Chapter 2: The Pretty Prairie Question
After we buried my dad, David picked up several boxes of books from the house where Dad and his wife had last lived together. I ran across this poem called “Netsie” in one of his books, The Rhymes of Ironquill, by Eugene Ware. I almost heard my father’s voice when I read it, and the poem seemed to speak to me from the grave.
NETSIE
Happiness or heartache?
Either it may be,
Blue-eyed little daughter
Sitting on my knee.
Happiness or heartache,
Either it may be.
Heartache or heartbreak
If it sadly be,
Blue-eyed little daughter
Sitting on my knee,
Though I may be buried
I will grieve with thee.
When the ache is ended,
We can go and see
Our old home in Lyra,
Where the rainbows be;
You will have a world of fun
When you go with me.
--Eugene F. Ware, The Rhymes of Ironquill
I think about how much I want to see him again “when the ache is ended,” and I want to have “a world of fun when I go with him.” In my heart “our old home in Lyra” could be our old home in Topeka, before the divorce, or maybe it would be the house in Pretty Prairie where he was born. I never got to see it. Or if I did, I don’t remember. 2004:
First came the question about Pretty Prairie.
The first time I went to Mexico was with 25 kids on a high school trip between my junior and senior year. According to my mother, my dad fought me going to Mexico that first time. Peggy owned a white stucco house in a town called Santiago, near Manzanillo (Little Apple Tree) in the state of Colima in Mexico. David and I had visited them there a couple of times since their marriage in 1994. In this tropical paradise, hotels and restaurants accented the landscape like rows of curved white beehives embracing the mountainsides. Palm trees lined the streets, and all the houses had names. Peggy’s was Casa Paz – Peace House. Both upstairs and downstairs had a kitchen, a bathroom and two bedrooms. Trees in the back yard yielded lemons and bananas.
Behind the swimming pool in the back yard of the house across the street, the Bay of San Juán merged with the sea. Across the bay, mountains hovered over the water. I can still hear the lullaby of the waves at night. The dogs always went with Dad and Peggy on any trip they took. Molly, a gray Miniature Schnauzer, and Mitzi, a cross between a Poodle and a Maltese, managed to get along most of the time. Molly had been an only dog until they adopted Mitzi in Mexico. Mitzi quickly assumed the Alpha role and intimidated Molly every chance she got. On that particular trip to Mexico, Dad asked me the question about Pretty Prairie. I don’t remember Dad asking me a lot of questions in my life. Peggy became the first of his wives to include me in a meaningful way in his life since he and his second wife, Irene, whom I called my stepmother, got a divorce. I don’t remember a lot of one-on-one with Dad while he was married to his third wife, and the girlfriend after that only wanted to see my brother and me one at a time. “Did you ever see the farm in Pretty Prairie where I was born?” my father asked. Pretty Prairie is a tiny town in Kingman County in rural Kansas. Dad attended school there in a one-room schoolhouse. “I don’t remember,” I said.
“You don’t?” he asked. “We’ll have to take you there some time.”
“Yes, I’d like that,” I said.
My dad was still good looking at 76. His dark hair, wavy in his youth, became smoother and straighter in later years. Still with nearly a full head of hair, highlighted with silver, his hairline appeared only slightly higher than 30 years before. His hazel eyes still smiled and laughed in symphony with his broad, engaging smile, accented by just a hint of a dimple on either side that seemed to lift the corners of his mouth.
A few minutes later he asked me the same question and we went through the same exchange and again a few minutes later. I think we went through that dialogue a dozen times or more on that trip to Mexico. In the years since the Pretty Prairie question, things gradually slipped from my father’s consciousness. I also noted the beginnings of strange emotional reactions on that trip. In a restaurant somewhere in Mexico, on the way down or on the way back from Manzanillo, we got into a discussion about infant baptism. I don’t remember what he said when I suggested that a person could not be saved by infant baptism. I just remember the look of indignation on his face and the volume of his voice. His face became redder and his eyes widened. I remember thinking how strange and uncharacteristic of him that was. Even though I knew Dad remembered less and less all the time, I still experienced the urge to call him to ask him if he remembered one thing or another. Once I called him to ask if he named the Schnauzer Molly Schisler (my grandmother’s maiden name) or Molly Cogswell.
