Welcome to The Morning Grumble by Grumble Farm, a community-supported newsletter that chronicles the journey of my life with pugs, dogs, and other animals through stories of hope & healing that are inspired by nature & the transformative and immortal power of unconditional love 🕊️🌈🐾
I’m Brandy (@grittygracious), the founder of Grumble Farm (you can learn more about me here). Between e-mails, you can find me hangin’ out on Notes here on Substack, posting to my IG stories from time to time, and sharing longer-form videos & vlogs of my travels and adventures on Grumble Farm’s YouTube channel.
I’m about to hit the road full-time with my two senior pug sisters, Fern & Ivy, to care for and continue learning from other pugs, dogs, kitties, horses, pigs, chickens, ducks, donkeys, and a whole variety of other magnificent creatures everywhere from big cities to rural farms across Western Canada as a nomadic sitter-of-sorts. If you’re going away and looking for a longer-term pet, pug, dog, animal, house, or farm sitter, you can find more information about my services & specialties here.
Thank you for being a part of our story 💙
Welcome to the second week of The Morning Grumble newsletter, written by me… Jonie’s Forever & Ever Mama.
I have to be honest - every ounce of my being was fighting against writing a newsletter this weekend.
I was frustrated and disheartened with feeling this way, because it was only the second one I was trying to write and I already felt like completely giving up.
I spent several hours trying to draft an e-mail yesterday afternoon, but by the time I was about halfway through, I simply couldn’t stomach anything I had written. It was all so fake and irrelevant, and not at all reflective of what’s actually going on in my life right now… or more importantly, what’s been going on in my heart.
I’ve only ever been able to write and speak openly and honestly about what’s real and true at any given time, and any other attempt to do so is futile. This is why I fucking suck at writing marketing copy, and it’s also why I struggle with stuffing my big feelings into the claustrophobic confines of an Instagram caption. So this morning, at 5:36 am with a cup of hazelnut coffee sitting on my electric mug warmer, I sat down to start afresh while it rained outside of my office window…
Today, April 28th, is Jonas’ first Rainbow Bridge “anniversary”. By the time this lands in your inbox, however, it will have been yesterday.
In the tender, surreal days following Jonas’ death last spring, as some sort of spontaneous grief ritual, I opened my Google calendar and created twelve new events to help guide me through the inevitable upcoming year:
Jonas’ Death Day - April 28, 2023 (repeat annually)
One month - May 28, 2023
Two months - June 28, 2023
Three months - July 28, 2023
Four months - August 28, 2023
Five months - September 28, 2023
Six months - October 28, 2023
Seven months - November 28, 2023
Eight months - December 28, 2023
Nine months - January 28, 2024
Ten months - February 28, 2024
Eleven months - March 28, 2024
One year - April 28, 2024
These dates weren’t exactly intended to be reminders so that I wouldn’t forget, but instead served more as a way to hang on to some semblance of the passing of time when something as arbitrary as time itself is nearly impossible to make sense of when navigating the kind of grief that follows profound loss.
I’ve known this day was coming since the moment I heard the palliative and hospice care veterinary technician say to me over the phone, “We’ll be travelling through Kaslo on April 28th” just moments after I had made the excruciatingly difficult decision to book an at-home euthanasia for him. The date she gave me was exactly one month away, and as soon as I hung up the phone, I knew that Jonas and I had officially been initiated into one of the most profoundly meaningful and deeply intimate journeys I would ever experience with another living being. I looked down at his glossy marble eyes - always gazing up at me softly from my arms, where he laid on his back like a baby - and I swear he already knew every last detail of what was to come.
It’s going to be okay. We can do this. I trust you completely.
I decided not to share about our last month together publicly as there was absolutely no way I was going to spend a mere nanosecond trying to express the magnitude of such an otherworldly experience on an app like Instagram. Instead, I opted to use Patreon as a space to share and process the experience of counting down the weeks and days until the big moment itself, writing posts and sharing photos that documented my time with Jonas in those final weeks of his life. I had built a very intimate and special rapport with our Patrons over the years, and writing to them felt just like writing to family. I trusted them, and they were always safe refuge for me to show up in both my moments of strength, and my moments of vulnerability. And more than anyone, they certainly knew how to hold space for something of this caliber.
I never officially announced Jonas’ death on Instagram after it happened. Through Patreon and by sending a couple of short e-mail newsletters to those who were subscribed to receive them, I managed to invite anyone who felt moved to light a blue candle for Jonas at 12:15 p.m. on April 28th to honour his life and help guide his spirit Home. I had asked my friend Sarah to log into Grumble Farm’s Instagram account to manage the story tags and mentions by re-sharing everyone’s burning candles to Grumble Farm’s stories, creating a kind of “virtual vigil” in community with each other. I knew this was something I wouldn’t have the capacity to look at or follow along with on the day of, and I didn’t end up making my way to my Instagram story archives to see everyone’s photos and videos until several weeks following the moment that Jonas and I said Goodbye For Now. But when I did, I had never felt more held - more cradled - more uplifted while I tapped through an entire spectrum of blue-coloured candles, blazing bright.
