BLOGS

Little Bug

It’s nice to be back in touch with you all. Thank you for opening my newsletter and for being a valuable part of my life and career. It has been an unusual summer and it’s happenings are why I have not been actively writing. Yet, it is the very happenings in life that open us to the greater aspects of life. Let me share…

After 12 years of companionship, I lost my pug, Little Bug, tragically and unexpectedly. Then 6 weeks later, exactly, I lost my adopted dog, Miss Jiff. She too was a sudden loss and unexpected. Between those two deaths, I lost my Aunt, my mother’s sister. Crazy right??! I had 3 very close friends who, in those same weeks, lost their animals. Little Bug and Miss Jiff offered me many gifts in their lives with me. Consequently, in their deaths, they offered me gifts as well. Animals are here to serve us and to reflect to us what we need to heal. They are an integral part of our purpose on this plane. Death and loss are also integral to our purposes. We lose relationships from break up, divorce, and death. Each ending opens us to something new in our Self and in our life. (In order for one minute to exist the previous minute must die.)

Many, who feel loss as painful, deal with it by diverting their attentions so that they do not think about the loss or death. On the morning after Little Bug died, I was with a friend who was talking about pictures he had taken in the Everglades. Periodically, I would look out onto my patio and think of Little Bug and feel the need to cry. Then I would reconnect to what he was saying and I would feel the emotion push down while I attended externally to the story. Finally, I looked at my friend and said:
I can’t wait until you leave so I can cry! Not that I want you to go, but I can feel the need to be alone and allow this to be released. I am amazed how I look outside the window and feel the resurgence of the sadness and then when I listen to you it is pushed back down. I can only imagine that this is how the majority of people choose to “cope” with the hurt of their losses — they stay externally focused so that they do not have to “feel”!!!

For many with grief, it may appear that time helps us move through the stages and come to a comfort of some sort. But time does not necessarily heal. Our release of the pain and that which causes it does. If we stay away from the crying and the release and wait for time to pass, we do not have the opportunity to heal. That is why so often years down the road, you may find yourself crying with the very grief you felt at the time of loss.

Miss Jiff

Many people have asked me how I am doing so well with the losses I have experienced in such short succession. There are several reasons. One is because I live In a state of acceptance and because I have healed a large part of my fears of loss. I still feel the sadness but not the devastation. Consequently, the sadness heals quickly and allows for me to move into a place of enjoying the lives gifted me. Those who cross over do not want you to suffer. That is not, ultimately, why they passed in the way they did and at the time they did. Second, their deaths were in the natural order of things. Our pets and older relatives usually pass before we do. Third, I took the time to understand why. Why they passed when they did and how they did. What the gifts in their passing are and will be. Fourth, my genuine feeling they are in a great place and that their time here was complete. I am then able to let them go. They are on their journey and I am in a place where I do not want to hold them back.

There are several more magical teachings that came out of this time in my life. I will share those at another time. I have enjoyed the unfolding of life that has occurred as a result of my experiences. Yet, it feels great to be back on a “normal” schedule and to be writing again. I thank you all for joining me in my weekly ponderings.

Acknowledgements: I would like to personally thank, Dr. Nancy Keller and Dr. Ayla Akbulut for their magnificent teamwork in the treatment of my animals – those who passed and those who are still with me. I would also like to thank Dr. Kim Simons and Lap of Love for the in-home euthanasia. And finally, with all my heart, I would like to thank my family (Mom and Sister) and friends: Deborah Paiva, John Chervenak and Sue Singer, Pat Price, Michael Lynch, Mary Sol Gonzales, Melissa Knight, Milagros Castro, Michelle Worthington, and John Morales.