biscuit's space | The blog of photographer Katherine Carver

Oct 28

Our Beautiful Victory

Our Beautiful Victory,

We cannot thank you enough for all the unconditional love, joy, light, and loyal companionship you brought to our lives. You are my first “fur daughter,” and you were truly ensconced in every aspect of our lives. You opened my heart more than I could have ever envisioned. We believe Biscuit sent you to us, a few months after his passing. Your presence in our lives has truly been a gift. We never took a day with you for granted. With tears welling up, I inherently knew someday your body would no longer be here; however, on the evening of October 6, when you took your last breaths, all three of us held your fragile body with tears streaming down our faces. It felt sudden and surreal, because we never wanted you to leave us. We know you did not want to leave us either, but your body would not allow you to stay in your physical form. The pain of losing you is tremendous. I do not have words to describe how my whole body aches and longs for you. Even with this indescribable pain, we would never relinquish our collective pain and grief if it meant foregoing the gifts of your unconditional love, joy, light, companionship, and protection you gave to me and our little family.

You have been only gone for three weeks, but it feels like an eternity. You have been a member of our family for 12 years, and it was not enough time with you. We are lost without you. We find ourselves looking for you each morning to take you out for morning potty, only to realize you are not physically here. During the night, I put my hand above my head to rub your body, where you slept against the headboard, only to remember you are not there. We look for you during each meal. You were always right there with us, nudging tirelessly for food. You were always so persistent—putting your entire snout on our legs while you looked up at us with your beautiful, kind, warm, brown eyes for another treat! I also look for you throughout the day, thinking it is time to take you out for potty. But I realize you are not here and the permanency of losing you sinks in. I truly miss giving you belly rubs and armpit rubs as part of your nightly “tuck in.” I can almost close my eyes and envision giving you a belly rub, my hands feeling your tummy and fur. You relaxed your entire body, and looked at me with those soulful brown eyes and smiled. We miss taking you out to dinner at our favorite restaurants and to Bruster’s for ice cream, one of your absolute favorite places! I miss our morning walks, and taking you for daily walks in your pet rover. Oh, how you loved the yellow pet rover that Alex picked out for you! I can close my eyes and see the sun shining down on you while your golden fur blew in the wind. You always loved the fresh air. When we opened up the house, you frequently sat near a window, taking it all in. Most of all, I truly miss your companionship, laying by me while I worked. We miss everything about you.

I am forever grateful for all of your companionship. You helped me through so many ups and downs, and everything in between, throughout the 12 years we spent together—in fact, you have been with us for over half the time your Daddy and I have been together. You helped get me through a complicated process to start our family, which led to Alex! You always hopped into bed with me whenever I felt sick or exhausted, for which I am very grateful. In fact, your Daddy gave you the nick-name: “Canine Compassionate Caregiver.” You lived up to this title in every way. I never felt alone with you by my side; you provided me with endless comfort and love. You were at the hospital the morning after Alex was born; it was so special and memorable. You intuitively knew when one of us did not feel well. In fact, I vividly remember you literally licking the mucus off Alex’s nose and face when she was sick as a baby. Fortunately, I have videos of this to share with Alex. We loved going on our family vacations with you! You loved the beach—I can close my eyes and see you walking effortlessly on the beach with your big, beautiful smile. We loved celebrating your birthdays together each fall. You truly loved eating an unfrosted vanilla cupcake, a treat on your birthday, along with custom cakes with your likeness! You were always so cooperative for photos, for which I am very thankful. We believe you know how important you are to each one of us. I am also very grateful for you literally being by my side as I created ABANDONED: Chronicling the Journeys of Once-Forsaken Dogs. I could not have finished this long-term project without you. Whenever I felt doubt, fear, or frustration, you inspired me to keep going, knowing the book could help other dogs like you and Biscuit. I am forever grateful you were here when ABANDONED was released. I will never forget being on CBS Mornings with you, a highlight we will forever share together! I will always remember you walking through the CBS Mornings’ studio with such confidence and grace. I will also always savor the memory of you walking so proudly in Central Park. You were so incredibly happy—you were beaming with radiance!

Your Daddy loves you to the moon and back. He would have done anything for you. He especially loved laying on the sofa, while you laid on his chest and he petted and talked to you! He said your beautiful guard furs and your smile are firmly imprinted in his heart and mind. Your Daddy always said you had the last laugh! You arrived at the Michigan Sheltie Rescue from a hoarding house in Western Michigan. You were emaciated and scared after living in such horrible conditions. With time, patience, and love, you blossomed into a beautiful, confident, loving little sheltie girl, who enjoyed a high standard of living! It is hard to imagine another sheltie from that hoarding house had a life as good as yours! So, hopefully, you are truly having the last laugh!