Some people included their favourite photos of Jonas, or Jonas and I together. Some even printed off these photos and framed them to create an altar. Others lit a blue candle and placed it amongst photos of their own treasured and beloved pugs, dogs, and pets in a whole variety of urns and wooden boxes and other beautiful vessels - beloved beings who were waiting eagerly up at Rainbow Bridge for Jonas to arrive. I loved seeing those ones the most, and I felt deeply connected to everyone who showed up for and participated in Jonie’s Virtual Vigil in a way that crossed literal oceans… such is the power of the heart.
Shortly after Jonas died, I was inspired with an idea to keep his memory alive by ordering 500 stickers of his face, made from the photograph that had become his claim to fame on Instagram several years prior.
I quickly designed Forever and Ever postcards with instructions printed on the back for how to participate in the Jonas Forever Sticker Tagging Challenge, where anyone who ordered a sticker was encouraged to tag me in photos and videos of the most unique, funny, or meaningful public places they had found to display Jonas’ derpy little face.
The idea was received so enthusiastically that I literally spent months stuffing envelopes with stickers that were to be mailed all over the world!
At the peak of hundreds upon hundreds of sticker orders coming in, Jesse and I made a trip to our favourite spot - Grumble Bay - a quiet lakeside park that holds a thousand-and-one memories of Jonas, including these photos that Jesse had taken of him the previous year under a cherry tree that blossoms each spring.
Wanting to properly capture and document what was happening with the sticker challenge, we worked together to pull off a photoshoot with all of the envelopes I had filled with Jonas’ stickers for those who were excited to participate.
Jonas’ loving energy palpably emanated through every pink blossom, and I could envision his little face looking up at me lovingly from under the tree’s branches, just as he had done the previous spring. I could also feel the love from every single name I had hand-written on the front of each and every envelope I was holding in the same arms that had cradled Jonas’ soft, warm, roly-poly body just a couple of weeks earlier.
In the days, weeks, and months that followed sending these envelopes away at the post office, absolutely nothing could have prepared me for the places that people brought and stuck Jonas’ little face to help his memory live on. Almost every day for the rest of the year, his life continued to be honoured and celebrated in a way that made the meaning and significance of his time on earth more beautiful and moving than I could have ever imagined.
While there’s no possible way I could include every single photo that I was tagged in or that was sent to me last year, here are a “few”:
At Disney World 🏰
At Disney Land 🎡
…on a literal rollercoaster at Disney Land 🎢
At a beach in the South of France (Martigues/Marseille) 🇫🇷
Near a waterfall at Watkins Glen State Park, New York 💦
On the Nāpali Coast of Kauaʻi, Hawaii 🌺
High above Niagra Falls, Ontario 🍁
In Yucatán, Mexico 🇲🇽
At Red Dog Saloon in Juneau, Alaska 🍻
On The Berlin Wall, Germany 🇩🇪
In the mountains of Les Trois Vallees in the French Alps 🏔️🇫🇷
At the beach in Ibiza, Spain 🇪🇸
At P!nk’s Summer Carnival Tour at Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts 💕🎶
At a Jonas Brothers concert at the Capital One Arena in Washington, DC 💙🎶
On a boat coasting through the oh-so-blue North Pacific Ocean near Waikiki on the island of O‘ahu, Hawaii 🌊
Sunning in Jamaica 🇯🇲
Surrounded by the azure waters of the Atlantic Ocean on Little San Salvador Island, also known as Half Moon Cay in the Bahamas 🇧🇸
In Las Vegas 🎰
In New York City’s Times Square 🗽
At the Grand Canyon in Arizona ⛰️
Watching the sunset at a beautiful vineyard in Saint Helena, Calfornia 🍷
At the London Bridge 🌉
Watching the eclipse in Monument Valley 🏜️
Horseback riding in Kananaskis 🐴
Overlooking East Hill in Hastings, United Kingdom 🇬🇧
In Carcassonne, France 🏰🇫🇷
“Leaving on a jet plane” above Tennessee ✈️
In the Peruvian Amazon - Jonie of the Jungle 🌴
At Machu Picchu 🇵🇪
At Grad (with his sisters) - Class of 2023 🎓
A good luck charm for surgery 🩺
And lastly, a photo that “accidentally” included something very special…
At Mount Fuji in Japan, with a rainbow heart high in the sky 🇯🇵🗻
As the 2023 year went on and these photos continued to fill my DM’s on Instagram, I decided to design a final Grumble Farm calendar so that I could create a collage of everyone’s candles to include at the very front, along with everyone’s sticker challenge photos at the very back. This project felt like immense closure, as Jesse and I had been creating and launching Grumble Farm calendars as a seasonal product each year for the previous three years and it had become a bit of a community celebration each and every time.
