Dearest @umi
I’m so so so sorry for your loss. There are no words I can share to make you feel better, but I will pass on the two things that had an impact on me.
When I was inconsolable about the loss of my first cat, my mom told me to remember that my cat feels no pain and I’m the only one suffering. Such a simple and obvious statement, right?, but it helped me tremendously remembering that I’m carrying this pain/grief alone and my beloved pet is spared from those feelings.
Recently, similar to what @Deborah_Hall said… my vet said the level of pain you feel is directly correlated to the depth of your love you had for them. That also made my ‘seemingly’ abnormal level of pain seem like a good thing… and yeah, if I loved them less, I would also would have felt less pain when they departed
And because you feel this so deeply is also why you make a perfect person to rescue another animal. But, like you, I will take a long break after my current 3 go because I have basically given up a lot of my life to care for them (they are very very old and in order to give them a great quality of life, I need to be here to do things for them, like daily sub q fluids etc).
This doesn’t help your situation because you want to be free from pet responsibilities for a while, but I know that the level of despair I had was very different when I have lost a pet when there was no other pet in the house. It’s not that I loved or missed them less, but I when I had other pets to focus on, the house didn’t feel as empty. When I lost my first two cats, I said I’ll never have another pet again because the loss was just too great.
Every night, for a year, when I got in bed, I shed tears when I didn’t hear my cat do his routine of climbing up his stairs to sleep on my pillow above my head. Over time the tears were less and less, and then there was a rescue situation, so against my firm stance of never again, I wound up with more cats… then all the sudden, my home felt like a place I wanted to be again and it did help me recover from the loss of the one I mentioned.
I’m significantly younger than my brother and sister. I consider them my best friends and we are in contact almost daily. Due to my heart disease and the way I felt, I always thought I’d go before them so I never much worried, but now that my health has completely turned around due to rapa and other things all of you have helped me with, I now worry that the natural order of things could take over and I will be alive and have to watch them go, which is scary as hell for me to even think about. I bug them to take rapa for my purely selfish reasons, but so far, no movement there. And like @blsm, most of my friends are also older than I am. Maybe the two of us can make a plan to hang out :). Cronos Tempi has shared he has made an effort to make younger friends to ensure his wife won’t be alone if he should go first.
And @desertshores it’s sweet to hear you speak of your love for animals and your dear departed soulmate. It is difficult, but I’m obviously with you because I’m vegan 100% for the animals and little to do with any health benefit, which just might be a happy accident. It’s easy for me now, but yes, it was difficult at the beginning. I started off eating fish and dairy, but then eventually deleted fish… and then back and forth on dairy a bit, but now am off that for many years too. And while I get why you didn’t do it, I certainly couldn’t, but you are exactly the type of person who should be in animal farming because you would make sure your animals lived the best life they could. In fact, if all farmers were like you, I might not have gone vegan in the first place.