My grandmother had 17 siblings. I don’t think Dad even knew all their names. Many times he had told the story of how my grandmother was her mother’s 18th child and that she had a twin brother, Uncle George, and I thought he said that my grandmother’s mother died giving birth to her. I thought I remembered Dad sometimes calling the dog Molly Schisler and sometimes Molly Cogswell, even though Aunt Molly never became a Cogswell. Even though I felt fairly certain he would not remember, I wanted to call him anyway. I just wanted to talk to him. I loved to hear his voice.
When I talked to him on the phone, I heard Daddy’s voice the way he sounded on the tapes he made with us when we were little, and I felt close to him again. His gentle voice, a rich baritone, still resonated, clear and strong after years of debating, lobbying, adjudicating, speaking and singing. His voice, especially on the phone, when I had his full attention and he mine, turned my ear toward him, and I was his little girl again.
“My little daughter,” he said to me one afternoon as I was pedaling a recumbent bike at the gym and talking to my father on my cell phone. “Sometimes in trouble, sometimes in great things.
“Play it hard,” he said. I understood that to mean for me to keep at whatever I was working on. I didn’t always understand him but from what I could piece together, I got the sense he was trying to encourage me, still trying to be a dad to me.
“Let me know how I can help,” he would say.
“Don’t worry, just work on it when you can,” he told me once.
I never told him the book I was writing was all about him.
As soon as Dad went into the first nursing home, Peggy’s health seemed to plummet. She seemed to hold up as long as she was able to take care of Dad, but as soon as she didn’t have to anymore, her health problems seemed to overtake her. Pretty soon she had to go in herself, first to the hospital, then to the same nursing home as Dad, then into a different one. Finally, a few months before he died, Peggy brought him over with her.
When Dad started to exhibit signs of memory loss, part of me wanted to be able to record conversations with him. David and I talked about getting as much as we could while we could, as sort of a historical record. However, when it came down to actually doing it, it seemed kind of distracting and impersonal, not to mention impractical. It turned out not to be something I could ever feel comfortable doing, nor something I could imagine Dad being comfortable with. I just wanted to spend time with him, not conduct a scientific study. I wanted to collect as much data as I could about my father while he was still there to collect data from, but my interest was in looking into his beautiful eyes and hearing him tell me he loved me. I just wanted to be with him, to sit with him and hear his voice and look at him close up with no distractions.
I wanted to make up for lost time, for the years I had missed spending time with him. In a way, I now wish there had been a way to record all those conversations. I would like to have included all of the ones where I tried to figure out what he was trying to say, where I was trying to piece together his message to me, even when I felt I was just intellectually curious about the meaning of his declining thought processes. But, in the end, it was just the simple act of being with him, in whatever state he happened to be, that I craved. It was just the longing to be with him that I desired to fulfill, that kept me going back, several times a week, sometimes nearly every night, if only for a short time. I have heard this craving for a father described as “daddy hunger,” and breaks in the father-child relationship as the “daddy wound.”
When Dad and Peggy moved out of their house in the Tall Grass Subdivision, I inherited a lot of pictures of my ancestors, handed down from my grandparents. Looking at old pictures of people long ago deceased became a comfort to me after Dad went into the nursing home. I enjoyed thinking about the ancestors’ lives and how different they lived back then, before cars, computers and cell phones, before everybody got divorced all the time. My understanding was that most of them, even if they had affairs, just stayed married anyway. I found out from one of my cousins that my grandfather apparently had them. I don’t know if that’s true or not. If so, evidently, everybody knew about this but my brother and me, and I guess that’s a good thing. They must have thought we had enough worries with all the divorces in our family. Anyway, based on the fact my cousins saw Grandpa in a car with a woman in Kansas City, everyone has concluded my grandfather had affairs. Like I said, don’t know if that’s true. My grandfather was always good to me, and I loved him. I had summer vacations when I taught child development between 1998 and 2005. During Dad’s marriage to Peggy, I stayed with them at their house in Topeka for days at a time. During that time, I experienced hugging my father in the morning while he was still in his bathrobe, looking at the newspaper with him, eating breakfast with him. I had not known how much I had missed during all the years after my parents’ divorce, until Peggy let me back into my father’s life. Tearfully, I expressed my gratitude to her. “You don’t know how much it means to me that you let me spend time with my father, I told her. “It has been so healing.”
