Bringing Penelope Home
I do not know if this is the correct forum … but this story made me cry … it is so lovely and sad at the same time
…
Angie was 35 when she, her husband, and son moved into their first home. It was red brick with a big picture window and a pasture out front where their horses could graze. It was almost a dream come true.
Almost, because Angie was dying. The lump she’d found just two years earlier had metastasized, multiple times. In the beginning doctors cut off both breasts, hoping to take the cancer with them. But the disease was stealthy, hiding somewhere inside, then popping up here and there: liver, lymph nodes, spine, brain. She was pumped full of chemo. Blasted with radiation. Time and again, surgeons opened her up, removing any fragments of the disease that they could. Then they’d stitch her back together, hoping to buy her more time. But eventually, Angie was told, there was nothing more to do.
Hospice was called. A hospital bed in Angie’s new living room allowed her to watch the horses graze from the picture window, her favorite feature of the house. Her son, just 5, would perch on the window’s deep sill, quietly building Legos and trying to process what was happening around him. And it was all happening so fast.
Horses are responsible for some of my dearest friendships, and it was horses who brought me Angie. We both volunteered for a local equine rescue. I put saddle time on the rescue horses, doing evaluation rides on new intakes and training rides to prepare horses for adoption. Angie, tech savvy and a gifted photographer with a company she named after her first horse, Sun Rae Photography, ran the rescue’s website and documented the horses’ rehabilitation journeys.
Everything about Angie was big: her personality, her laugh, her heart, and even her body, ballooned by steroids. She swore like a sailor but baby-talked her horses. She rarely brooded about her illness. Instead, she’d say, “I’ll be crapping myself all morning from the *bleeping* chemo, but let’s get lunch then go take some pics of Coyote for the website!”
More at:
https://www.chronofhorse.com/article/bringing-penelope-home/
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