Christy wanted me to share the news that she learned Monday afternoon that she will not be going to the Pines Rehabilitation Center in Glens Falls, N.Y., after all, they have no available beds for her. She and her family and the hospital are looking at other possibilities.

“I am so disappointed,” she wrote. “I want to get going. Yesterday was a great day but today not so good. I pulled my back out again. There is great pain when I move. So I am trying to stay still and rest my back. They are giving me a strong med, so I am sleepy.”

Then she went to sleep.

Earlier, she thanked me for writing about her and she said she trusted me with her story because I am treating the Mansion residents well.  She said it has been difficult for her to trust people. I am humbled by that and will try to be deserving. “I am going to look forward from now on and take care of myself.”

Christy and I have talked about the importance of dogs in her life, I believe it is really Red, not me who has made a powerful connection and opened her up, I’ve seen it before. She told me about her dog Cinni, who lived to be 17 years old. “I read once,” she wrote,”that dogs are Gods furry angels sent to watch over us. I believe that.”

I believe in spirit dogs, as many of you know from my books and blogs, and Red is a spirit dog. They enter our lives for a reason, they leave when their work is done. If there is such a thing as furry angels – why not? – then I believe Red is one of them, and perhaps he has come to help Christy give rebirth to her life, as she is trying to do.

I have learned in my therapy work not to try and cheer people up or give them false hope. I don’t ever try to do God’s work.

I have to meet them where they are, not where I wish them to be. I told Christy that while this might be a disappointing delay, it need not change her conviction to get well and get home to the Mansion. Nothing has changed but the location of her rehab.

It will just happen in a different place. That is easy for me to say, but I believe it. I believe in rebirth and resurrection, at any point in life. But that is up to Christy, not me. I feel our communication is important, for both of us, and I will keep going as long as she wishes.

Thanks for your messages and concern for her there is obviously no point in writing to her at the Pines. But if you write her c/o The Mansion, they will get your letters to her: 11 S. Union Avenue, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816. When I found out where she is, I will pass the information along, and thanks for caring.