August 21, 2007

Thursday evening last week, the 16th of August, 2007, I lost the fur love of my life, my Maine Coon cat Mr. Bear. He had gone in to the vet’s to get an abscessed tooth pulled and when the blood work came back before doing the surgery it was discovered that he was in kidney distress and failure. Rather than keep him on antibiotics for the month or so that he would have left to live, I made the decision to let him go instead. He was about 15-16 years in age and had been in diminishing health for the last 6 months or so.

And in that moment of making the decision to have him put down, I knew that it was right, hard though it was for me to let him go. I had been aware of this time coming to me for over two years, and especially so in the last two weeks, and while you can never truly be prepared, I walked into the knowing that it was time for this change for both of us. Various channels that I’d had over the last two years had shared with me that this fur person was tired and did desire to leave this incarnation. That was never easy to hear.

I chose to have him cremated and did not keep his ashes.

In the immediate days following I went through a type of personal hell that I have never experienced before. It took me a couple of days to fully appreciate what his death was all about and I am still learning and perceiving what this means for me at this time in my life and the gifts that his passing have brought to me.

If you have the opportunity to listen to the Tobias Q&A Pets CD, I highly recommend it, especially if you have any special pet companions. I forgot that I had it until yesterday and listening to it once again brought me a measure of peace and surety about what I was doing and experiencing that I desperately needed. This CD is about those very special pet companions, the ones who are so much more than simply an animal that shares your life and journey with you. These are the ones that have shared potentially every life you’ve ever had on this earth!

Initially with the loss of my beloved cat, I felt a personal loss of self and identity that was horrendous. I had extreme moments of panic and anxiety attacks that seemed to come from nowhere and I experienced such fear that I would virtually be paralyzed at times. Strange words kept repeating themselves in my head, “who am I without him?” and “I don’t know how to live without him!” that were being dredged up from some place deep inside me. It took a couple of days to come back to myself so as to see what this was all about as it seemed to be so much more than what I would expect to experience from the situation.

As a child, I grew up in a family that shared no love between any of the members. There were four kids as well as two adults and the only love in the family came through the animals, primarily a series of Siamese cats. What I have experienced over the last few days is the soul integration of those little girls who fragmented off and left during those three times when the family cat was put to sleep due to illness or something else. And in this integration I have once more gone through the full blown loss and grief that those little girl aspects of myself felt with these losses. This was all brought home to me at the same time over the last few days, just like it was suddenly happening all over again. These little ones ranged in age from 1½ years of age to about 5 years… ages when external experiences have huge and lasting impacts.