Dad and Peggy became interested in our family history during the first few years of their marriage. Dad tried to interest me in it, but the main thing that interested me was being with them, anywhere at all. They took David and me to a Cogswell Family Association Reunion in 1999 in Salem, Massachusetts. The only reason I cared about that trip was I got to be with my Dad and Peggy and see my brother and my niece in New Jersey. I also had more interest in converting all my family members to Jesus if I could than I did about the ancestors. I always hoped it might work, just by being around me, like by osmosis, maybe. Notably, for me, his memory of my mother finally decreased. One day I showed him my parents’ wedding picture.
“That’s my mother,” I said.
“That’s not your mother,” he said. “That’s Kathy.” I never knew any Kathy except for a woman who worked for Peggy for many years. But she didn’t look anything like my mother.
Although he didn’t recognize my mother in the wedding picture, in a photograph in a photo album of my bedroom, he recognized the portraits I have of him and Mom in the ’40s.
“That’s me and that’s my wife,” he said. Compared to what he said about his high school sweetheart, this meant something to me and gave my heart a little thrill. My father’s high school sweetheart was stabbed to death in Denver in 1999 at the age of 76 by her step-grandson. I wondered if he still remembered her and, if so, what he remembered about her. So I showed him her picture in the album he put together back then and asked him why they broke up. “That wore out,” he told me.
After my parents’ divorce and Dad moved out, David and I lived with Mom, he still saw us three times a week, Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Daddy lived only about six blocks away from us with our stepmother and her two children from her first marriage.
My parents had not spoken for years until a few weeks after my Dad entered the nursing home. My mother said she had a normal conversation with my father on the telephone.
“It was wonderful to talk to him,” she said. I had not had anything like a normal conversation with him for quite awhile but I let it go.
Returning to Topeka after 20 years away, I thought about what would happen when one of them inevitably died before the other one. Although that can happen whether people are divorced or not, the divorce adds another dynamic to the situation, at least for me, as their child. I worried about whether or not they had made their amends with one another, whether or not they had closure. This was probably due to my feelings of responsibility for everything that happened, a carry-over from when I blamed myself for my Daddy leaving, and just part of my lifelong reconciliation fantasy. But I did feel responsible for them being in touch with each other again before one of them died and making sure they were still friends, as Mom always assured me they were. Lines of communication had always been open between them until shortly after Dad married Peggy. Dad had helped Mom out with legal problems, giving her free legal advice and probably even some money now and again, but Peggy put a stop to that. That would not be happening anymore. I wondered how the one who remained would respond when the other one died. Their talking on the telephone, though not quite fulfilling my reconciliation fantasy, counted for a lot. I felt renewed sitting by my dad as he talked on the phone to my mom and sitting by my mom while she talked on the phone to my dad. I feared earlier that if my mother were to call my father, he might not remember her, which might add to the sorrow, because of his dementia. She had always said they were “friends,” and so I figured they would always be friends.
“Just be prepared,” I had told her. It was more than I got from her or my father. They never prepared my brother or me for the things we would suffer in our lives because of their decision to break up our family. Daddy wasn’t thinking about that when he took an interest in the pretty dark-haired divorcée who lived across the street from the tennis courts. Mom wasn’t thinking about that when she decided to kick him out after she’d had enough. She would always be the one I would blame for the rest of my life for irreparably breaking my heart and ruining my life. I would forgive her or at least I would say I had forgiven her, but nothing would ever be right again in my life, and after he was finally dead she would still be there to blame as she lay in her bed with a feeding tube. She would still be the one to blame, as far as I was concerned, after he was gone, when I would shamelessly wish for death so I could go to heaven and be with him.
As a child, I had no way of knowing we would become a broken family. When he was allegedly being unfaithful and she kicked him out without consulting either my brother or me, it is as if we were shot from a cannon into outer space and had nowhere to land. Maybe a Roman candle would describe it better because at least a cannonball is round and solid and lands somewhere with a thump. Instead, I feel more like a fizzle up in the sky with ashen curly-cues fingering the atmosphere as they float down to the earth. Before they have a chance to land, they have dissolved in mid-air.
We went through subsequent stepfamilies like snakes shed their skins. I remember as a child seeing skins left behind by snakes. They have the shape of a snake but they’re transparent and thin, lying there with the memory of a snake in them. But the snake is gone. After divorce number one, nothing would ever be right again.
I was not at their wedding at the Church of the Ascension, Bitterne Park, Southampton, England, to hear them say their vows to each other, but I spent nearly a lifetime breaking free from the effects of their broken relationship. “It was a cold morning, but the sun was brilliant,” my father wrote to his parents, describing his wedding at 10:00 a.m. May 1, 1945.
