Goodbye my friend

This is a picture of Tracy's parents black labrador, Zoe. She was a wonderful girl, full of love, who as a young dog was the terror of rabbits and squirrels.
More recently she was mostly just a sun worshipper and cuddle monster who, in true lab style, would run headlong at your knees before sliding down your legs and landing on your feet, legs in the air, all the while wagging and squealing fit to burst. When Zoe said hello, you knew about it.
Sadly, Tracy's parents today had to make the tough decision to let her go to a better place, where she has no arthritis, no fatty lumps, and all the rabbits she can chase. I'm sure she will have been greeted on the other side by her best friend Pippa, who died last year. Run free, old girl.

Better to have loved and lost

On the D For Dog forum, in Prince's goodbye thread, Graham says:

It's so sad in many ways, that we all seem to have some experience of the gravity of such a loss - and many of us very recently.

It got me thinking.

Loss and grief are the price we pay for opening ourselves to love, but love is it's own reward. The trick is to not close your heart because of the pain of loss, but to hold on to the memory of love and so allow it into your heart again.

To quote Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem In Memoriam:

I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

So many people say silly things like "I'll never love again" or "there'll never be another ". They're right about the second one - there will never be another Prince, or Cleo, or Timmy, or Lady or (in my case) Duke, or Nisse - but each dog, and therefore each love is different. Some people ridicule the love that can exist between owners and their pets and think that such owners are somehow warped, and that that love could be better 'spent'. Personally, I think that the more you open your heart, the more love you find that you have to give, and the more you receive in return. In fact, pets are so good at opening people's hearts and healing their minds that Animal Assisted Therapy is becoming more and more popular and achieving amazing results.

I would turn what Graham's said around - the fact that so many of us have experienced the gravity of such a loss, although painful, shows that we can love. It shows that our hearts haven't hardened, in spite of the terrible things that are on the TV and the internet daily. That gives me hope.