Samwise at Nine (and Atticus & Emily, too)

Virginia Moore, Hemingway, Norman Rockwell, and Dorothy Parker

He came into my life when I was told I was dying.

After five weeks in Portland's Maine Med, my three teams of doctors were astonished I was able to walk out, albeit slowly and unsteadily. But there I was, with my failed heart, a pair of failed kidneys, several blood clots, pneumonia, anemia, internal bleeding, lung disease, and other assorted maladies,* being driven back to Jackson with a little dog on my lap. (*Almost as an afterthought, one day, a doctor said, "Are you aware you also had a stroke?")

I was returning home to my dear friend, Atticus, who had also been ill. We'd never been away from each other, but when we needed each other the most, I was hooked up to a dialysis tube, and he was being shuttled around from a friend to his friends.