It happens this way …
A friend just emailed me to say she put down her dog this morning. It was a compassionate thing to do since her sweet pet was suffering so much. My friend’s heart is cracking open with grief again – she’s experienced this before –- but she will assure anyone who listens that the love she has shared with her dear dog is worth the pain.
Everyday I receive FB posts from my dog-loving friends across the country. They include messages about the benefits – physical and spiritual – of owning a dog – or, better yet, being owned by one. They make me laugh about the silly things dogs do and joy in the tenderness dogs show in nurturing abandoned kittens or guarding a sleeping child. I can understand the love.
We don’t have a pet – unless you want to count the feral cats, steller’s jays, juncos, robins, and other various creatures who play in our backyard. The traveling we do makes owning a good excuse. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving a dog in a kennel or even having someone other than us watch over it when we flew away.
Perhaps another reason is equally true: the experiences my brothers and I had with pets growing up in NJ. I dug out this poem that appeared in Fall 2016 in an anthology called Our Last Walk: Using Poetry for Grieving and Remembering Our Pets.
I think the last six lines nail the truest truth about my lack of pet-ownership. A million cheers to all of you share love with, and learn love from, your pets. Someday …
Love’s Labor’s Lost
or Why I don’t own pets
Three chameleons
disappeared
into our bamboo shades.
The horny lizard’s
soft-curled back
amazed
then,
like goldfish
in their hazy bowl,
flipped
its down-side up.
Unamused,
dad booted out
the lab who
slurped
his cabbage soup.
The speckled mutt
arrived
one day,
ran
away the next.
Need more
reasoning?
A droop-face cop
charged
our summer yard
and shot
two frothing pups.
My heart
can’t bear
another crack.
I fall in love
too hard,
too fast.
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