Sarah Goes To A Funeral

Our sweet baby boy

 A few years ago we lost our family dog - Oscar.

 Like so many family dogs Oscar got sick. Really sick. There was nothing we could do, but let him go peacefully.

 I never had a pet growing up. My mother was  always allergic. I had a few fish. They were underwhelming.

 Oscar was our first real pet. He came to us one cold night during the Academy Awards (thus his name) and warmed our hearts with his charming overbite and deep love of bacon. My mother fell in love with him after only two hours and suddenly we had a dog. Oscar was a gem - who magically didn't trigger her allergies. Saying "turtle" would send Oscar into a barking frenzy. My brother and I loved to mimic Oscars sweet bark that sounded kind a lot like a ferocious chicken. Oscar got two walks a day from my mother who adored the ground Oscar pooped on. We would tease my mother that Oscar had quickly become the favorite child, because he was. If I pooped on the dinning room rug I would have been banished and told never to return. He had a million nicknames - Oscar Meyer, Oscardoodle, Oscardo, Oscar the Grouch, Baby Snuggles, etc.

So dapper. This is Oscar on "Oscar Night".

When Oscar got sick I drove down from St. Louis to be with my family. Holding Oscar in our arms we drove to the vet where a very kind and understanding lady injected death serum into our beloved fury friend while we all cried hysterically. Then we carried our lifeless dog to a grave out in the country at our friend Gale's house and covered him with dirt and cried some more. It was brutal. It was a horrible horrible day. Standing around the kitchen like zombies we hardly spoke. There was no drinking or merriment that night like usual. We were (barely) walking dead.

I never wanted to have a pet ever again. EVER. In fact, I never wanted to love anything ever again. Losing someone you love is just too freaking painful. Then, it hit me. Like a Flaming Lips song, it hit me.

Oh dear God, I'm going to have to go through this agony for every single being I love. My cat. My bro. My Mom. My friends. My co-workers. My kids. Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Every one I know, some day, will die. Mother of poo why have I loved so many freaking people?!?! It's like setting myself up for a lifetime of pain and torture!!!! I could lose anyone at any minute. Oh dear God! Why have I done this to myself?!???!!! WHY?!?!?!?!?!

Losing a dog was hard enough, but now I was faced with the hard truth that I was sooner or later going to lose everyone I ever loved. It shut me down. This was NOT my first experience with death, but it was one of the first times I lost someone I chose. I couldn't choose my family and therefore their deaths didn't bring up this feeling for me. But this new found sadness shed light on a painful realization - the more beings I choose to love the more beings I will have to mourn when I lose them.

Sitting at the kitchen counter with my mom I expressed this new realization. My Mom, as always, had simple yet profound wisdom to share. The exact wordage escapes me, but I remember the message and it was basically - You can't run away from love just because you might one day lose it. A life without love isn't much of a life at all.


But there's that moment when you lose someone you loved and it's so painful and heartbreaking that you think to yourself "I can't ever go through this again". This has happened to me after every break-up I've ever had. I say to myself and anyone standing nearby "I AM NEVER EVER FALLING IN LOVE EVER EVER AGAIN!!!!!" but then after twenty pints of ice cream and roughly one hundred bottles of wine my heart is magically healed and I'm ready to take on love again.

It's strange. Even though you know every relationship you will ever take on will eventually end in death, it's impossible to stay away from them. Because love is magical and wonderful and worth the pain...mostly.

A few weeks ago Rebecca called me with one of the greatest surprises of my life - she had rescued eight kittens from certain death and we would be having a KITTEN PARTY all weekend. Six two-week-old kittens came into my life along with their ten-month-old mother and six-month-old friend. These babies were precious. We snuggled them and cleaned them and fed them and watched them learn to walk and named them and ooohhh and awwwed over them. Various children came over to play with the kittens and it was both very stressful and delightful watching young children experience the magic of the first weeks of a kitten's life.

 

Two favorites emerged - Louie, a large extra fluffy kitten with bright blue eyes and an affinity for post-eating snuggles and Monica, the scrappiest of the bunch with a tenacious spirit and a meow that would even pierce God's ears. We loved all the cats, but those were our early favorites. We would all lie on the giant king size bed and let the kittens walk over us, revelling in their sweet innocence. It was picturesque.

Then Tuesday morning, something happened, Rebecca texted me....Louie was dead. It came out of no where, she was a healthy little eater with such a sweet heart. Rebecca was beside herself. We were no longer having a kitten party. Now we were planning a kitten funeral.

Rebecca set me on the task of explaining Louie's death to her two children - Soren (age 5) and Margot (age 2). I'm a children's therapist, so putting hard topics into kid-friendly terms comes easily to me. But having to say over and over again that Louie was "never coming back" and we were burying her "in the ground" made me tear up. Death isn't an easy concept for a 30 year old, let alone a 2 year old.

Soren and I picked out flowers (and wine) at the grocery store and we decorated a cardboard box for Louie. Soren drew a picture of Rebecca for the resting box so Louie could always be looking at her face. We folded up some white satin for a soft resting surface. I painted a grave marker for Louie. For a break in the sadness Nathaniel (Rebecca's husband) and I sang "Memory" from CATS...Rebecca found this unamusing. We all have our unique ways of saying goodbye. I can only be serious for so long.

With lit candles all around we laid Louie in her resting box, placed her in a deep hole Nathaniel dug in the backyard, covered her with dirt and said a nice word. We laid the flowers over Louie's grave and placed the marker in the dirt so we could always remember our dear friend Louie.

It was sad, but kind of beautiful. Death is a part of this sad, beautiful, hard, confusing, magical life.


Through her tears Rebecca cried out an all too familiar statement, "What was the point if she was just going to die? I'm never doing this again!"

Then I shared the words of wisdom my mom had shared with me after Oscar died. Louie would have died alone starving the cold, but instead she knew great love and sweet snuggles, because Rebecca cared enough to rescue eight abandoned cats.



There are various beliefs about death in my family and circle of friends, but I don't think what you believe or don't believe about "the afterlife" matters. Not really. If angels or reincarnation or heaven or reunification with loved ones brings you comfort then I think that's wonderful. Go with it. Who am I to say these things aren't real or true? I can only remember this life. I only know about the here and now - and honestly I barely know about that. To me, it's not what you think about death that's really important, it's what you think about life and how you treat the living. And I think life is about love and therefore choose to love at (almost) every opportunity. Though love has cost me great pain and heartache and sorrow, nothing has ever brought me such great joy or hope or fulfilment as love.




Rest In Peace little Louie and know that you were loved.