Dear Blog Friends-
I am going to begin to blog about my experiences over the past days/weeks/months and even years which eventually brought me very, very close to ending my mortality. Some of it, okay all of it, is very personal. The reason I am blogging about it is because this is my journal and this is me... not the definition of me... but a part of me...

Last week of August 2010:
Tonight, Gunner and I took a walk after dark past that building. Of course, we were on the other side of the four lane road, and so I could feel some separation. I kept looking over at it... thinking that there was something over there that belonged to me. I just could not stop thinking that I needed to go over there and get whatever it was that was mine. But, I could not figure out what it was. In the end, I realized that there was nothing there that I could retrieve. Whatever was there of mine was not tangible. It was gone. Forever.

The night that I was at the hospital, an officer came in and tried to talk to me. I didn't want to talk to him.. or anyone for that matter. I kept asking them to just let me go home and finish what I started. The officer told me that I didn't have to talk to him, then, but that he had something that he wanted me to have.



It was a felt heart, that fits in my pocket, or my purse. He said, "Heidi, he took a lot away from you tonight, almost everything, but he didn't take your heart. You still have your heart."

He was right. As I have clung to that little piece of heart-shaped fabric since that day over two weeks ago, I have heard his voice in my head telling me that I still have my heart. And I do...