My friend Ross has completed a very touching series about pet euthanasia on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/rosstaylorphoto/?hl=en).  I’ve known Ross since junior high or high school.  He is an incredibly feeling person, and I can tell in reviewing these posts that he feels every emotion in the rooms where he is watching these animals pass and watching their human loved ones – including their veterinarian care providers – grieve.  He talked about the paw print people sometimes receive when an animal passes – Pete and I have one of those for our beloved Zenith, whom we lost in September 2016.  We were not blessed to be with Zenith when he left us, but we were fortunate enough to have a vet who was also a friend, and we were comforted that she could be the one to send him across the rainbow, or whatever the saying is.  It’s a peace and a closure I wish we had with our still-missing Julius – although I don’t wish for Julius to be dead.  I wish for someone to find him and contact me on moving day as I relocate into a house, because I would of course then go to him and he would return to us and we would make it up to him forever.

But I digress.

One of Ross’s posts mentioned a friend who said she was with her friend during her dog’s euthanasia because she couldn’t let her go through it alone, and I remembered that my mom had a dog (Buttons) who had cancer and she had decided to have him put to sleep rather than have him endure treatment.  She thought treatment would be frightening for him.  I don’t think it was going to cure him, and he wouldn’t know what was happening, and it would just prolong his life rather than improve it.  (That kind of reminds me of Dad in the end, too, now that I write it.)  I don’t think Mom asked me to go to the vet with her.  I think I volunteered, so that she would not be alone.  It was one of my rare Super Daughter moments.

When Mom died, I thought it was the first time I learned to be unafraid of the physical presence of death.  I thought I was sort of forced into it, because she died and we were by her side and wouldn’t have been anywhere else.  But in reality, it was animals who taught me how to handle death.  My friend Nicole’s cat who got hit by a car and I removed it from the street so she wouldn’t have to.  Countless pets I buried, some who returned from the grave thanks to other critters who didn’t know or care to leave them alone.  There was a cat whose exhumation I insisted on just to confirm it was my cat (I hadn’t been the one to find him dead), and then I reburied him.  (Bless that stranger who humored me in the pouring rain with that task.)  Buttons and my cat Schatten, whose medically induced passings I attended and whom I hope I helped comfort in their final moments.

And even before that, I remember what most would call an “inappropriate” conversation with my dad about embalming at my grandmother’s funeral.  He was just explaining to me why she didn’t feel like a regular person.  I don’t remember asking…I just remember him telling me about the embalming process.  And I appreciated it, because she was the first deceased person I ever remember seeing or touching.

There is a stark contrast between a deceased human and a deceased animal.  It is less expected in our normal lives to see “a dead body” outside of a funeral, but we see dead animals all the time.  The universal pain comes with the grief we feel when a person or an animal we love dies.  How we respond to a corpse or blood or vomit or poop – all of that varies from person to person and from situation to situation.  I know parents who gag at bodily excrement.  I don’t think I mind any of it, but I also have a poor sense of smell.  I’ve been puked on, peed on, pooped on, bled on, and died on.  I don’t “mind” any of it – although obviously my preference would be for every living being to be alive and healthy.  I think I should have been a nurse, but God didn’t give me the math and science smarts, so I guess that isn’t where He wanted me.  I’m a helper, though.

I am comfortable in an office.  It is easy (usually).

But I am also comfortable with sickness and death – which is not easy for everyone.  Is this a calling?

How do I know?

Where do I go?