieces back together. They don’t use glue to try and hide the cracks. They use gold – a precious metal – to hold the shards together. It shows the bowl has been broken and has lovingly been put back together. The bowl isn’t the same. It looks different. It may even be shaped differently, but it is a bowl again.

Grief is so much like this. My heart shattered in a million pieces almost a year ago. I remember sitting there and thinking that I could actually feel like air was blowing through my chest…. like there was a hole the size of a cannon ball where my heart should be, and the wind was just blowing right through me. I always pause now when I go to say, I wish something from my heart…. because me heart is still so very broken. However, I envision my heart going through a long kintsugi process of being repaired but still being able to see the many cracks – evidence of my heart breaking – and proof that it is healing…but will never be the same. Anyhow…this was brought up in a grief zoom I was part of today and I wanted to talk on it now that I know the name of this art. I have put a couple of photos of examples below. I lived in Japan for 2 years but I don’t have any Kintsugi art. I think it is beautiful and each piece tells a different story.

So many of you have commented on the zoo photography I have been doing…. which has been a lot. Being at the zoo makes me feel closer to Joe for a number of reasons. On Rich’s suggestion, I am sending a copy of the photos to the zoos. I wrote a letter to each of the zoos: Henry Doorly Zoo & Aquarium/Wildlife Safari in Omaha, NE; Sedgwick County Zoo in Wichita, KS; Busch Gardens in Tampa, FL; Fort Worth Zoo in Fort Worth, TX; and the Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Clearwater, FL. I enclosed a photo of Joe, told them about our story, and then included a thumb drive of the photos I had taken at their zoo/aquarium. I gave them my permission to use them if they would like, just to give me credit for the photo. I don’t know that anything will come of it, but it is a gift to honor my Joe at the anniversary of his death. He really supported and loved my photography and Tim really likes my zoo photography as well. So this is a gift for them. I hope they at least look at them and perhaps share them with their zookeepers. I really thought this was a nice way to honor Joe.

Well, the one-year anniversary is closing in on us. Two weeks. They say the days leading up to the anniversary are worse than the actual anniversary itself. We shall see. All I can say is I have been doing a LOT of grief work over the last few weeks. I still have moments EVERYDAY that I just can’t believe that it is all real. Where there is such great love, there is great loss.

We have been thinking for weeks about what we were going to do for this first anniversary of Joe’s death. March 6th falls on a Monday and we are planning to spend that day together as a family and go to a Mass offered in his name at our church. We wanted to get together with Joe’s friends and their families one last time to honor Joe before we move to Montana. We didn’t want to miss this opportunity to get together with the people we have loved for years, who were a part of Joe’s tribe. We are asking his classmates, rugby teammates, friends from college, firefighter friends, Delta Chi brothers, anyone who loved our Joe, to join us for food, drinks, cookies, and scotcheroos on Sunday, March 5th, from 1-5 p.m. at our home in Omaha. Please bring stories to share and pictures if you have them. They both would be a blessing to our family. Our Joe came with a big tribe, and we’d love to get together with you all one last time to honor Joe’s memory and say our goodbyes. If you need our address, please send me a message. Bellevue peeps….we moved to Omaha several years ago, so don’t head to our old house in Tregaron! If you plan on attending, please let me know so I can make sure you are fed properly!

This has taken a few weeks to get ready, but when I was on my way home to Omaha from Houston, I stopped in Wichita, Kansas for the night. They say that they have the best zoo in Kansas there – the Sedgwick County Zoo. I got up early in the morning in late January on a weekday. It was 32 degrees and I had the zoo to myself for the most part. I spent about 6 hours walking around and really had a nice time. I got a few photos that surprised me…like a rhinoceros sticking out her tongue. There was also a cardinal…I think I have mentioned that I often see cardinals at the zoo….making me feel like Joe is with me. This cardinal flew right into a coati enclosure to get my attention. He followed me around and so I got a lot of photos of him too. New fun fact: flamingoes actually don’t mind cold water. They were really noisy but splashing and having fun in the cold water. You could hear the lioness roaring at the lion from all over the zoo. You could see her breath in the cold air and that was pretty cool. Just hearing her give him a hard time about I don’t know what, but she was the epitome of “I am woman; hear me roar!” I was also chased by a wood duck, which was comical I am sure, but somewhat terrifying. The black swan also tried to approach me, but I don’t mess with swans – learned that the hard way as a kid. There must have been something strange going on in that aviary area because I heard several screams of people come from there. Either the ducks were chasing them, the swans, or maybe one of the free-roaming wallabies in the area snuck up and scared them. There were also these African Painted Dogs that were interesting. I don’t think I had seen them before. The buffalo here, Boomer, died this past week. He was so patient and let me take lots of photos of him. Their zookeepers are heartbroken at his loss, according to their FB page. Anyhow, I wanted to share some of my happy place times with you. The one random sunset shot is from my drive home that night to Omaha. I was in northern Kansas and just had to pull over and catch the beautiful colors.

