Alki Fritz, Dec. 25, 2001 – Nov. 17, 2014.

His true soul name was Heartsong, but he thought it too froo-froo for his daily name, especially when his favorite puppy thing was to tuck his head, somersault on top of gull poop, and wiggle it in. So I chose a daily name, and it didn’t stick, but he insisted I choose for him.

Hmm, okay, what was the thing I most loved? Of course, Alki Beach, our neighborhood in Seattle. That’s how my sweet boy became Alki. It was the first of many things I learned about love from the king of doggie soccer and chin rubs who loved his family, kids, everyone (except bad guys with guns on TV).

I share this because part of my chosen work as an intuitive is to give witness to love in all its forms, from birth to the dying process and beyond. I tried all year to save my boy, and in the end all I could do was hold him in my arms as his beautiful heart failed. Our thanks to all who offered us comfort, support, much-needed help, and friendship during this dark, painful year—you confirmed, again, that love is in the details. Right now, as you read this, please stop to celebrate those you have loved and lost, and hug those still here.

Our time together is short, but love is eternal. My little Heartsong could tell you that. As Alki rests now in my dad’s arms at his Way Station for Dead Things on the Other Side, I smile as he is once again strong, healthy, and running free. Grief runs deep, as it should: it means you loved and were loved, no matter what. Peace. With thanks, Robyn and Grace the Cat.

© 2015 Robyn M Fritz

In loving memory: Alki Fritz, Dec. 25, 2001 – Nov. 17, 2014

Do you ever wonder why you bother? Not just to get up, but to stay up when you know that mostly what you’ll get is hurt?

I’ve wondered that lately. Not because I doubt my work, although it’s hard sometimes. Not because I doubt myself, because we all do a little and most of us manage to get over ourselves while getting in a few laughs at our insecurities.

No, the bigger question is why we bother to love, because love hurts. Sure, we bother because we all matter, regardless of what we do to earn a living or to learn or have fun, it all has one purpose: we are all called to love, no matter what. Even when it hurts. And it hurts at our house right now.

I appreciate the patience of all my subscribers who have stuck with me in a hard, painful year as we dealt with a horrific attack that left me and my dog Alki both injured. I had to re-direct my business to mostly writing, because going out with Fallon wasn’t possible when I couldn’t use my hands. I suffered from PTSD, from the horror and from my inability to save either of us that night. Healing is slow and painful, but I’ve loved the writing and the support I’ve had from so many people has kept us going. I love what I do.

Some of you also know that during the incident that injured us Alki’s heart “went bad.” By March he was on heart meds, by June he was on all he could take, and for the last month I worked to prepare him, and myself, and Grace the Cat for his death. My sunny little boy who loved everyone he ever met, including his precocious sister, Grace the Cat, was always the sweet epitome of his breed. On Monday, November 17, I held my sweet boy in my arms as his beautiful loving heart failed.

I met Alki long before he was born. In those days 13 years ago I was just understanding how energy worked, and I literally experienced pregnancy with his mom. Three weeks after he was born I learned why when I tucked him under my chin and a bolt of knowing hit me like lightning: he was my son, another reincarnation of my beloved English cocker Maggie and Cavalier Murphy, the puppy whose true soul name was Heartsong (too fussy for everyday, so after several tries we landed on Alki).

For almost 13 years he was glued to my side, the velcro Cavalier (the boys are like that). And now he’s gone.

Make no mistake, I am angry and bitter that he had his life cut short by violence. I’m human after all. I also know enough to let that go, because you can’t change what happens to you and your loved ones, you can only choose how you’ll respond. My response is to remind myself that we come into the world to learn to love, and in the end it is only love that matters. Above all, I am grateful that such an extraordinary soul chose to live his life with me.

Alki taught me a lot about love. He was incredibly patient with my inability to love him at first, even knowing who he was. He was rambunctious, demanding, and getting Murphy’s attention (yes I was jealous). He was all happy dog, and I finally realized I wasn’t just being a jerk, I wasn’t seeing the love he kept freely offering me. When I did I was rightly ashamed of myself, and made sure that he knew every single day how much I loved him, how much he mattered. Even now, as he rests at my dad’s Way Station for Dead Things on the Other Side, as he gleefully races through the mountain meadow, healthy and vibrant like he hasn’t been all year.

