Your Pet Loss Diaries

Oct 30, 2012

by Joseph N. Roland
(Waldorf, MD)

When Sugarfoot left me four years ago, I'll never forget how those days after felt so long, each like it would never end. It was just incomprehensible the amount of pain that I felt, and I would have given anything--anything--to have just gone back to the day he died and just had a chance to hold him one more time and tell him how much he meant to me before he passed. Just ten minutes.

In the four years since his passing, one thing has remained constant in my mind, heart, and soul: how much I hate death being a part of life. I will never accept death; I will always hate it. Maybe one day IT will die so that we no longer have to fear it, to wait for it.

But Sugarfoot, as long as I am alive I will always champion you, my friend. Every time I talk about cats with a friend, I mention you, something that you did or loved to do, all of the crazy stuff you had a blast doing. It's easy talking about those things, and they bring back such fond memories. What's harder to talk about is how you just "got" me. There's just no explaining that connection. It's something felt, and no words I could ever write could begin describe it. It would be like trying to describe the Mona Lisa, the Sistine Chapel. You just had the best heart, my friend. Simply the best. And that's the only way I know how to describe it.

I've seen you in so many dreams over the past four years, and when I have them, I just never want them to end. And when I do have these dreams, I remember them in vivid detail and think about them all throughout the next day. They make me smile. They make me believe you are okay. They make me know I'll see you on the other side some day, my friend. My bud.

You take care now, and one day I *will* see you again and we'll create together new experiences, and there'll be no end to them this time. No end.

JNR