G’day Gorgeous!
I been looking for the opportunity to talk to you about something that I’ve been reflecting on, I’ve not been home in nearly two weeks and when I returned home my beautiful little dog whom I’d had for eleven and a half years was really sick, he’s been sick for about a year and one of the things that has amazed me was the number of people that have different reactions with regards to grief and loss.
So I came home on a Wednesday night, it was very obvious to me that my dog wasn’t his usual self and I had to take him to the Vet the following day, his issues were not resolvable and we tried all sort of things but his body basically said enough was enough and I had to put him down the next day, which was very sad but he was eleven and a half and had a really good life. I always said that he must have been in his last reincarnation. He must been ready for nirvana because you know your last life, right before you reach nirvana has to be the best one. He had a pretty good life, but the impact even though I knew he was sick, even though I knew that his health was deteriorating and I knew beyond a doubt that I could not keep him in the space where he was suffering.
It still was a really difficult experience and a number of people have reacted to it in different ways. I’m always surprised to find that there is some people who don’t have the same level of emotional connection to animals as I do, and you know some other people who seem to have highly sensitive kind of response to animals, some people have lost horses and had really big reactions to it, some people can’t necessarily understand that because these animals are really big and it’s not like you can have them curl up on your lap but feels a little bit different.
But my main issue around that was to understand grief and loss, grief and loss happens to us regardless of our circumstances. The worst thing that we can do to ourselves is not to take the time to acknowledge that a person or an entity that gives you some level of emotional connection is now no longer available to you in your life. This brings with it the sense of hollowness, emptiness, like something is missing, it’s a key component and something that people just misunderstand and often down play.
We think it shouldn’t be this important or I shouldn’t be so upset about it. In reality a lot of us have a connection with our animals that is very safe. We feel that we can be true to ourselves with an animal and that animal is going to love us anyway. Particularly strong in the case of dogs.
So I just wanted to highlight the importance of recognising that grief and loss is a key component and whether it’s an animal or somebody who you had in your life. We go through a loss and grief process when we lose a partner even if it was just your decision to step back from a relationship, we still go through a grieving process.
That’s just acknowledging that sometimes you just feel a bit flat, you don’t necessarily want to engage in doing things with people, you find that you’re a little bit more sensitive, really easily upset or life just sort of temporarily lost its mojo. It’s a really important thing to be aware of and to understand, give yourself that little bit of space and time to just reflect on a good times. I think about the good times that I had with that beautiful little dog, but also acknowledge the loss, that’s part of the grieving process to allow yourself to reflect back on the good times.
They’re not all good times and I get that – especially in a relationship. But it’s a really important process and if we just try to ignore it and pretend that it didn’t happened and move past it or pretend that it didn’t actually had an emotionally impact, we actually do ourselves a disservice. We make it more difficult for ourselves in the future.
Ok so that’s my musing for this week.
I hope to see you soon.