I used to think Alki wasn’t all there mentally. Certainly he didn’t possess the innate intelligence that Murphy had, but then he didn’t need it. Alki has always been pure chaotic experience, a live in the moment, roll-in-gull-poop boy, the secret energy master who surprised me one day with his raw power, well beyond any energy system we humans know. The dragons were here in his last weeks, because he is their ambassador, a job he and I inherited together at Murphy’s death. And his previous incarnations, Maggie the English cocker and Murphy the Cavalier were here, too, supporting all of us.

I’m sharing this rambling note with you so you know that darkness comes to all of us, no matter how much we love, because in choosing to incarnate here we choose to experience organic life, and that means it will eventually end. But darkness doesn’t have to destroy us: we can choose how we meet it. Have you ever felt grief, worry, doubt, confusion, despair? Of course you have, because you are here. You are not alone. We all have something we have to deal with, like it or not, because we all bothered to love. It matters.

On Monday, November 10 on my radio show at News for the Soul. com I suddenly found myself talking about Alki and death and how we get through it, because I know he was dying. You can find it in the archives. The point is that love matters and it hurts, and that’s a good thing. Grief is good: it reminds us that we were lucky enough to love and be loved.

Part of me has been grieving the loss of Alki all year, because he couldn’t run or play, and I knew his heart was failing. If you are grieving, my heart goes out to you. Remember the good times, hang on to them. I have told Alki that he is always welcome to come back, although I’m quite certain he will choose a household with a lot of land to run on, because that’s the one thing he missed with me, and the one thing he turned down to be with me. Love is a miracle, isn’t it?

And Thanksgiving is the time we celebrate it. It’s my favorite holiday, and this year, like all others, I will stop and remember those I’ve loved and lost, those I’m lucky to still have with me, and the world for making a place for all of us in it. I will give thanks for my clients, who are brave enough to share their journey with me and Fallon, our classes, and their beautiful hearts brimming with love. And I will be grateful that in this difficult year I embraced the darkness and claimed, now and always, love.

I was privileged that my little Heartsong chose me as his partner in his journey. I hope that all of you are lucky enough to love and be loved like that, knowing that embracing love also means embracing the darkness.

Love matters. You matter. Never forget it. Never stop saying it. You don’t know how long you’ll have with those you love, only that it will never be long enough.

Peace.

© 2014 Robyn M Fritz

This is my Grace the Cat, not the missing cat.

Animal communicators can help you find your lost animals, but you have to do your share as well. Don’t hesitate! Get your support team up and running. Here’s how.

The minute you know your cat is missing, start looking, indoors or out, depending upon what you know about the circumstances involved. Explore the nooks and crannies, get the kids and the neighbors to help, even rent a trap if possible, especially if night is quickly approaching (night time holds all sorts of terrors and legitimate threats to lost cats, including predators). You can find details on how to search for missing pets at the excellent website Missing Pet Partnership.

Working with an animal communicator can also help. A successful case closed today proves my point.

One of my intuitive jobs is animal communication. I was contacted Friday night, Halloween, about a cat that had gone missing in L.A. that afternoon. I left a return phone message late at night, and talked with the owner on Saturday morning. I got the information I needed to connect with the cat, and set the owner the task of hunting for her, from getting a cat trap to putting up posters and rounding up the neighborhood. We communicated several times on Saturday. The best information I could give her was that the cat was trapped in the dark, could not get out, and was close by. The entire neighborhood helped, but no cat.

Early Sunday morning I emailed the owner: I kept getting an image of a car in a dark garage, and was pretty sure, again, that the cat was trapped in a neighbor’s garage.

Intent on helping, I called a Seattle friend, Karen Cleveland, who is herself a professional animal communicator. I gave her the basic information, and she went off to contact the cat. When she called me back, she had the same information I did, as well as a direction, southwest or southeast, of the house. We were both convinced a garage was involved.

As we were talking, the cat’s owner called. I put Karen on hold to get the owner’s update.

The cat was found! How? The owner had followed my advice earlier and contacted all the neighbors again about their cars and garages, and one neighbor emailed that she’d found evidence of a cat in her car inside the garage. I had insisted she go back to the garage and look herself, because cats hide, and would respond better if she were calling. Sure enough, she went back, peeked through the garage windows, and there was her cat!

Why did this work? Two reasons. First, with animal communication, we were able to narrow the search and to give the owner support to keep looking and not give up. Second, and even more important, the owner was not willing to give up the search, and kept at it, posting signs, combing the neighborhood, enlisting help, and getting courage by being supported by me (and, by extension, Karen).

Turns out the owner was talking to the homeowner involved on Saturday; the garage door was open and she was calling her cat, but did not see her. Was the cat in the car at that point? We’ll never know all the answers, but we do know this: because the owner refused to quit, she found her cat.

