#106: What makes a grown man willing to cry on national TV? His dog.
What our pets teach us about the yin and yang of love and loss.
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As a kid, I was never the begging type.
I wouldn’t pound my parents with incessant requests. No pleading. No pouting. I was persistent, but at a low frequency. My strategy worked: I often got my requests at least considered, and sometimes fulfilled. Which is how I ended up with Tasha.
Tasha was a shelter kitty, petite and gray, with fuzzy-sweater fur that made you want to run your hand up and down her back all day. She was perfect.
And two weeks after we got her… she was gone.
Unbeknownst to us, she was ill when we brought her home. We had a few love-filled days, followed by a week of decline, then a quiet burial at the tree line in the backyard. I was ten.
I was reminded of this first faceplant into loss when I heard the story of Ben.
Ben was the beloved pup of Kirk Herbstreit, a well known college football Game Day anchor and analyst. Kirk brought Ben everywhere, at first to keep him company while chasing football teams around the country, and then because Ben had become famous in his own right, just by being so dang lovable.
Unfortunately, Ben’s journey on the planet ended last week at age ten, when he passed away from cancer.
In a video my brother-in-law sent me (Richie knows I’m a sucker for anything grief and/or love related), Kirk is at his regular seat with the other Game Day analysts. His longtime colleague, Lee Corso, is by his side. As Kirk attempts to intro a tribute to Ben, he finds himself unable to speak. He is overcome. Heaving shoulders follow. Lee reaches across to touch Kirk’s arm. The other commentators lean in. And the video tape rolls with a sweet tribute to Ben.
This is what happens when we love.
We lose.
Not the ‘loser’ kind of losing, like getting picked last for kickball or falling face first into your mashed potatoes in the middle school cafeteria. The winning kind. The kind that proves just how deep our love went.
Loss doesn’t exist without love coming first. And yet, we still think losing something is a sign of failure and grieving is a sign of weakness? Please. Pets prove this isn’t the case.
It takes guts to cry on national television like Kirk did! (And on ESPN no less, not even Oprah!)
Loss isn’t a consolation prize you get when you mess up. It’s a sign that you’ve done something right, in my opinion. That you gave your heart to a person, animal, relationship, job so deeply that losing it feels like losing part of yourself… Losing feels like dying.
This is what love asks of us —
Are you willing to care more about this other creature than you care about protecting yourself? Are you willing to risk the bone-deep ache of grief in order to feel epic amounts of love in this relationship? Are you willing to trade plain Jane comfort and security for firework explosions of aliveness — both heart filling and heart breaking?
Loss is a feature not a bug of aliveness.
And our pets, more than any other kinds of loss, give us the chance to practice this over and over and over again, because their life spans are frustratingly, achingly short.
We think we have no experience with loss.
No experience making it through the really tough stuff. But we all do. A pet, a job, a dream, a love affair — we all know what it’s like to say goodbye to something we desperately want to keep.
It sucks, but on some level we were all built to do it — to learn to love again.
Just to be clear, I’m not comparing the death of a person to the death of a pet. Because I think ‘comparing’ losses is total bullshit, and only serves to make our ‘smaller’ losses unacceptable, and therefore hidden.
What I am saying is, if you’ve ever cared for an animal in your life, from a gerbil to a goat, a parakeet to a python, a Maine coon to a mastiff, you have loved and lost. You’ve felt that bittersweet feeling, and you would not have traded the love to avoid the pain. In fact, the love lives on in spectacular ways. As Kirk says of animals in his tribute “The warmth they give us never goes away.”
Let’s tell ourselves a different story. Let’s tell ourselves the truth. That our animals have not only taught us how to love, but also how to lose. Then how to love again. And again. And again.
A few months after Tasha died, we got another cat.
Then eventually, another.
(Our radioactive goldfish, who went by the cutting-edge name Goldie, was not exactly giving off a huge amount of love from her algae coated bowl on top of the television set.)
We didn’t stop loving because we lost. We didn’t pull up the ladders, circle the wagons, make our lives smaller by vowing never to have a pet again.
We opened our broken hearts to something new. We said “yes” to love and loss all over again.
And if nothing else, knowing that Tasha’s and Ben’s and Fido’s and Mr. Whiskers’ life will eventually come to an end makes us love a little more fiercely while they’re still around.
I don’t want a life that feels like a steady state of predictable numbness. I will choose the love, licks, and cuddles every time. I will choose to be broken, knowing that first comes opening… and once I heal, opening will come around again.
To our pets,
My new favorite. Thanks for writing about what is so hard to speak.