For all of you out there who have lost a pet, I want you to know I am thinking of you today. For all of you who understand the joy of loving and the pain of grieving a four-legged-animal, I am here with you. My daughter when we first had to discuss the reality that our dog was in pain said it beautifully, “Why does anybody get a dog when they’re just going to die?” Why would anybody put themselves through the inevitable pain of loss? And anybody who has a pet and loves a pet knows the answer to that question too and there aren’t really words that do it justice. You all know how much it hurts to say goodbye or make that choice to let them go and end the suffering.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my daughter’s questions and what it means to love and lose in life. So much of life is love and loss — happy transitions, moments of joy and painful transitions, moments of pain. It gives life such texture, sometimes feeling beautiful and amazing and other times feeling cruel and excruciating. In some ways the love of a pet is the best example of this.
It was about ten years ago when my daughter and I went to the Downey shelter to look at dogs. I had never had a dog before and was blissfully ignorant. As we walked down the hall of cages and the dogs barked at us, one dog made eye contact, sat and lifted her paw to greet us. We adopted her on the spot. I loaded her into the back of my SUV and she crawled through to the passenger cabin, sat beside my daughter’s car seat and rested her paw on my daughter’s leg. Raja was never a perfect dog. In difficult times when I cried, she growled at me. She jumped up on toddlers knocking them to the ground and licked their faces until they were sobbing sometimes. She was not good with other dogs and never socialized well. But she loved us and we loved her. My kids melted in her kisses and loved being knocked to the floor. She loved us and walked us through other difficult transitions in life — divorce, loss, struggle. She was always there for us even if she growled at bad times — and as she got older, she did learn to comfort in those moments.
Last week, I was at Dick’s Sporting Goods and my twins were behaving like monsters— all the good stuff: wrestling, whining, tattling. I was losing it and the cashier who was an older woman said to me, “Believe it or not, one day you’re going to miss this.” I know that she’s right. And this is also a window into the reality that nothing lasts forever. With the loss of a pet it’s painfully clear. But those moments, good and bad, it’s less clear and still equally true. They won’t always be this small and they won’t always care about where I stand on who hit who and why.
We know in life that all things, good and bad, will come and go. Everything is temporary. There is light and there is also dark. There is beauty and there is also pain. The life of a pet is perhaps one of the greatest examples of this very phenomenon. Because most of the time, we know how it ends when we go into it. We know that we will likely outlive them. We choose to love them and enjoy them knowing that the end will be painful and also knowing that it will be worth it. But this painful truth is not just about our pets — it’s all of life: the moment at Dick’s when I want to run screaming out of the store and the moments at home when I relish watching my children dress up the dog like a flower.
This past weekend, I had an epic war with a rat in my house. It was grueling and Raja was there with me through it all. Raja has helped me get through so much and it is so painful to think about not having her there anymore. And she’s not there anymore — yesterday was her last day with us. Feeling her absence in our morning routine and in our quiet house has been so hard for me and my kids— and it has only been one day. She wasn’t there to take me for my morning walk and this was the first morning that it occurred to me that it was indeed my morning walk and I needed that walk with her as much as she did.
Goodbye, Raja. We loved you deeply. We will always love you deeply.
And to all of you who know the love and loss of a four-legged friend, I send you love and light. Man, this hurts. And no reading of the ‘rainbow bridge’ takes away the pain.
