TheBanyanTree: Merlin

[Pam Lawley]

more of Monique's wise and wonderful writing...

I think that what you  just wrote should be Tree'd!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 6:51 PM, Monique Colver <monique.colver at gmail.com>wrote:

> On another list yesterday there was talk of lost pets, dead pets, missing
> pets, and someone said how sad she's been since her dog had died.
>
> It is sad.
>
> Someone else said she understood, she had a cat she'd been very fond of,
> and she'd had to leave it at her brother's farm, out in the country,
> because she couldn't take it where she was going (wherever that was), and
> the cat had gone missing, and never been found again. She said she'd never
> get over it.
>
> The first one woman responded with, "There's no way that's comparable with
> losing a pet who dies! Your cat is still out there somewhere, while my dog
> is dead and will never come back. You can't possibly understand what it's
> like to lose a pet that's been with us so long and that we were so attached
> to, and who suffered the last year of her life!"
>
> Really?
>
> I responded, because I'm unable to keep my mouth shut a fair amount of the
> time, about how we can't compare pain. I can't say my pain is more or less
> than your pain, and why would I? Why would I care? Does it make me feel
> better to say I experience more pain, or does it make me feel worse to
> think that no one could possibly understand the pain I'm going through? And
> why? Does feeling more pain than anyone else give one special privileges?
> Does it provide a degree of sympathy I wouldn't get otherwise? "Oh, I'm so
> sorry," are we to reply, "Your pain is much greater than anything we've
> experienced, and we are so sad for you."
>
> Perhaps I didn't phrase it quite like that, though I did say we can't
> compare pain, just like we can't compare joy.
>
> The first woman said that if a pet of hers goes missing, she assumes that
> someone needed them more, so it doesn't bother her nearly so much.
>
> "To conduct grisly experiments?" I wanted to ask, but didn't. Who knows
> what happens to a missing pet?
>
> Instead I said, "That's you, and as for me, I'd worry incessantly about
> what was happening to them -- were they suffering, were they hurt, were
> they lost? Everyone is different."
>
> The second woman responded this morning and said we were a bunch of
> insensitive mean people and she flounced off. She said we are also
> egotistical.
>
> I responded that yes, I am quite egotistical. She would be too if she were
> me. Too bad for her she's not.
>
> Okay, I didn't say that, other than in my head.
>
> We can't compare pets. My pets happen to be the most fabulous pets on the
> planet, and the fact that you think you have the most fabulous pets on the
> planet doesn't affect my opinion at all. I still know I have the best pets.
> And when one of us loses a pet, we will be heartbroken, whether said pet
> dies, goes missing, is taken by aliens (of the interplanetary variety.
> There is no more or less heartbroken, because when a heart is broken it
> doesn't work, and there are no degrees. It's not a competition (which is
> what I said to the rude woman who thought her pain superior), and if it
> were, no one wins, so what's the point?
>
> My pets are under orders to stay the same as they are, and to stop aging.
> Since they disobey all my other orders ("Honey, stop digging in my trash!"
> "Ash, get out of the kitchen!") I'm pretty sure they'll disobey this one
> too. But I have to feel like I gave it a shot, don't I?
>
>
>
> Monique Colver
>