Dear Friends,
In the wee hours of Saturday morning, we were awakened with the deafening sound of a hard rain on the roof. Our bedroom is located in what was once our old house’s attic, so there is a thin barrier between us and the pounding drops, gusting wind and thunder.
In addition to the storm flashing and pelting outside, we were also roused by the wheezed cough of our small dog Lucy, who was sleeping restlessly on blankets on the floor of our master bathroom. A storm of a different sort began to stir in our hearts as we picked her up and carried her downstairs.
Lucy had been more congested than usual the last few days due to her weakening heart. As Gail and I stood out in the pouring rain in the backyard – Gail holding up Lucy’s little back legs for support and coaxing her to do her business, and me holding up two umbrellas over them both – we both suspected that this might be the day. The Day . . . the end of an all-too-short life and of our life, too, as Gail and I have known it for over 16 years.
We were all wide awake now, and there was no going back upstairs to that bed under the storm. So, we did the only thing could think to do: we took turns sitting with Lucy on the kitchen floor and then, by the afternoon, on our family room sofa. We held her and we waited.
A reader once submitted an anonymous poem to Ann Landers that she reprinted several times afterwards in her column. It was the same poem that was framed and hanging on the wall of the quiet and softly-lit room at the pet mortuary we visited later that Saturday evening . . . an evening when the sky was finally clear of dark clouds and an orange line was appearing on the horizon.
A portion:
Treat me kindly, my beloved friend
for no heart in the whole world is more grateful for kindness
than the loving heart of me.
And, my friend, when I am very old
and I no longer enjoy good health, hearing and sight,
do not make heroic efforts to keep me going.
I am not having any fun.
Please see to it that my life is taken gently.
I shall leave this Earth knowing with the last breath I draw
that my fate was always safest in your hands.
Lucy, I pray that it was so for you . . . and that it is so for all our beloved and aging animals.
Thank you, thank you, for the joy . . . for all the amazing light and joy.
Love,
Terry