I've been thinking a lot of Cami recently, partly because Nic has suggested that perhaps it would be good to get another puppy - something I am in no way, shape or form ready for given I can barely look at pictures without crying. And partly because we're going to the same (poultry) shows and auctions I took her to last year as a little baby and having to tell everyone why she's not here. I'm glad people remember her and I do enjoy sharing the funny little things they remembered about her but it opened it up again and along with remembering comes the guilt and hurt.

Then yesterday Laurent came down with some sort of virus and spiked a fever. He's been running temps between 38.5 and 40C last night and through today. He swings from cooperative to wailing like a lost soul and nothing is right in his world. He hurts, food tastes bad, his stomach is yucky, his feet are cold, the light is bright and everything is too loud. While I was making breakfast this morning, he looked around and asked where Cami was between mouthfuls of cornflakes and started telling me about an adventure he'd had with her last night not seeming to remember she has died. The adventure was totally made up - he and Cami had gone hunting for honey and climbed a tree to get it with balloons and bees a la Winnie The Poo and Christopher Robin - obviously something he'd dreamed of but it started a whole slew of questions.

Probably a dozen times today he's asked where she is. I try to be honest with him instead of hiding the truth or using sugarcoated euphemisms, so we tell him that someone in a car ran over Cami and Cami's body was too broke for her to live in anymore so she died. Death is what happens when your body is too sick or too broke to be fixed anymore and you can't keep living in it. It's about the simplest way I could think of to explain what happens and he seems very at ease with the ideas of some owwies being too bad to fix and of death meaning you leave your body.

He recounts that she had a bad ouchie from the car, that she was laying on the porch and he had to be careful only to touch her on her head and not on her ouchies. (When we found her I had to keep him from trying to hug her better.) We put her on the blanket and took her to the car and mummy was very upset. We went to see the doctors at the vets and they gave her "IB" (an IV) to make her feel better. She was on the table (at the vets) and he pulled up the blanket to keep her warm. We had to put her in the cage on the blankets to be warm. The vets band aids (solution to all injuries in the world according to 3 year olds) weren't good enough to fix her. Cami was too broke for the doctor to fix and her body died. Over and over and over he keeps asking where she is and then remembering and recounting it all through his fever. Hopie doesn't have owwies though. She wants bikkies. Only Cami got bad owwies. Veri and Sisi don't have owwies either. They like to play tennis ball still. But Cami had bad owwies the doctor couldn't fix and died. Over and over.