thank you to everyone for your support and kind words as i struggle thru this...they all brought tears to my eyes...the white bull poem and esp. barb's story about her dog and her very last comment.
we are a society that hides our failures, we hide our shames. we re-write history or pretend something never happened. we do this to protect ourselves but what we end up doing is perpetuating lies. and those lies not only cripple us but they cripple others too.
how many parents struggle out there to do the very best that they can? and still their child strays into a place of danger or violence...automatically the parents are to blame. they can't defend themselves, the judgement is made... there HAD to be something wrong with them or their parenting skills or how else did the child get to that bad place? it is always the parents fault. we all know this so we don't share our struggles, we don't want anyone to know, we think it is better to hide it all because maybe no one will know. and all the other parents who are sharing the very same boat, think they are alone in that vast empty ocean of personal inadequacy and parenting failure. they suffer in silence and fear because of what others will think of them. and it perpetuates the perfect lie...good people don't have shameful things in their lives.
we do the same in rescue. good rescuers never have bad endings. we sprout this utter bullshit of happy fairy tales where everything we do is right and everything is good and we are so absolutely perfect in every single way. and we are not. it is a lie. rescue is freaking hard, it is fraught with struggle and pain and victory and defeat. it is dirty and it is bloody, it is shining and pure and it is petty...it is so freaking small minded and petty sometimes, it just makes you want to puke.
and we hide it...anything and everything that maybe someone will use to knock us down or make us feel small or somehow make us feel even more guilty. why should someone like barb be afraid to tell her dog's story? a dog she so deeply loved.
why should i hide the true events before swinger's death, just so someone couldn't call me a killer? what has that misinformed opinion got to do with anything at all? it had nothing to do with swinger, it had nothing to do with me...it had everything to do with the holder of that opinion but for the rest of us it meant less than nothing.
we are humans, we make mistakes, we take the wrong roads and we royally mess things up sometimes. we do all the right things, we try our hardest and it still all falls apart. we are humans, not some magical race of gods.
i feel no guilt because i couldn't save clyde, i knew this all along....i tried my very best to give him as much time and happiness that i could and i think i was fairly successful in this. my guilt comes very simply from taking his life which was not mine to take.
i feel alot of guilt because cuddles got hurt...i left him the back area and he scaled the gate. i SHOULD have left him in the cat room where he would have been safe. i did not mess up with clyde, i messed up with cuddles, i made another mistake.
and i share all of this life here, not so someone can judge me, who wants to suffer that? i tell you so that when you make a mistake or have to take a life, or suffer a failure, or do something stupid...you don't feel so very alone. so you aren't afraid to keep trying even if it doesn't always end with a happily after......sometimes it ends with a "this freaking sucks." and if you keep going even tho it freaking sucks, then you are a real rescuer or a real parent or a real whatever because you have what it takes to keep moving on.
maybe you will share your story with someone to help them like barb did. endings that suck happen in rescue, they happen in families, they happen in life...they happen to all of us...we are never alone. i hate the perfect lies. it cripples me, it cripples others. it hurts the animals in the long run because if you really truly can only do this if you are perfect, who the hell will be there for them when they are not?
we all make mistakes, carol. it just happened to prove to you that it was time.
you did do the right thing.
i'm going to miss clyde, even though i saw him once, when he arrived; he was always one of my favorites. in this, what you're written, what other people have said, it was getting out of control, and it had to be the last time. those medications helped, but not all the way. anything more might have simply maxed his liver completely out. and, there are only so many meds they've tested on dogs with these kind of problems- i'm sure there will be more. (and then there's the side effects).
i love clyde. and bewildering though it was for him, and still is, he's where his mind is calmer, and he won't hurt any of the other bairns.