Losing a Pet – The Heartbreak & The Healing

I want to talk about love. And I want to talk about loss. Because to love means you will inevitably experience loss. It is unavoidable, inescapable. A certainty.

This won’t be a light read so now is the time to pick up you coffee and walk away if you are looking for a bright and breezy start to your day. But I’m hoping, if you stick with me, my story might strike a chord, ease a pain, lighten the load of your own burden of grief by knowing you are not alone. We all walk the journey of love and loss together.

Because into each dolce vita some pain must fall.

Be still, sad heart, and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

September 27^th 2019

This day marks the one-year anniversary of the passing of our beloved dog Rocco. To many of you who know us well but live a continent away, this may come as a surprise.

We couldn’t bear sharing this news on social media. In fact, we can barely talk out it even now without crying. Still. That is the impact the life of this little, scruffy mutt with buckteeth and a crooked nose has had on us. He is unforgettable, irreplaceable.

He is a piece of our heart that was cast adrift on that unforgiving day – a part we have been quietly, sometimes desperately trying to find ever since and put back in its proper place. But before I talk about how we said goodbye, I want to share with you our first hello. How this quirky, sensitive, sweet animal soul came into our lives.

Please read the post in this link and then continue with the rest of the story below. https://ladolcevitadiaries.com/puppy-love-life-with-rocco/

The beginning of the end

Rocco spent his whole life dealing with one health problem after another. His poor start in life cast a shadow he could never outrun. The little guy had teeth and gum issues that made it difficult for him to eat, chronic abrasions in his throat, severe arthritis, testicular cancer and in the last year of his life, blocked salivary ducts that meant weekly trips to the vet to have his swollen glands drained.

We refused to see the obvious – Rocco’s time was running out.

I continued to make him home-made meals every morning – chicken (his favorite) with rice, turkey sausages with noodles, making sure to mush it up so he could swallow. Peter continued to take him on his morning and afternoon walks in the hills around Paciano.

But Rocco was slowing down. He found it difficult to make it up the final, short steep hill. Then miraculously, he would race down the street to the car, leaping like a puppy. Our hearts soared. “He’s okay, it’s just old age. He’s fine. ” Words we clung to when heard him groan while he slept, fall back when he tried to jump on the sofa. We willed him to be okay.

We did everything we could to keep him alive, telling ourselves we were doing it for him. But I know now, we were doing it equally for ourselves. We couldn’t let go. We put him through an aggressive operation to remove the blocked ducts. For months, I gave him 2X a day antibiotic pills that needed to be placed down his throat since they were too big to get hide in his food. He stoically sat through it all – the weekly vet visits, the shots, the pills, the operations. He knew we weren’t ready.

September 22nd 2018

A glorious fall day. A light breeze washed over us as we had our morning coffee on the terrace. Rocco ran around on cat patrol, chasing all the wild felines out of our garden. He was recovering from his gland operation and seemed like his old self on this day. Then he jumped on the terrace and yelped. He slowly made his way over to me and sat by my feet. I couldn’t see anything wrong. I thought maybe he’d been stung by a wasp hidden in a fallen fig or worse, by a snake. We looked him over and saw nothing out of the ordinary.

By the afternoon, Rocco wasn’t moving. At all. He didn’t seem in any obvious pain. He just wasn’t moving. We called the vet who by now was on our speed dial. He said to bring him in. We did. The vet confirmed there were no puncture wounds and couldn’t figure out what could cause this sudden, dramatic change. A series of x rays and ultrasounds later, we were told the vertebrae in Rocco’s neck had fused together. The only possible solution was an operation to repair the fusion but there was no guarantee it would work. It had likely taken a long, painful time to get to that point and that final jump, literally sealed the deal. Rocco was paralyzed from the neck down.

For five days, we brought him in for daily cortisone shots, hoping it might help to ease the fusion enough to get him on his feet. For five days, we hand fed him, carried him out and held him so he could pee, bathed him when he soiled himself and turned him over in his bed every half hour.

