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The Empty Tray

 


I still have tubs of home-cooked food which I had specially made for Rosie. Rosie loved chicken with carrot, and I had fortified her special food with liver too (for her anaemia). It will take some time to use up this food for the cats as I would need to mix it with their regular food.

There are the five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. They do not necessarily occur in a linear fashion. They are tools that help us identify with what we are feeling. I know I’m experiencing denial and bargaining (yes, definitely bargaining). No depression, I hope, but definitely sadness. No anger too – why be angry knowing that THIS is how our earthly life is – there is a mix of happiness and suffering and both are not permanent. That much, I can accept.

I still wake up every morning and look to the place where Rosie sleeps. And I will remember how she would happily trot towards me and ask for her pre-breakfast snack. There were so many times when I would look under the bed and be extremely relieved to find her sitting up and not recumbent. The vets had already told me her illness was terminal but we kept our hopes up that TCM might be able to cure her.

Towards the final week when her abdomen was really swollen, I was really, really so scared. What is going to happen if it continued to swell? It wasn’t fluids, the vets had already checked. If it was, at least we could get it sucked out. It was her liver. There was nothing we could do about it. I was so, so scared. So scared that I could not even write about it. Yet, Rosie was so brave – she took it all in her stride.

Rosie was the epitome of courage. Call it what you will – the vets will tell me not to humanise, that animals do not have certain abilities that we humans have. Call it what you will, I say. It IS courage that I saw.

Perhaps the greatest blessing was that Rosie remained happy and perky right until the last day. There was no prolonged suffering. I ought to be thankful for that, if there is anything at all to be thankful for.

There are still many quiet moments where I cry because I miss Rosie so much. Why is this earthly life so imperfect? Why does sickness exist? Why can’t we just live this life, grow old and die of old age? I don’t mind being born, growing old and dying of old age, but why is sickness also in the equation? It almost seems cruel.

No, it IS cruel.

Birth, old age, sickness and death – no one can escape from them, so we are told by the wise.

Such is this imperfect life.

The only thing we can do is to accept this fact and live this life daily, helping others as we go along, so that when our time comes, we can go with a clear conscience knowing we have indeed done our very best while we were alive.

I have gone through quite a number of pet deaths now. The only thing I can say is that, time heals. In time, only the good memories will remain and the sad ones, they never disappear, but the good will overshadow them…in time. That’s just how our mind works to preserve our sanity.

After Rosie passed away, I cleared up her bedroom breakfast tray, the extra litter boxes in the bathrooms, I washed all her towels, gave away her medicines (back to the clinic so that other animals can use them), cleared her subcut tray, put away the new drip set (we were supposed to open a new set on the day she passed away). I did all this not because I didn’t want to remember them. It was just a coping mechanism to suppress the pain and let the good memories prevail.

There are still six bowls on the shelf at the patio. Sometimes, Tiger eats with the PatioCats so, yes, it justifies keeping Rosie’s bowl there – for Tiger to use. But it will still be Rosie’s bowl…for a long, long time.

I guess pet deaths are so much more painful and sad because as pet parents, our pets are our children and we love them as such. The Chinese have a saying: Grandfather dies, Father dies, Son dies (sorry, the Chinese people are a patriarchal lot) – and this is a blessing – that people die in the “natural” progression of age. So, when a child dies before the parents – that is always harder to accept. And this is why it’s easier to emotionally accept the death of an elderly than the death of a pet. No matter how old our pets are (we can use the formula to calculate our pet’s age in equivalent human years and tell ourselves that they are “actually” older than us), we will always see them as our children.

Don’t we?

tray

This is the tray I put Rosie’s hibiscrub, povidone iodine, the alcohol swabs, the organic cotton pads and her drip set for the subcut.

It is empty now.

Rosie is in a happy place now – I would just have to keep telling myself this, over and over again until time heals.



Source: https://myanimalcare.org/2017/04/03/the-empty-tray/



 

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AnimalCare

AnimalCare is a registered society that promotes caregiving to street animals and helps in their neutering and medical needs. AnimalCare has a Medical Fund, Food Fund and Education Fund.

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