We had to put our cat Kenzie to sleep
at the end of last week. There was nothing else to be done, not in
fairness to her and her quality of life. She had been born with a
birth defect that was going to limit the number of days she would be
around to bring happiness to those about her. That was a fact,
immutable and harsh. She did not have a full supply of intestine and
that was enough to end her life way too soon.
Obviously, this has been very hard of
Sheri and me. I hope you know how much a family pet can make
difficult situations bearable, hard times less so. That would be a
terrible thing to miss out on.
We got Kenzie from the Humane
Association in October, just as, unbeknown to us, we were about to
enter a difficult phase of my illness and life in general. Sheri had
been ready to bring a new cat into our home much sooner, but I was
resistant, still suffering from the loss of our Samantha. Still, it
was time.
And what a great decision it was. There
were times that having Kenzie in our home and in our lives made
feeling bad, or sorry for ourselves, virtually impossible...
My point here is not to be maudlin. If
you are a pet lover, you know only too well how disheartening the
loss can be. I'd rather deal with fairness, loss, hope, faith... you
know, all the big ones.
To me, the biggest issue with believing
life should be fair is that it makes you think stupid thoughts and if
you can think 'em, you can say 'em. For example, Sheri has type one
diabetes and I have an incurable form of cancer. We were doing OK
with it, and we were able to bring Kenzie in to brighten our lives,
and she did. Given that, does it seem fair to you that she would then
be taken from us? Does it seem fair to you that she was born without
a genuine chance to grow old? Probably not. But, if I'm not looking
for life to be fair, I'm not having these thoughts; I'm not saying
these things.
My sense of hope has taken a battering
lately. No matter what the doctors try, I feel nauseous every day. My
wife struggles with her diabetes. And while the big things are hard
enough to take, it's the drip, drip, drip of the endless small things
that can drive one daft.
How did you feel the last time you were
trying to sleep and one of the faucets in the bathroom kept dripping,
just one drop at a time? And it was a night when you were exhausted
and couldn't stop thinking and every “bad” thing you had ever
done picked that night to show up for your nightly thought parade.
Each and every loss, big or small, showed up right in your face.
“Think about me!!!” “Hey, remember me??? Wasn't this
horrible?!?!?” “Life sucks and then you die. You know that now,
right??!!”
And drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip.
You're wide awake, a scream forming in
your mouth, brain and heart. You wish you had a pressure valve like
the one Popeye used, just as you thought his muscles were going to
blow up.
But, you don't.
Fair? Don't make me laugh. Life is
really hard. You have to go through it each day with absolutely no
guarantee that “things” are going to get better; that those four
bad things that happened are going to be evened out by four really
cool, wonderful things. Life is an adult dose, an adult portion,
brothers and sisters.
So why bother, right? In this latest
round of heavy thinking, I've come to see that we “bother”
because it's what we do. It's what makes people wonderful,
exceptional. Show me a person, any person, and I'll show you someone
who is doing the best they can with what they've got... each and
every day. It doesn't mean you're going to like them, or that they're
going to be anyone's idea of successful. It just means they're going
to be brave, whether they know it or not, and whether they want to be
or not.
Right now we miss our Kenzie so bad it
hurts. But, we've already started focusing on the happiness she
brought into our lives; the happiness we knew because of her. And
that's why, ultimately, life being fair or not, doesn't really
matter. Added up, we're probably going to find more happiness than
sorrow; more laughs than tears. I guess I can live with that.
There are a variety of versions of
the story that gives this blog its name. The pony is the constant in
all of them. A man is on his way to a party when he comes across a
young boy shoveling ass over tea kettle at an enormous mountain of
manure. The man asks the child if he wouldn't rather go with him to
the party than shovel all that poop. The kid says, “No way man.
With all that poop... there must be a pony in there somewhere
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