When one of my animals dies, especially a dog,I try to share the process of sickness, death, loss and grief as openly as I can. This is the third piece I’ve written about Gus since he died, and my purpose is not to wallow in loss, but to work through grieving myself through my writing and photography, and hopefully, offer something from my own experience that other people can use.

I do not have the answers for everyone, I do not tell other people what to do. People can take what they need and leave the rest. To me, the intelligent man gets wise by acknowledging what he doesn’t know.

Death: Almost everyone reading this has been there or will be there, the death of someone or something we love is one of our universal experiences.

I don’t write about this to tell  you what is the only truth,  but so that all of us to get to think about in a safe way and place. I believe that everyone has it worse than I do, and everyone has a harder battle to fight. Perhaps when your time comes, there might be something helpful for you to remember.

I am not teaching you how you should feel about loss – I don’t know – I am sharing my experience at working through it.

Gus’s sickness and death hit me hard, obviously, but it is also teaching me a great deal and making me stronger and clearer about my stewardship of animals.

I noticed right away that many of the people e-mailing me referred to his death as a tragedy, and assumed I must be devastated, “shattered,” that I had lived through a horror, a “calamity”, a disaster.  Many people wrote to me as if a parent or loved one had died, and I balked each time at these words and descriptions.

There were many, many, messages like that, I would say 15 to 20 per cent.

I thought quite  bit about those descriptions, and my instinct was to try to reassure these good people that I was all right, that  I would survive. In fact, I was always all right, even at the worst of it. I respect life, I accept it, I don’t get to choose who dies or when. My dogs are nothing but a joy to me, dead or alive.

I could see the deep pain the loss of animals had inflicted on so many people, it was a great wound to many. But it was not my pain, and I should be open enough to say that. I wondered if I was callous or if my emotions were shut down in some way.

I was in no way offended or angered by these comments, but this is how we learn.

We think, not argue, we talk and listen. I listened. Some people say I demonize people with whom I disagree, and I am sorry if I do that, but I see it differently.

This is how we learn together in this curious new world. This is how we think.

Disagreeing is not demonizing, a reality often lost in translation via e-mail and social media.  People who think differently from me are not my enemy, I am deeply grateful to all of the people who contacted me to wish me well and comfort me, they really did comfort me and Maria.

But these comments about tragedy and disaster, and horror and devastation stuck in my mind, they didn’t feel right when applied to Gus. I’ve been thinking about them a lot. I had the impulse to answer them with thanks and also reassurance, and I did answer some. I wrote to a very lovely person in Ottawa, it was not a tragedy for me.

A tragedy, says the dictionary, is an event causing great suffering, destruction, and distress, such as a violent crime or natural catastrophe. 911 was a tragedy, the Parkland, Florida school killings were a tragedy. Synonyms for tragedy are: disaster, calamity, catastrophe, cataclysm, misfortune,  mishap, blow, trial, tribulation, affliction, adversity. Floods are tragedies, senseless murders, the sinking of ships with people on board. AIDS was tragic, children who die of cancer suffer tragedy.

Did Gus’s death quality as a tragedy?

A women messaged me today to offer condolences: “Your heart must be heart- broken, I am so sorry for you.” Another wrote to say she was sure I was devastated, “I will pray for you.” No, I thought, pray for the refugees drowning in the sea, pray for many victims of gun violence, pray for the murdered families in Syria. Not for me and Gus.

The many messages I received lifted me up, there were thousands of lovely ones, one or two hateful ones, I think the angry people are avoiding me at long last.

But I also must be honest, my job is to make people think, not just agree, and my job is to think myself, and keep on thinking.

The truth is that I am very sad, even mournful.

I am not devastated. I am not heartbroken. The death of Gus is not a tragedy to me. Not was it a catastrophe, affliction or plague. I was at work the next day, taking photos, writing on the blog, talking to my agent, going to the Mansion. I have been waiting for Robin Gibbons to decide if she wants to breed again, and checking out some other breeders in case she doesn’t.

I have been  raising money for the refugee kids and calling out the Bingo games at the Mansion.My life was not interrupted, even though it was deeply affected.

I love every day of my life – Maria, my blog, my photography, our farm, the town we live in, my friends, the winter pasture, the coming Spring. Death is always sad to me, but no only sad.  It is also beautiful and meaningful and profound.

In the life of Gus, I found great joy, love, openness. Animals I love open me up, and I had and have a lot of opening up to do. Gus helped me to dig deeper inside of myself to find love and determination that was often missing, or hiding.

Maria said that she doubted I would have been nearly as open to the love I felt for my granddaughter Robin Sunday if not for Gus. I remember Simon opened me up. And Orson. And Lenore, the Love Dog. Something about animals turns the wheel and opens the gate of my moat.

And Red, for sure, he opens me up every day. Somehow dogs can do that for me when people can’t. Maria opened me up more than anything, I knew if I didn’t open up she would have been gone, I would have lost her. She is not one to tolerate a lack of feeling or emotion or love in a partner, not now. She loves snails more than I love many people.

As much as I loved Gus,  as sad as I as to lose him, I do not believe I  have suffered a tragedy. And my heart is not broken. It is beating quite vigorously.

I am lucky in almost every way a human being can be lucky. My heart could have killed me, but the doctors saved me. I live someone I love, do the work I love to do, take photos and see the world every day. My life has meaning and purpose. What more could I want?

Death is a part of life, and death is surely a part of our life with dogs. They don’t live as long as we do, we can learn much about dying from them. I am grateful I could do things for Gus I could not do for my own mother, and that is help him leave the world with dignity and die in comfort.

If every death of a dog were a tragedy or catastrophe, I would be dead or broken emotionally. Gus took nothing from me, I have  everything I had before, and more. I have everything I want.

I remember when I was on an NPR panel in Milwaukee, we were talking about loving animals,  and an animal lover said the death of any of her cats and dogs was just like losing a child. The woman next to me, another panelist, suddenly burst into tears and had to leave the room. I followed her out during the break and asked her what was wrong.

She turned to me, eyes filling with tears, and said “my son was killed in Iraq, blown to pieces by a roadside bomb. They sent him home to me in a small box the size of a milk carton.” It is not, she said to me, like losing a dog or a cat.

I believe the animal lover had lost perspective, and I promised myself that I would never do that. Being sad is enough. Mourning and grieving is enough. But I would never confuse the death of Gus with the real tragedies and disasters and horrors that sometimes wrack the world.

I can go get another dog, she cannot go and get her son back.

From the first, dogs have come to love and serve human beings, not to diminish them, hurt them, or break their hearts. I am nothing but grateful for Gus, and when Maria and I both feel ready, we will go out and do it all again,  dogs do not come with a guarantee of long life.

And when, we will  once again be in the hands of the angels, who will teach us what they wish us to know, and what we need to know.