The moral of the story? Don’t give up if your cat is lost … or your dog or any other animal. Animal communicators can help, but you need to do the legwork. These cases don’t always end happily, but when they do, it’s because everybody pulled together.

I’m pretty thrilled this worked out, and that Karen and I were getting the same information, with slight variations that helped us fill in the details. By that time the cat had been found, but her input was vital. I’ll be looking forward to working with her in the future—teamwork!

Have you ever used an animal communicator to find a lost animal? Tell us the story here in the comments.

© 2014 Robyn M Fritz

This spring I was privileged to attend the death of a dear friend’s beloved cat, Sachi, who had terminal cancer and had reached the end of what she could tolerate. My friend, Reiki master and massage therapist Mary Van de Ven, had done everything possible to help Sachi, but the cancer was relentless.

Sachi was a stray kitten who showed up at my friend’s Hawaiian home on Thanksgiving Day in 2002, a few months after Mary’s previous cat died, and moved with her to Seattle in 2006. Mary and I met in Rose De Dan’s Reiki class series in the spring of 2007 (Wild Reiki and Shamanic Healing), so we’ve been close friends a long time. Mary knows my work very well, and was comforted at the thought of me attending the euthanasia and being Sachi’s advocate, to tell her what was happening, and to help her communicate with Mary at the end.

My Animal Communication Work

For those of you who are wondering, my animal communication work focuses on the human-animal bond. While I help locate lost animals and examine medical issues (but only if the information I provide is taken to a veterinarian), my focus is deepening our connection with our animal families, including family harmony and the tough issues involved in re-homing animals and dying. (For more on how to handle end-of-life issues with your animals, see my article, “How the Human-Animal Bond Meets, and Survives, Death.) That means my work is as practical as it is mystical: my goal is that multi-species animals prosper together, so that each soul has its best chance of achieving soul growth in its body’s lifetime. I work with individual clients and I teach animal communication as a bonding process for families.

Vet Clinics and Euthanized Animals

The euthanasia was going to take place at the vet’s office, a place where Mary and her animals felt comfortable and were warmly treated. I said goodbye to my beloved Murphy at the vet’s office, and I know how generous and kind they are to families and animals who face death together. But there can sometimes be problems.

Because I can and do talk with anything (chairs, cars, mountains), I usually walk around heavily shielded, or I’d never get anything done. So I had been surprised some weeks before when I had Alki at his vet and my sweet boy completely freaked out: he wanted nothing to do with his vet when he had always loved him and willingly cuddled. Instead, Alki sat rigidly beside me, eyes wide in horror, or raced around the room, crying. We finally moved to a different exam room, and Alki calmed down.

At first I thought it was that Alki and I had both seen a lot of our respective doctors since we were attacked by the neighbor’s dog in January, but it was more than that. When a friend and I checked in, we discovered that a dog that had recently been euthanized at the clinic was screaming at Alki: “Run for it, they kill you here!”

So I could hardly blame Alki for feeling terrified. When my friend and I checked with the dog, we discovered that his people had been with him when he died, and they were crying. That assured me that the euthanasia was necessary to prevent suffering from a condition that could not be resolved. Once I explained it to the dog, he promptly moved on to his afterlife, greeted by my dad, Ray, who runs a Way Station for Dead Things on the Other Side. (For a more detailed account, see my article, “What To Do When Your Vet Is Haunted.”)

I also mentioned it to my vet, suggesting that they institute a procedure to explain to the animals what was happening, and so prevent the trauma we had accidentally witnessed.

Because I walk around heavily shielded, and I’m focused on my kids or on clients’ kids at the vet, I hadn’t thought much about the stuck dead at veterinary clinics (which is not an excuse, only an explanation). The dead get stuck and don’t move on to their afterlives for a number of reasons, but in the case of euthanized animals, it’s usually because they are confused about what’s happening and weren’t told it was coming, or they didn’t want to die and wouldn’t accept it.

The problem is, this is happening at every vet clinic that euthanizes animals or deals with their dead bodies. So the night before I was to be at the vet clinic with Mary and Sachi, I sat down to look at the clinic with my dad, Ray. We saw a steady stream of cats, dogs, gerbils (lots of gerbils) … meaning the clinic had been in business a long time, and a lot of deceased animals were stuck. Now, this isn’t anyone’s fault: it’s not like people intend for the animals to be confused and get stuck. Instead, they just don’t always stop to think that, like us, animals have souls and can think for themselves, and we don’t always think through what that means, and act on what we learn. It’s even harder when we’re traumatized ourselves as we face the loss of a beloved animal.