“The church was pretty – decorated with masses of flowering shrubs, including guild rose, pink double-cherry blossom and hydrangea,” he wrote.
I had expected them to stay together. When my family broke up, my childhood ended, and I believed my life was ruined. If anyone would have asked me, I might have told them how hurt and angry I felt. But nobody asked me. I had no one to tell, because nobody was listening and nobody cared. Then Mom started drinking and I learned that talking about my feelings did not do any good anyway. It didn’t change anything. I had no control over anything. If I’d have known then what I know now, I could have saved myself years of misery. But I didn’t. That was a problem.
I remember the desolation I felt when I found out we were moving from
Park Laneto Seabrook. I felt darkness as though I were enveloped in a black cloud that adhered to me like quicksand, helpless and hopelessly trapped inside, unable to move or breathe. But that was only the beginning of sorrows, because shortly after we moved to Seabrook, the world as I knew it would end. Grief became an intermittent and uninvited guest, stalking me like the angel of death for the rest of my life. And I remember the anger I felt throughout my childhood and adolescence.
For awhile after he left us, he shared an apartment with another divorcing, temporarily single male friend, Pat Murphy. The first thing I saw when I walked into his apartment was a picture of the new lady. I remember one day I stuck my tongue out at the picture while I thought my dad could not see me. Immediately he came back into the room. I know that he caught me doing it and then I felt guilty and afraid of losing his approval.
At a high school reunion, a classmate told me I laid my head on my desk and cried for two months after my parents got divorced. I do not remember doing that, but for years I wondered when I would stop crying. I finally realized that healing was a lifelong process and crying was part of it. Even now when I cry it seems the tears are related somehow to the first time my heart was broken. I finally figured out I’d probably just cry about that until Jesus wipes away my tears.
As I experienced pain I could neither identify myself nor tell anybody about, gradually, I found things to do to get my mind off the pain. The things I chose to do were stupid and destructive and did not take away the pain for any measurable period of time. In fact, my behavior, that is, my sin, simply took me on a collision course with destruction, flying like a misguided missile into the unknown.
As my parents went on and tried to find happiness with other partners, I don’t know if I appeared to roll with the flow or not, but for me, nothing would ever be the same. I lived a double life. Even when I may have looked all right on the outside, inside I was angry, cynical, selfish, and critical. I was wounded on the inside, and I thought I could run away from the painful emotions.
I believed achieving success and recognition would make me feel that my life was worth living. Driven to find a safe oasis, away from the grief and the disappointment, life became a series of failures and losses that compounded the agony I already felt.
You might think I should have just gotten over it, especially after I found the Lord. The religious people told me I should.
“You can’t depend on feelings,” they would always say. Whatever that means.
2009
During the summer of 2009, when Peggy went into the nursing home with Parkinson’s Disease, my brother David and I picked up several boxes of photo albums, clothes, cuff links and other assorted items belonging to our dad. For several days I spent lots of time looking at pictures of my father as a child, as a youth, and as a young man. I looked at pictures of him with his high school sweetheart, pictures of him as a child on a pony, with his feet reaching the ground, pictures of him with his parents and his brothers.
I looked for clues about him in those pictures, clues about who he was. I was looking for the essence of my father in those pictures.
At Aldersgate
The first time I found him asleep, I had to leave. I couldn’t bear the sadness. He looked so vulnerable there with his tennis shoes on the floor under the chair. My chest cavity felt like a bowling ball I could not lift. So I just asked someone to let me out so I could cry in the parking lot. In fact, at first I cried in the parking lot every time I went to see him. Later, if I found him asleep, I would try to wake him up. If he wasn’t sleeping too hard, he would wake up, his face would light up with that smile of his, he’d say “Hi, Sweetheart,” and we would have some precious moments together before someone would come in and say it was time to go to dinner. Then I would usually leave because I didn’t want to distract him from his food.
Sometimes he’d say, “How’d you find me?” or “How’d you know I was here?” or “How’d you get in?” Or he’d ask me, “Where are you living now?” or, “How long does it take you to get here?” or “How far away from here do you live?” He was so used to me living out of state. I think that’s why he would ask me all those questions. I had spent a lot of years living as far away from home as possible. I didn’t like living in Topeka. I didn’t like passing the streets where we lived together as a family before the world caved in. We had our best times in his room, without the distraction of the TV or the other people who live there, the people the staff call “the residents.” These are people’s fathers and mothers who raised children and fed and burped them and changed their diapers. They are people who cherished their grandchildren and protected them from the world. Now they call them “the residents.”
