Life, Love, Death, Repeat.

Today was a very interesting day. I essentially woke up to my mom telling me that we needed to go bury a friend's dog. The dog was young, but had epileptic seizures throughout its life, and this time it was just too much. We went with the lady (my mom's friend) to the vet where they brought the dog in to the room and euthanized her on the lady's lap. It was odd seeing the life snuffed out of a creature in a matter of seconds... the pulsing of the seizures just faded away... the breathing just halted... and the heart just gave up. A nurse then came and wrapped the dog up in her blanket and the lady held the lifeless carcass as we drove back to her house. We dug the grave, lowered the dog in, said a little prayer, and just laid the dirt back over.

I have thankfully never had to deal with death in my family. I have obviously had family members die, but they have always been geographically and personally far from me. Oddly enough I have only really been around death twice now and I have barely or not known either person / dog. It is weird how we are so afraid of death, we do everything we can to stop it, we make people who probably don't want to or aren't even capable of wanting to live stay with us to make us feel better. But in the end, death is the most natural part of the life cycle, it is the only part that is guaranteed and shared by every life form.

Realizing this brings light to a lot of life's situations. When something is gone, remember the good parts about it, don't hold on to it until all you remember is the pain of loss. I have made that mistake and have faced a lot of unneeded pain because if it. I suppose the good thing about death is that it has either happened or it hasn't, where as many of the similar cases in life aren't so easy, such as relationships.

In the end, I have decided that life is too short to hold on to the dead dogs, somehow we just have to grieve and move past and not let too much of the rest of the world pass us by.