Hard Times

Black Back as a kitten

Back to the 30-day blogging challenge.

Today's prompt is: "What is the hardest thing you have ever experienced."

Boy, that's a tough one (no pun intended).

My grandmother dying was hard (my mother's mother). We were pretty close. Probably the hardest thing I've every gone through is very personal and I'm not going to talk about that.

The man who said, "Keep the cat outdoors."

The hardest thing recently was when my son's cat, Black Back, died back in September. My son was in the Seattle area helping his older brother move into an apartment and his cat was missing all that day (we saw her the day before). She was an outdoor cat (at my insistence because I'm allergic to cats; but not as allergic as I used to be before allergy shots). In the evening, the neighbors found her dead in their yard and came over and told me (I was the only one home at the time). So I had to call my son and tell him his cat, that'd he'd had for two months, was dead. Because he was friends with Black Back's mother's owners, he'd known her since she was a very small kitten. And even so, everyone in the family loved that kitty. But telling him his cat was dead was that hardest thing I've had to do recently. And she was such a pretty kitty. She was all black. And she had a very mellow personality. She loved to be held. I miss her.

Basic training in the Army was one of the hardest things I've ever done. And that lasted 8 weeks (actually, longer, because you waste at least a week processing in, and then they kept us there after we graduated for two weeks because the next training assignment wasn't ready for us).

One of the harder things was watching my mother-in-law die. I won't go into detail. As Forrest Gump says: "That's all I have to say about that."

And this is the 76th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the U.S. into World War II. And I am sure people who fought in that conflict had much harder experiences than I will ever have.