Your sister, Alex, loves you so very much. You taught her so much about love and kindness just by being yourself. Alex cares deeply for animals. She is very kind to and ardently aware of animals because of you. She will never, ever forget you, and we talk together about you daily. Alex loves you dearly. She especially loved when you licked her face, a sign of your steadfast affection. She loved how you waited in her room each evening to read together and do her “tuck in.” She loved taking you for ice cream and sharing a vanilla ice cream cone! We are lucky to have photos and videos we can look at together. These provide a small measure of comfort. You are her “big fur sister” whom she has known since birth. This is such a huge, painful loss for all of us, especially for Alex. We think about you all the time, and we know that you will live forever in our hearts. We wish you were still here.

I want to thank for teaching me so many things. Most importantly, you continue to teach me so much about myself. You are truly a gift to our entire family. We made an altar with your ashes, photos, and memorabilia, so Alex has a place to be with you. The Chaplain from Alex’s school recently visited the house to offer prayers and blessings in your honor. Alex will miss you at Halloween this year; it will be her first Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas without you, which is difficult to fathom. We know you are always with us, but wish you could be here physically—it is just not the same without you here. We are presently working on other ways to help commemorate your life and contributions to our family.

You are a magnificent being, a gift to our family, and you will forever be our “beau, beau chien,” a fitting nick-name coined when you visited Quebec on several occasions. I am so incredibly grateful for our time together. You are my teacher. You continue to teach me about myself, including how to be a better human. We are all honored to have been your family. Your photographs will always be proudly displayed in our home. Your image will forever appear in ABANDONED. Your memory will never leave our hearts. Your legacy will live on and we know you, like Biscuit, will send us another rescue sheltie who needs us as much as we need him or her. Thank you for all of the joy, love, light, and loyal companionship you brought to each one of us. You are truly a wonderful gift and blessing. We know that we will see each other again someday, and we know that you are always with us. We miss you deeply. You were always there for each one of us. We were always enveloped in your love; and each day with you was truly a gift.

“There is a cycle of love and death that shapes the lives of those who choose to travel in the company of animals. It is a cycle unlike any other. To those who have never lived through its turnings or walked its rocky path, our willingness to give our hearts with full knowledge they will be broken seems incomprehensible. Only we know how small a price we pay for what we receive; our grief, no matter how powerful it may be, is an insufficient measure of the joy we have been given.” —Suzanne Clothier

Here is the last video of our girls together.

Oct 3

Snapshot: Summer Vacation

This blog post is a few months late! There has been so much going on as of late, and, consequently, I have been quite behind with editing our family photographs. I hope to eventually catch up on my editing of our family images.

This past August, we took our sixth trip, with our girls, to Rehoboth Beach and Dewey Beach. Doug, fortunately, found another beach house to rent that would allow a small child and a furry family member! We were not far from both beaches! Alex loved the ocean and she even found little friends to play with on the beach, as she is so outgoing! She also enjoyed taking her boogie board out into the ocean with Doug! Alex absolutely loved Funland! Victory had a great time as well, she absolutely loved going to dinner and walking on the beach in the evenings, so much so, she did not want to leave the beach when it came time to leave!

Victory has been to Dewey Beach several times before. Victory enjoyed walks with Alex on the beach, in the evenings, shown below in the brief video! It was so sweet! We were also very fortunate for good weather on our trip.

Here is a video of our girls at the beach together!

Sep 26

Rituals: Georgia O’Keeffe

I am fascinated by the rituals of artists. It is very interesting to me to see how artists crafted and designed their life encompassing their passion, their art. This is not an easy feat. I love Georgia O’Keefee’s work and became interested and curious in how curated her days, while still making her art.

“I like to get up when the dawn comes,” O’Keeffe told an interviewer in 1966. “The dogs start talking to me and I like to make a fire and maybe some tea and then sit in bed and watch the sum come up. The morning is the best time, there aer no people around. My pleasant disposition like the world with nobody in it.” Living in the New Mexico desert, O’Keeffe had no issue finding the solitude she craved. Most early mornings she took a half hour morning walk. Then, breakfast at 7:00 a.m., prepared by her cook. If she was painting, O’Keeffe would then work in her studio for the rest of the day, breaking around noon for lunch. If she was not painting, she would work in the garden, do house work, answer letters, and receive visitors. According to O’Keeffe, painting days were the best:

On the other days one is hurrying through the other things once imagines one has to do to keep one’s life going. You get the garden planted. You get the roof fixed. You take the dog to the vet. You spend a day with a friend. . . . You may even enjoy doing such things. . . . But always you are hurrying through these things with a certain amount of aggravation so that you can get at the paintings again because that is the high spot–in a way it is what you do all the other things for. . . . The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that make one’s life.