I wanted to thank every one of you who sent me warm wishes yesterday. It was a hard day on so many levels, but I was kept busy. I did my normal Barre and Dancefit classes in the morning at the gym. Then I came home to a weekly photography zoom meeting….took a shower and was ready to meet Rich for lunch at 1230. The doorbell rang and Zac Oslica (Joe’s best friend) and his mom, Wanda, were at the door. They came with yummy carbs and an invitation to lunch. Zac had gotten off of shift at the fire department that morning and drove up from Kansas City to get to Omaha for lunch. I may have cried a little – it meant so much to me. He had lunch with us and then was going back down to Kansas City to try and beat the winter storm we were expecting. Plus, today is Zac’s birthday, as well as his girlfriend’s, Megan. So happy birthday to them. Grief zoom meeting number one ensued. I then got some laundry done and talked with my mom for awhile. Then grief zoom meeting number two…my local one that is monthly for grieving moms. By 8:20 I was finally done with my day and sat down with Rich and Lily to open cards and packages. I wanted to share with you what Lily gave me. I asked her last May if she would paint a portrait of Joe from a photo I had of him. I wanted her to change the helmet he was wearing to reflect that he wasn’t a recruit but a firefighter in the painting. I even went with her to Michaels on the last day of her junior year to buy her all the supplies she would need to paint it. I asked her a few times over the summer but she just put it off and I thought she had blown off the whole thing, However, she surprised me with this painting last night. I may have ugly cried when I saw it. I can’t tell you how realistic it is….the shading of his jacket…the detail of his gloves and wrinkles of his pocket. It blew me away. Today I spent a few hours making sure that she had everything she needed to get her spot verified for the Kansas City Art Institute. I have no question in my mind that is where she is meant to be.

Today is complicated. Today is my birthday. I am 52 glorious years old today. I remember 3 years ago that I wanted to make it to my 50th birthday. It was my second goal after making it to Joe and Michelle’s wedding. I remember being so out of breath on my 49th birthday that I couldn’t blow out the three candles on the cake. That was due to a rare reaction to the chemo that I was on. Joe, a year or two later, told me that it was a hard birthday for him. I was bald and couldn’t breathe and had been at the hospital for 7.5 hours the day before, trying to avoid a hospital stay and get some help with the crazy reactions I was having. He said he realized at that moment how sick I really was. So, every subsequent birthday is a blessing.

Last year, Joe came up to Omaha to surprise me on Valentine’s Day and stay for my birthday. He had been trying to get me to be a Chiefs fan for years, and told me, “Since you have finally drank the Chief’s Kool-Aid, I thought you needed some swag to wear.” It was a throwback Chief’s sweatshirt, which I absolutely love. He went out to dinner with us and then drove home after my birthday dinner. It was the last time I ever saw him…. on my birthday. I often look at the spot in my living room where he gave me one of his big bear hugs as he got ready to head out the door and drive back to Kansas City. I had no idea that he would be gone three weeks later. So today I am sad as it has been a year today since I have seen him. I am also blessed because the last day I saw him, he was spoiling me with a visit and my last hug from him was on my birthday.

This past Saturday, I did something very special for myself. I didn’t let anyone know I was doing it…. but it was something I had been wanting to do for about 10 months. I put on my Joe Messina memorial t-shirt, my dark gray and neon green socks (Joe’s favorite color in high school), jumped into the car that all of our kids have owned and driven, but was originally Joe’s, and headed to the tattoo parlor with a letter from Joe from when he was in boot camp. They created a stencil of his handwriting and now I have a message tattooed on my inner left forearm from Joe that I see all the time. My tattoo artist was super nice, and she was from Montana. She thanked me more than once for letting her do this work on me in his honor. She thought it was really cool. It didn’t take long, but I was near a window and watched two firetrucks go by during my time in her chair. That was my cue that Joe was with me and approved of my choice. Joe had A LOT of tattoos. He is probably laughing hysterically that his mom and dad now both have tattoos….to honor him and his memory. Below are photos I took with Joe at my birthday dinner last year, one of his hair on my birthday (I compared him to an alpaca) and then of the tattoo I got. I absolutely love it. The tattoo says, “Hey Mama! I love and miss you! Love, Joe”