Love and loss….they are always together!
Maybe its because it is a rainy damp Saturday, or perhaps it is hearing of a co-worker’s dog’s recent brain tumor diagnosis, but I find myself thinking often of the dogs we have lost. The loss of our pit bull, Geo, who has been gone over two years, still brings me to tears if I think about him too hard and too long. Perhaps because his illness and death was so sudden and unexpected, it hurts the most. We only had him for 8 years which seems entirely too short a time for a dog who loved everyone so deeply and was loved by so many.
Our first dog, Ziggy, was a mixed German shepard and he shared our lives for 12 years until he succumbed to cancer. He was part of our nuclear family that we formed shortly after my husband and I married. In fact Ziggy was adopted the day after we returned from our honeymoon. Our daughter arrived four years later and even though Ziggy understood she was a new member of the pack, I think he was a bit jealous that he was no longer “the baby”. I don’t have any digital pictures of Ziggy, so when I’m thinking of him, I go to an album that we made after his death of all of our pictures with him.
As I mentioned, it has been over 2 years since we lost Geo and neither my husband, my daughter or myself are ready for another dog. The pain of that loss is still raw and the wound still open. Perhaps another dog would numb that pain, but right now we are not ready to love so completely for fear of hurting again so deeply.
There is no hard and fast rule about when you should get another dog after the loss on one. In fact we adopted Geo only a month after losing Ziggy. But now, it has been much longer.
I know when we are ready, the dog we bring into our lives will not be a replacement for either Ziggy or Geo; he/she will fill a whole new spot in our family and in our hearts.
I think Sir Walter Scott said it best about losing a dog:
“I have sometimes thought of the final cause of dogs having such short lives and I am quite satisfied it is in compassion to the human race; for if we suffer so much in losing a dog after an acquaintance of ten or twelve years, what would it be if they were to live double that time?”
Sir Walter Scott
For some really cute puppy pics..check out:
www.homezookeeper.com
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