TheBanyanTree: Merlin

[smack58 at nycap.rr.com]

Great, Monique.  You said it all and very well, I might add.

Sharon


---- 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