2011
Life did not prepare me for the loss of my father. Only in my memory can I hold him here.
2008
When I walk around to the front where he is sitting, I sometimes see a dour expression on his face. Sometimes his forehead is wrinkled and he looks like he is thinking very deeply about something, figuring something out or puzzling over something. But as soon as he sees me, his expression changes to a bright smile, that beautiful smile of his that lights up a room.
“Well, hi,” he says. I kiss him near the right corner of his mouth and sit down beside him.
“How’d you know I was here?” he says, and every time he asks me that I have to try to think up something to say because I am really running out of answers.
“I’ve been visiting you here for about a year,” I might say. If I say that, he denies it.
“I haven’t been here for a year,” he says, and then I just sigh.
“Where are you living now?” he always asks me several times. And I tell him again, like I am telling him for the first time.
“Near 29th and Gage on Twilight Drive. Whitehall Apartments. About 15 minutes from here.” “Oh, yeah,” he says. “I know where 29th and Gage is.”
Now that I have time to ask him questions I have wanted answers to, he can’t tell me anymore because he can’t remember. I couldn’t ask them before, because I was hardly ever alone with him. Whenever I saw him, he was usually with his wife and/or her family members where it would not be appropriate for me to ask certain questions.
The relationships we had with the subsequent wives, and, consequently, with him, tended to be superficial. After all, my brother and I were guests in their home. Our home was in another house. He lived there with this other family and we respected that boundary. It was not as though Irene was not hospitable or did not make us feel at home. She did. She was a regular gal, raised in rural Kansas, down home and friendly as could be. My memories of her include boiled corn, which she called “roasting ears,” homegrown tomatoes, peeled, sliced and piled on a plate to slap in a bun with a burger cooked on the grill on the patio. After lunch or dinner sometimes we just sat around the table talking until it was time to go home. But I don’t remember any intimate conversations. I loved her, but I wasn’t supposed to. After all, she was the “other woman.” She was the one who lured our father away from our mother. She was the reason our home was broken. Thus we had to balance loyalty to our mom with love for the one with whom our dad had chosen to start a new life. Never would it have occurred to us to ask our dad any questions about his choice.
But if I could have I would have asked him questions like, “How did you meet Mom?” “Why did you leave her?” “What did Irene have that Mom didn’t have?” Finally, he hardly remembered either Irene or my mother, at least, not consistently. One time he did, another time, he didn’t.
For a long time he remembered that he married my mother in England after the war, that she was English, that she had brown hair and her name was Jeannette. He seemed to have forgotten everything about my mother the day he didn’t recognize her in the picture when he said, “That’s Kathy.”
Several months later, I again asked him if he remembered my mother.
“Who’s your mother?” he said.
“Jeanne,” I said (she’s been going by “Jeanne” for a long time now). This time, he said, “I remember Jeanne,” and I think he did.
I remember being burped by my dad and I have a picture of him reading to me. Who knew that he would leave and later forget my mother?
Still, nothing that he remembers or does not remember matters much to me anymore, because, to be honest, I am happy as long as he knows me and tells me he loves me. I’ll always remember how he warmed my cold hands in his, picked up my hand and kissed it. He tells me he loves me. He gives the best hugs of anyone in the world ever. And I know he did not mean to ruin my life.
My father was my hero, my knight, my glory, my prince, my idol, my god, who was there and then he was gone. I remember when we were a family and when he used to make us pancakes on Sunday morning, and then he was gone.
I remember when Daddy was probate judge, he used to talk about children at the detention home at the table when we ate together as a family, the four of us. When we were a family, he read the paper at breakfast before he went to work in the morning when we lived on
Park Lane.
But something happened.
After we moved to Seabrook, pretty soon Daddy was gone. Suddenly, there was this mysterious new lady who lived over on Parkview by some tennis courts with these two little kids. He took us over to their house to meet them.
So, what do we care about meeting these people? Surely, this is a nightmare and I will wake up and Daddy will be back home. Surely he will.
Why is Daddy taking us to see this lady? Why does he want to be with her? Do you think maybe she doesn’t make “issues” of things? He used to accuse Mom of making “issues” of things.
