I want to thank you for the post but that almost trivializes something that, I’m sure, had to have worked its way out of your heart like an ages-old bullet migrating to the surface of your skin. As Clyde lay dying, those last three days, unable to get to his feet and walk or eat, I pulled a mattress onto the living room floor and just lay next to him, stroking his old floppy ears and whispering to him that it’s okay, we understand, you’ve taken such good care of us all these years and you’re tired. It’s okay, it’s okay. We’ll be fine. You can go in peace…When it really wasn’t okay and, I felt, never would be again. And I would have delayed that hour of his death for years, if it had been just up to me, in my completely selfish wish to have just one more day listening to him snore on the floor beside our bed. My sole comfort is – and I hope it will be yours – that the final and largest gift we can give to our pets is to send them on their way in love, with our voices in their ears and our hands on their heads, since that’s what they’ve come to treasure most in life.

My prayers will be with you…and Pepino.

It’s the elders among us who handle the details of death and show us how to grieve.  Like Clarissa Pinkola Estes I didn’t want to become ‘old hand’ at these matters. But, I have. Even though the instructions on…

I miss them both terribly.

I know I’ll be walking that road with my oldest dachshund some day, and it’s a sad, sad journey. One you never want to make, but that would mean 15 plus years without her, and that would be even sadder.

http://www.cosmoetica.com/B59-DES27.htm

http://www.cosmoetica.com/B51-DES25.htm

http://www.cosmoetica.com/B476-DES408.htm

Chia never returned and Sassy’s dead.

A poem:

CHIA SCHNEIDER. ALONE.

To me it is you, little kitten at play,
inhabiting this dream. I hear your soft squeak
wake me. Many years from now I will speak
of your broken hip, and the very first day
we saw you at the Humane Society-
both unspayed and with claws. That did not last long
as your black and white face filling up this song,
caring how you played with our feet, constantly,
as we tried ways to sleep, dream of what is now,
when I pick you up and your squeak is no ghost,
thinking of other stray names that came, and how
I chose Chia. If I should say this to you
would centuries cross the darkness, again lost
in your eyes changing me? To me it is you.

Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider

I think the death of domestic animals
mark the sea changes in our lives.
Think how things were, when things were different.
There was an animal then, a dog or a cat,
not the one you have now, another one.
Think when things were different before that.
There was another one then. You had almost forgotten.