the friend online
13 June 2008

Loving and Losing Lilly - preview

Animal companions: their role in a life with psychiatric diagnosed disease, by Eliza Johnston

I want to offer a celebration of Lilly, my animal companion
  • Many of us who end up with a psychiatric disease diagnosis have very good reasons for not trusting humans any more
  • As a bridge, trust in Lilly became my only source of love


  • I had ten years of caring for and loving Lilly
  • When I tell friends that she died, they are sympathetic, but I want them to know how important she was to my life


  • She was beautiful, pure white, with large green eyes, nervous, but litter-trained
  • It only took her a few days to get settled, realising that it was her and me
  • She was quiet and calm
  • When she first stepped out of her box into her new world in 1998, I got a wonderful sense of a beautiful white light spirit arriving with her
  • She was a mature cat, from Battersea cats and dogs home
  • I was finally in my council flat, with a little garden, recovering from hospitalisation
  • Back then that meant police, being under section for a six-month detention, with a manic psychosis diagnosis, part of the bipolar diagnosed in 1991
  • It had by then become almost an annual event
  • Almost instantly Lilly started to change my life

  • Eliza Johnston

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