O’Keefe’s dinner typically took place at 4:30 in the afternoon–she ate early in order to leave plenty of time for an evening drive through her beloved countryside. “When I think of death,” she once said, “I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore.”

Sep 17

Tangibly Commemorating Your Child’s Artwork

Over the summer, I photographed all of Alex’s first grade artwork and made a book for her containing images of her art. Alex made many art pieces at school, and she loves that I have been making her books of her art for the past several years! It is a great way to help encourage Alex to continue to make her art and to continue to be creative. I made a 70 page book of all of her first grade artwork, approximately 100 pieces of her artwork, via OnceUpon, and I selected the matte paper option. (A sampling is shown below.) The book turned out well, it is simple in design, and not as expensive to print as compared to other places where you can make books.

The best part is—I printed one of these books for Alex, and she loves looking at her art via this book, while simultaneously encouraging her to keep making her beautiful art—she is incredibly creative! The arts are really important, and we hope to keep fostering this love within Alex. I hope to continue to make yearly books of her artwork as a way of preserving her artworks! Here are Alex’s previous artwork books, which you can view here, here, and here. I am still making our family yearbooks, and I am a trying to catch up on the editing of our family photographs—these books are so meaningful to have and to share with your family!

Addionally, Alex recently designed and created a shirt for a school event, and she did such a fantastic job—she is so creative and she comes up with the most unique ideas!

Sep 12

21 Years Together

Yesterday, on September 11, we celebrated 21 years together from our very first date, and I can remember it like it was yesterday — dinner and a play, Uncle Vanya. Life has been so hectic; yesterday, we divided and conquered — one of us went swim practice with Alex, and one attended the back to school night! Most of all, I cannot believe over two decades have already passed — the time has flown in so many ways. We were so young, and we had so much more “free time” on our hands in those days, but I would not trade anything for our little family. I actually had to go digging through our actual physical photo albums from our dating days, and this image, below, is from when we saw a play together at the Kennedy Center!

Oh how life has changed, but remained the same in so many ways! With everything going in with the world, I feel so thankful for our marriage, grateful for our little family, and the life we have made together. I am especially grateful for Doug, he is my rock, my everything — we have endured so many unexpected twists and turns in life, and we’ve always figured things out, together. Alex absolutely adores her Daddy, along with Victory! In fact, each night, Victory, without fail, gives Doug an entire face washing, including his ears, hitting every nook and cranny, as he falls asleep — it is so endearing! I feel so lucky!

“To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.” –Mark Twain

Aug 22

ABANDONED: International Photography Awards

My first book, ABANDONED: Chronicling the Journeys of Once-Forsaken Dogs, earlier this week, received an International Photography Award, Second Place, in the Professional Book, Other category! You can view ABANDONED on the International Photography Award site here.

Additionally, I am donating a portion of my royalties, earned from the sales of this book, to the SPCA International, helping dogs in need around the globe. You can read more here and here.

And, if you have not ordered your copy of ABANDONED, I hope you will consider ordering ABANDONED today!

Aug 18

Gone Fishing . . .

I hope that your summer is going well! It has been a really busy summer here! We recently finished up the summer swim team, which went really well! Victory is healing well from her recent surgery, which we are very grateful.

We just returned form our vacation, Doug is in Norway for work, and I am taking a break from the blog for several weeks to soak up the remaining summer days together; and to just be. Whether you are a recent reader or have been following the blog for awhile, I am honored you take time to read the blog. I am truly grateful.

Meanwhile, if you are in a blog-reading mood, you are warmly invited to visit the archives — the links are shown below.

Dog Related posts

Dog Rescue posts

‘Dog-Centric’ Artists Interviews

For Artists posts

Photography posts

Personal posts

Victory Related posts

Aug 6

Anne Truitt — Parallels of the Artist and Parent

Anne Truitt in Daybook: A Journal of an Artist, shares a lifetime of artistic and parenting experience. Truitt, a widely recognized sculptor, successfully weaved her family life into this artistic practice, exploring how the two could feed creatively and intuitively into one another. At the peak of her career, Truitt raised three daughters, and it was not always easy, but she proved it was certainly possible. For Truitt, the ultimate sacrifice was shutting out the external world and making time for what she called an “inside life,” that of her intimate family circle, as much as her inner world of thought.