I could never grieve this before. I never thought I could. I thought the grief would overwhelm me. I thought I would drown in it. Or maybe I would roll like a tumble weed across the prairie right into a brush fire and be destroyed, burn and crackle like a bonfire throwing sparks in all directions. If I were allowed to grieve, I might lose control and if I lost control I might lose my mind. So I held it together as best I could. So did David. We went through this together.
As a family we were more than the sum of us as individuals. We were a whole, more than the sum of its parts and then we were parts again, but the parts were not a part of anything any more. Everything that was our world and our reality was suddenly over, and there was no instruction guide. There was no one to walk with us through this maze. It tore apart the core of my soul. It hurt and it hurt and then it hurt some more. And nobody knew how to talk about it. Everyone was involved with their own concerns.
Nobody asked us how we felt about it. Nobody asked us how we were doing. Nobody told us why it was happening. Nobody asked us for our input. Thank God at least David and I got to stay together. And we had our grandparents to show us that couples can stay together.
When I was a little girl and my Daddy was probate judge, I thought I was somebody because I was my father’s daughter. I took it for granted that I had a destiny. After the divorce, I became an angry little girl. I stayed that way for most of my life.
After Daddy left, I kept trying to prove I was somebody by accomplishing things, by being good at art, by writing stories, by doing well in school. Later, when the pain caught up with me, I tried to medicate myself with alcohol, then drugs. I tried to fill the void with art, music, poetry and men. I stayed on the move to keep myself from looking inside my life, and I stayed as far away from Topeka as I could. But finally I had to come back to the scene of the crime. My father was somebody in this town when I was a young child, and I felt that I was somebody because he was my father. When he was in a nursing home, the fact that no one other than a few family members visited him was a sad testimony to me of the fake world he occupied. But this took nothing away from the sense that I once was somebody in this town because I was his daughter.
He didn’t mean to leave us fatherless. He would never have thought of what he did as leaving us at all. In fact, he worked hard at not doing that. He lived six blocks away. He visited us three times a week, Tuesday, Friday and Sunday.
Mostly, we went over to his house. Sometimes we even went on trips with his other family. But the organism that was us was not going to be allowed to live, and in the process something inside of each of us died. Even though Daddy attempted to continue to father his children while living with another family, the losses to both my brother and me were vast. Like the loss of his guidance and protection, the absence of daily affection, the loss of provision and security. We never got those things back. The memory of us as a family will live on forever, but only as a memory that “appeared for a little time and then vanished away.”
I often wondered why people were always praying for me for God to remove what was holding me back from being used the way God wanted to use me. I finally realized what was holding me back was that I had not looked at losing Daddy. Although this event, more than any other, opened the door through which I would walk and lose my soul, I had not dealt with it. As a child, I did not have the vocabulary to deal with it, and I remained unaware of any resources that may have been available to help me deal with it. A woman from the Foursquare Gospel Church in Osage City, Kansas, who counseled with me a few times, put it this way: “You were a princess and you lost your throne.” At the time she spoke those words to me, I was not terribly receptive of them. However, I have pondered those words over the past couple of years, and I have seen that this was a pretty accurate assessment of my situation.
2011
A little over a year before he died, my father was admitted to the Alzheimer’s unit of a local nursing home. But he knew me, he told me he loved me, and that made me happy. During that year, he warmed my hands in his. Sometimes, he reached over to take my hand and kiss it.
“I love you,” he told me.
“I love you too, Daddy.”
This I know now, is a gift from God. I had missed him so much. I had missed him for most of my life.
I got to hear my Daddy say “I love you” as many times as I could get out there to where he was to see him. The time I was able to spend with him was precious.
The year he lived at Aldersgate and Homestead was the first time in my life that I had him all to myself. God knows how much I had needed that. And He knows how much I have needed to know how much He loved me. When Peggy went into an assisted living facility, she decided only to take Mitzi. Peggy had been talking about how disabled Molly was and that the vet would probably put her down. She didn’t seem disabled to me, but Peggy said she was deaf. I agonized about Molly after Peggy gave her to the vet. Then one day I got a flat tire on the way to work and I had left my cell phone at home so I could not call AAA (I have never fixed a flat in my life). I stopped at an animal hospital and asked to use their phone. There, on the counter I saw Molly’s picture and realized she was there. I thought Peggy had taken her to a different place. I told the two young women working that day that Peggy was my dad’s wife and they brought Molly out to see me. I called this a miracle and received it as a gift from God who knew how much I needed to be relieved of the worry I felt about the dog. A few days later the hospital called and told Peggy they had found a home for her.
