The past week has been tough, with the winter freeze upon us while I recover from surgery, and losing our beloved dog Doobie, I’ve taken to my office to collect all the photographs I’ve made of our pooch over the years.
One thing you learn as you grow out of childhood into an adult is that everything in life is temporary. Nothing is forever. We don’t pay much attention to it most of the time, but when reality bites you, the lesson is reinforced. One learns to appreciate the little moments of joy we share with our pets. That’s one reason I make lots of photographs of my pets. It helps me to keep the memories of them alive after they are gone.
Many of my friends and family members are pet owners and some of them have recently lost one of their loved companions. Some of you reading this may have also lost a loved pet as well. We all have a common bond of sharing our life with an animal who relies totally on us for their existence. In return they give us joy and companionship.
Our pets are our personal possessions. Our pets are mostly our concern and exist in our personal lives for our own private experience. Doobie was friends with everyone who came into our home, but he wasn’t a part of their lives outside of interacting with Trudy and me. If you know us, you know we love our animals and that we take good care of them. Almost to the point that they are our children in some way.
As Trudy and I grow old, the rate of loss of people and pets is increasing. It’s another reality that one must adapt to. Trudy lost her mother who lived with us for over 20 years, about a year and a half ago. My son died shortly after Trudy’s mother passed. One of our dear friends lost her husband this past December. Other friends have left us in the past few years as well. It’s getting hard to keep track. My heart is growing more heavy with every loss, be it personal or one of our friends. When someone loses a pet, it too grieves us as we know and understand what their pets mean to them in their life.
I don’t compare the loss of a pet to the loss of a person though. While the grief is real for both, I think we tend to get over the loss of a pet much quicker. The people we lose stay in our thoughts more intensely and the reality of losing a loved one is far more impacting upon our psyche. I think about my son every day of my life and I expect that my thoughts of him will linger until my dying breath. The pets we have lost over the years are still in our memory, but the gravity of that loss has faded and we look back in total fondness at those days but with fewer regrets, or questions, and with acceptance of the fact that we knew when we got them they would eventually be gone and we could replace them with a new pet. Rinse and repeat so to speak. It’s not that way with the people in our lives that we lose.
So, we are down to one pet now. Fiona. Fiona is a rescue dog too. We saved her from the rescue cell about a year after we got Doobie. We felt Doobie needed a companion dog and we found Fiona, who was two years older than Doobie. They took to one another famously. Both had a loving family to care for them and they had each other to do their dog stuff together.
Fiona is about 10 years old and we don’t know how much more time we will have with her. She is well adjusted and a far more subdued animal than Doobie, but she has her own unique personality and is very attached to Trudy and me. I have no idea what she is thinking most of the time but I have noticed her looking for Doobie, expecting him to appear any time now. At some point she will realize that Doobie isn’t going to come back from wherever it is he went. But her behavior and attachment to us hasn’t changed, and I expect she will adapt to losing her brother just fine.
When the time comes that we have to say goodbye to Fiona, Trudy and I have decided that we aren’t going to bring new pets into the house. It’s just too much for us emotionally, knowing they will eventually leave us and we have had enough grief in our lives to experience it by choice again with new animals. In the meantime, we’ll enjoy the companionship of Fiona and remember Doobie for the fine family member he was.
Life is for the living. We will never lose sight of that fact.