Year One - Our First Year in the Kootenays
Year Two - aka The Year I Panicked, Abandoned Jesse in the Kootenays and Moved Back to Calgary for Nine Chaotic Months
Year Three - The Year We “Pawtographed” Our Jonas Forever Calendars
For our fourth and final year this past fall, shortly after moving to the cabin, I designed and launched Grumble Farm’s 2024 very last calendar with the title “For the Farm-ily” - dedicated to everyone who had celebrated Jonas’ life with me over the years, supporting me and us right up until his very last breath (and beyond).
Knowing that it was the very last time I would be doing this, I decided to vlog and document the entire process in a two-part video series for Grumble Farm’s YouTube channel so that I could share it with everyone.
Part One
Part Two
For the Farm-ily was my favourite calendar that I’d ever created. It included twelve photos of Jonas taken throughout our final adventure together in the West Kootenays, with each month featuring a pair of words that had become sanity-saving mantras of mine in an effort to cultivate strength, grace and acceptance while navigating Jonas’ end-of-life as his guardian and caregiver.
To me, it all felt like it was a little more than a “calendar”. And in the little square box designated for April 28th, 2024, I had included the very same “reminder” that I had put in my own Google calendar - the one year anniversary of Jonas’ absolutely fucking magnificent crossing of the Rainbow Bridge, and the hundreds of beating hearts he brought together along the way.
This afternoon, while taking a much-needed break from writing this newsletter, I drove into town with Jesse and the girls to grab a bite to eat while slowly walking Fern and Ivy along the beach at Grumble Bay.
It was still raining with just a little bit of sun, and I was hoping I’d see a rainbow over Kootenay Lake as an obvious sign from Jonas since I had asked him for one the night before as I tucked his pine needle urn up into my left armpit the same way I used to cradle him to sleep at night.
I love you, I love you, I love you!!!
While a rainbow never appeared, I was still hoping for one more special thing that I might catch a glimpse of while we were there, although I wasn’t entirely sure if it was too early in the season to see them.
Just as I was about the give up hope as we wandered up and along Jonie’s “Apple Trail”, I spotted a subtle flash of blue directly beneath one of our favourite apple trees.
I guess it wasn’t too early in the season at all…
Good grief has honouring. I don’t write, speak, or share about death, dying, and grief as often as I wish I would give myself permission to, because I’ve noticed that most people aren’t comfortable with the topic and will tell me that they can’t read - can’t listen - can’t watch, because it’s just too hard.
While I respect that drawing healthy boundaries to protect one’s inner peace is an important act of self-care during certain periods of time, the only way to experience the beauty of what lies on the other side of our attachments, pain, and suffering is to move through our grief with the courage to feel it all.
With a few tools and practices to process, integrate, and honour our experience of grief from profound loss, we can cultivate the grace and resilience to expand our capacities for giving and recieving love - which is exactly the lesson our dogs come into our lives to teach us in the first place.
Forever and ever,
📧 brandy@grumblefarm.ca
💌 P.O. Box 492 Kaslo, B.C. V0G 1M0 Canada
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Gone From My Sight
I am standing upon the seashore. A ship, at my side,
spreads her white sails to the moving breeze and starts
for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength.
I stand and watch her until, at length, she hangs like a speck
of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.
Then, someone at my side says, “There, she is gone.”
Gone where?
Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast,
hull and spar as she was when she left my side.
And, she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me - not in her.
And, just at the moment when someone says, “There, she is gone,”
there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices
ready to take up the glad shout, “Here she comes!”
And that is dying.
~ Henry Van Dyke
Thank you for reading issue #003 of The Morning Grumble by Grumble Farm.
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If you enjoy following along with my journey, or if you find my heart-filled work on pet loss grief valuable, the best way to give thanks & encourage me to keep going is by becoming a free or paid subscriber to this newsletter.
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The way you are able to speak so beautifully about death, dying and grief makes it feel like something that should be embraced and not feared. You make me want to explore that and not cower from it. Thank you, Brandy, for always sharing the depth of your heart with us and for letting us feel like Jonas was ours too. 💙💙💙
As hard as grief is, your open heart sharing keeps me from being lost in my own grief. IT IS HARD. Hard to experience pet loss. It’s isolating, or at least feels isolating. Grieving Jonie, alongside you and the grumble farm-ily, has helped me allow myself to grieve my own pugs. Helped me feel less alone, and feel like they are not alone across the bridge but are among all the other pugs who welcomed Jonie, and Jonie himself.
You were in my thoughts all day yesterday, and continue to be. 💙