Sachi … and Harold

The upshot of this session with my dad was that I agreed to get to the clinic early and unobtrusively help the stuck dead move on to my dad, and then he would stand by for Sachi. Yes, of course, we could have done it that night, but I was going to be in the space, and I wanted to honor the animals by actually being present with them as they moved on.

Oh, the best laid plans. The next morning it was pouring down rain and I got lost. As I was driving, my dad suddenly popped in.

“I’ve asked my friend, Harold, to take all the other animals, so all I will do is take care of Sachi,” he explained.

I was surprised, but I wasn’t going to tell my dad how to do his job. He had figured it all out, so I simply agreed. Then Harold started talking to me, and would not shut up. Interestingly, I could clearly see him as he talked, which doesn’t always happen (I will know who I am talking with, but they aren’t usually as vividly present as Harold was).

Harold was still talking when I went into the clinic. He made it clear that he was somehow connected to the clinic, and that he wanted that acknowledged, so after I greeted Mary and her sister and Sachi, I asked the vet technician working with them if someone in the clinic was connected to a deceased man named Harold. She didn’t know of anyone, and left the room, saying, “Oh, I wish one of my dead would ask for me.”

I figured that was the end of that, and focused on Mary and Sachi. I was honored to help them say goodbye to each other, and to transmit loving messages from Sachi to Mary as we waited for the vet. This is always sacred time, and it is such a blessing to share it with families.

Then the vet came in, and I immediately realized that my dad had set me up. The vet was the clinic owner, and he was the spitting image of Harold, who was once again eagerly chatting away, and refusing to be ignored.

“Are you Harold’s son or nephew?” I asked the vet.

He smiled shyly and said the vet tech had told him what I had said. Harold was his dad, and, as Harold had insisted, he had always been interested in animals but had never worked at the clinic and was not a vet. I explained to the vet that Harold ran a way station like my father did, and that he was volunteering to be present at the death of every animal coming into the clinic, to ensure that they got safely to a way station. I also suggested that he establish a practice that each vet explain to every animal what was going to happen and why, and if the families weren’t open to that, they could do it silently in their heads, because the animals would hear, and Harold would be there.

He was thrilled that his deceased father was eager to assist him, and readily agreed. Yes! One vet clinic out of how many? But one that was going to see to it that deceased animals had an escort to their afterlives. That sneaky Harold, and my far-seeing dad, who, unlike many way station managers, can see energy lines between the living and the dead. Meaning that when he looked at the clinic with me the night before, my dad saw the connection between Harold and the clinic, and set about connecting father and son in service to the animals. Awesome, isn’t it?

And, yes, Sachi had a beautiful sendoff, and died peacefully in Mary’s arms. Sachi quickly and safely transitioned; my dad smiled at us as he held her in his arms. Later, I told Mary that she was streaking around the Way Station, enjoying the mountain scenery and the other animals who visited there or worked with my dad.

We celebrated Sachi’s life at a local restaurant with Mary’s sisters and a picture of Sachi on the table with us.

How to Deal with a Sick and Dying Animal

The point of the story? Remember to tell your animal companions what is going on, whether they are sick or dying. Sometimes animals who are very sick or in a lot of pain panic, or get worn out by the pain, and tell me they want to die: this is your clue as their companion that they need comfort and support, and possibly additional medical attention. Too often people, especially energy healers and intuitives, think of their animals as teachers and healers, or sponges to their human’s worries and ills, so dismiss anything else by insisting their animals ‘are mirroring their feelings.’ This is a disservice to the animals and to you: they have real fears and concerns, real joys they want and need to share with you. Be open to them and listen; your caring response and support could be all they need to hang in there and recover and thrive again, much quicker than they can do when their concerns are being ignored. Think about it: when you’re sick or hurt and don’t know what’s wrong, or the extent of the damage, you relax and recover faster when your care team keeps you informed and attends to your concerns. Your animals deserve that level of support from you, and you deserve it as well. Your entire family will feel better.

My friend, Mary, was totally tuned in to Sachi, and they were able to share her final weeks together peacefully, and to say goodbye tearfully but confidentally, knowing that Sachi was aware that everything that could be done for her was done, and that she both understood and greeted her death as bravely and joyfully as any human who is well prepared. Sachi was ready, and so was Mary—as ready as any loving pair who have to separate. It isn’t easy, but it’s possible.

Questions about animal communication or my upcoming animal communication class? Please contact me.

© 2014 Robyn M Fritz