If you ever love an animal, there are three days in your life you will always remember.

The first is a day blessed with happiness when you bring home your your young new friend.  You may have spent weeks deciding on a breed.  You may have asked numerous opinions of many vets or done long research in finding a breeder.  Or, perhaps in a fleeting moment,  you may have choosen that silly looking mutt in a shelter, simply because something in its eyes reached your heart.  But when you bring that chosen pet home and watched it explore and claim its special place in your hall or front room and when it brushes up against you for the first time, it instills a feeling of pure love you will carry with you through the many years to come.

The second day will occur eight or nine or ten years later.  It will be a day like any other.  Routine and unexecptional.  But for a suprising instant, you will look at your long time friend  and see age where you once saw youth.  You will see slow deliberate steps where you once saw energy.  And you will see sleep where you once saw activity.  So you will adjust your friends diet and you may add a pill or two to her food.  And you may feel a growing fear deep within yourself which bodes of a coming emptiness.  And you will feel this uneasy feeling on and off until the third day arives.

And on this day, if your friend and God have not decided for you, you will be faced with making a decision of your own on behalf of your lifelong friend and with the guidence of your own deepest spirit.  But whichever way your friend eventually leaves you, you will feel alone as a single star in the dark night.  If you are wise, you will let the tears flowas freely and as often as they must.  And if you are typical, you will find that not many in your circle of family and friends will be able to understand your grief or comfort you.  But if you are true to the love of the pet you cherished through the many joy filled years, you may find that a soul, a bit smaller in size than your own, seems to walk with you at times during the lonely days to come.  And, at moments, when you least  expect anything out of the ordinary to happen, you may feel something brush against your leg, very, very lightly.  And looking down at the place where your dear, perhaps dearest friend used to lay, you will remember those three significant days.  The memory will most likely be painful and leave an ache in your heart.  As time passes, the ache will come and go as it has a life of its own.  You will both reject it and embrace it and it may confuse you.  If you embrace it, it will deepen you.  Either way, it still will be an ache.

But there will be, I assure you, a fourth day, when, along with the memory of your pet and piercing through the heaviness in your heart, there will come a realization that belongs only to you.  It will be as unique and strong as our relationship with each animal we have loved and lost.  This realization takes the form of Living Love.  Like the heavenly scent of a rose that remains after the pedals have wilted, this love will remain and grow and be there for us to remember.  It is a love we haved earned.  It is the legacy our pets leave us when they go.  And it is a gift we may keep with us as long as we live.  It is a love which is ours alone.  And until we ourselves leave, perhaps to join our beloved pets, it is a love we will always posses.




By Martin Scot Kosins
author of "Maya's First Rose"
Living Love