Truitt traces her creative roots to an encounter with a single painting at the same Picasso retrospective. Truitt writes:

“I had no idea at all that I would become an artist. It was in one of those deflections that sometimes subtly predict the course of a life that I sought out, just for pleasure, the Museum of Modern Art.

On entering, I turned left and up the stairs straight into Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Shocked, my eyes clamped on it. I focused on the three towering women gazing out at me with the eyes of basilisks — their breath would be fatal — and then took in the remote shadowed faces of their companions. Suddenly I understood that I knew very little of what it is to be female. Even less of art. I had not felt its naked power before, its power to shatter the appearance of things so as to reveal behind them another order. When in 1949 I began to study art, I more or less consciously looked for what I had found in Les Demoiselles: shock, an understanding deeper than my own of what it is to be human, and a mysterious revelation of a radiant order.“

Truitt, who was trained as a psychologist before she became an artist saw the two strands of her life, as mother and artist, to be intrinsically linked:

“People sometimes ask me if I feel as if my sculptures were my children. I do not. The love I feel for my children is unique in my experience. Nothing is comparable. But it occurs to me this morning that they too are transformations of secret, silent resources similar to those out of which [my] sculptures emerged.“

Truitt also revisits the subject of parenting and how it illuminates one’s creative autonomy:

“I noticed that when my children reached the age of about twelve, the balance of power shifted from me to them. I have sometimes felt myself in the quandary of a chicken who has hatched duck eggs: my children took to the water, I remained on the riverbank. But I cherish my own independence too much to begrudge them theirs. I do better on the bank cheering them on. If I keep a respectful distance, they welcome me into their lives almost as wholeheartedly as I welcomed them into mine when they were born. “Almost” because even the most affectionate adult children maintain with their parents a healthy reservation that marks the boundary of their autonomy.

I am more impressed by what my children have taught me than by what I may have taught them. The physical purpose of reproduction is, obviously, the continuation and renewal of genetic continuity, human survival. Its psychological purpose seems to me to be a particularly poignant kind of mutual learning and, matters being equal, ineffable comfort.“

Jul 17

Alex and Victory

Last week was a big week at our house: Victory had surgery and Alex turned seven, all within a few days of each other. We are happy to report that Victory is recovering well from her surgery–she had two masses removed, and she did really well, per our beloved vet! She gets her stitches out next week!

Alex turned seven, which is so hard to believe! The time is going way too quickly! On Alex’s birthday, we celebrated at home with a summer flower themed birthday! Alex even lost her seventh baby tooth on her birthday at the pool! She has a birthday party coming up with her little friends, which she is very much looking forward to! In the video below, Alex said that having Victory is her best birthday gift! We are so grateful for our girls. A few photos are shown below!

We hope your summer is going well!

Jul 9

Summer Checklist

What is on your summer checklist? It really feels like summer–it is so hot and humid! Poor Victory is panting on her walks, and we have to sometimes cut them short, as a result of the heat. Below are 10 low-key things I’m hoping to do this summer…

Swim. Enjoy a lot of swimming time at the pool together. We love the pool we belong to, and Alex is enjoying the summer swim team, in addition to still practicing with her year-round team! It is always fun to pack our lunch and get take out for dinner at the pool on the weekends!

Read. Read more books for fun! I recently started reading this fun, creative book: The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life.

Play more games. Alex likes playing games, and we are trying to play more games as a family–Mexican Train Dominoes is a favorite!

See art in real life. Alex loves art, and we have been reading books about art, and she wants to see more art in real life, and fortunately we do not live far from the Smithsonian museums!

Grill more food. Doug is a really good cook, and we hope to use our Big Green Egg, more this summer, to enjoy more grilled foods, but it has been so hot here, recently!

Get more ice cream. We found a new favorite place to get ice cream, and Victory absolutely loves it!

Go fruit picking. We are going to pick some sort of fruit this summer; we missed picking strawberries this spring, so we are looking forward to picking some other fruits this summer!

Go to the beach. We plan to take a trip to the beach, and Alex and Victory both love the beach, and we always have great memories together!

Celebrate Alex’s Birthday. We are excited to celebrate Alex’s birthday in a few days! She is so excited and she’s excited to celebrate with her little friends!

Building in more down time. I literally feel like the time is flying by way too fast, and, at times, it is hard to keep up with. Sometimes, there is so much going on, that we do not plan enough down time, and I plan to do better about planning down time together.