Dear Hrishab:

What an amazing post, how deep, insightful, soulful and painful.

1. About money: “Maybe being in an average income family was the cause…his death could be totally avoidable, if we were a little alert and wealthy… We couldn’t afford the medicine at the right time.. We couldn’t get a better treatment, because of money”

2. About euhanasia: “In my country ‘India’, it is illegal to euthanize any living being..  I wished that he could die quickly. His pain was unbearable for him as well as us. We were ready to pay our family vet for putting him down. But he rejected it. Maybe the money was less”.

3. About death and god: “I remember the moment when he turned from a living to a non-living. He showed me that death is a curse not a blessing. He showed me that animals do have a soul, but it is more pure than ours.. He showed me god was never in humans… Our god left with him”.

My thoughts: you ended your post with, second line from the end: “Sorry for the inconvenience”- it is indeed inconvenient to think of the unpleasant, or  inconvenient reality. And we often say or hear convenient thinking aimed at covering and dismissing the inconvenient reality, such things as: oh, he (the dead) is in a better place now. Or he will keep on living in the memories of others. In reality, the dead are gone. Simply gone.

And we who witness the death of others, we will be gone as well. But we don’t like to think of our death, I don’t. It is  indeed inconvenient.

Reality is that a lot of people get sick and die because of lack of money. Reality is that a lot of people get sick and die even though they have unlimited money. Reality is it hurts so much to see someone we love, human or pet, die. Reality is that our pain will not last forever, because we will be gone too.

Reality is the suffering and death of your pet Fluffy was a result of multitude of factors of which your lack of alertness that you mentioned was only one factor. Other factors: euthanasia not being practiced in India (unless one has a lot of money to go around this rule of conduct in India), all the people who play a part in the status of your household economics, from politicians to local and international business practices. There are lots and lots of people who are responsible to Fluffy’s pain and death.

About “god was never in humans”- honesty, being loving and lovable, that is always present in a human that is being born, and in the young child, always.

Then life happens, older humans hurting the young child, betraying the young child’s trust. Some betrayed children become hard, without that soul you referred to (“animals do have a soul”). Soulless humans hurt other humans, and animals, unnecessarily and badly.

I think we love our pets because we trust them to not hurt us, we know they never have such an intention. Unlike humans. And we see how they trust us, and we are afraid we are not  worthy of their complete, perfect trust.

It is a whole lot to live up to, this complete, perfect trust, isn’t  it?

anita