For five days, we watched him oscillate between being wild eyed with fear and sleeping for long stretches. On the third day, we took him out to the garden, wrapped him in a blanket and sat with him, caressing him until the long, afternoon shadows covered us all. That day, we shared stories with each other of special moments with Rocco. We told him how much we loved him and that it was okay to go if he wanted to. We laughed, we cried and felt our hearts beginning to break. We knew the end was near.

By day five, it was Rocco who told us the time had come. He was with us again in the garden, lying on a blanket. Usually he cried when he wanted to be rolled over. This time, he started yelping, frantically. Peter went to him and reached to roll him over and for the first time ever, Rocco tried to bite his beloved ‘Daddy’s’ hand. We both froze. Rocco looked from one of us to the other and continued to yelp. In that moment, we understood the look on his face. He was beyond frustrated, he was tired, he was done. He wanted us to let him go.

I won’t tell you how gut wrenching our final goodbye was. Those of you who have been there will not need me to share the words. Suffice it to say, it is one of the most profound pains we have ever experienced. It cut us to the core. We were inconsolable, clinging to each other and to the vet, wishing it was all just a bad dream and we would go home to find Rocco waiting for us. Instead, we arrived home to a quiet house. Too quiet. His big spirit that somehow managed to fill our house had left the building. We could feel it. Our boy was gone.

Pets are family

There is much talk and plenty written about the five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Certainly in those days of Rocco’s sudden illness and the weeks and months after his passing, we experienced most of these. But they don’t talk about guilt. They don’t talk about the incredible guilt you feel when you take a life – even if you are ‘doing the right thing’ as we were repeatedly told we had done. They don’t talk about the guilt you feel when it’s a life that can’t defend itself, can’t tell you what they are feeling, what they want. Can’t say the words.

My guilt haunts me to this day, despite family and friends telling me I need to let it go. I keep wondering if I could have done more. I am told this is a natural response. Maybe. But waking up and not seeing him do his ‘happy dance’ when I come into the room still tears at my heart. I have not found the last stage of grief, ‘acceptance’ yet. I still want him back. I’d still give anything to have him back. That is love. The kind of pure love that our pets give us.

We loved Rocco like he was our child. There are people who don’t understand this and say it is too much but that is how we feel. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. I remember a lively debate on Facebook last year where a woman called herself a mother to her ‘fur-baby’ and a slew of mothers to human babies got up in arms and shamed her for calling herself a mother, saying pets are not like children. True they’re not. But why are we judging someone’s feelings? Isn’t ‘love’, ‘love’? Does it have to be qualified and quantified? Can’t we just love? Pets are family. At least for us, this is and will always be true.

What pets can teach us

Maybe we should honor our pet’s lives by being more like them. Maybe we should greet our loved ones at the door like they are the best thing that happened to us that day. Maybe we should look at each other adoringly and with gratitude. Maybe we should learn to live in the moment, to run free, play hard and never hold a grudge. Maybe we should live our lives like giving and receiving pure love is the most important thing of all.

It’s been one year since we lost our ‘boy’. Life is not the same. There is still an empty place in our hearts. We are still searching for that missing piece. It’s amazing how many people tell us to get another dog. I know they mean well but we are not ready. We are still healing. But we found we were really missing having animal energy around us. We wanted to share all this love we still have for Rocco that sits heavy in our hearts. So we signed up for a pet sitting service.

We now travel throughout Europe taking care of dogs. I will talk about our pet sitting experiences in a future post but for now I will tell you it’s been transformative. Each time we meet a new animal soul and spend sometimes weeks taking care of him or her, we feel that gaping hole in our hearts close just a tiny bit more.

And each time we say goodbye to our new furry friend, we do so with gratitude because in sharing our love we are honoring Rocco. We are saying, ‘thank you for bringing so much love and joy to our lives that we can’t help but share it’.

Thank you sweet boy.

A presto

Anna