Butters Says Goodbye

[UberScout]

My friends, we here at the Adams household have suffered a great tragedy.

Butters, nicknamed Simba, was brought to an untimely end by the beak of a passing hawk seeking its latest meal. By the time I got to him, he was already dead. Never had a fighting chance.

Though the sun shone on my house today, it soon turned gray when we suffered what we did. Butters was among the most loveable alongside Nala, his little sister. Whereas Nala was wont to sleep by a shining window, Butters could be heard racing up the wall after a gnat or a mosquito, or batting a piece of cat food back and forth.

But there is no longer that bundle of noise in our home.

And Sophia.... I've never seen a child cry as much as she did. Her tears were enough to fill a bowl. I've never seen her grieve over anything, at the very least I wasn't present when she did.

Anyway, I have to find something to mark his resting place now. I'll be helping Maddog comfort Sophia...

 

[SusanLR]

We feel this way because we are emotional people.
Yet I have come to understand whatever created this planet we live on made it a fact of life here.
The food chain.

 

[onlything]

The same happened to my parents' friends and their york. In fact, they were just really unlucky with dogs for a few years... The first turned out to be incurably sick and died in a few months, the second, and he was such a little and cute guy, ran into the kitchen and was killed by a freaking cabbage that fell from the table (and what the heck). Finally, the third one was taken by a hawk when they were on a road trip. Really, what are the chances? Thankfully Squirt seems to be healthy and very energetic, bless the little guy, with them for a year already and hopefully much longer.

I'm sorry for your loss. It's always tragic and shocking to suddenly lose your companion like that. Please stay safe. Maybe you could give your daughter flowers to put on his resting place, encourage her to say goodbye? With flowers and a mark it could help her in the grieving process. The first is always the most difficult.

 

[Misery]

This is why I was always really reluctant to let our cats go outside (well, back when we had cats). Always that paranoia that something would happen to them. Particularly the big male, who would go outside and vanish for like 3 days at a time... always told the others to NOT let him out, but "oh he'll be fine". Granted, he was *enormous* and intimidating, so that might have helped, but still. Sigh. Fortunately that house is in an area where wild animals really do not wander all that often. Aside from like, squirrels and small birds I guess. Still, every now and then he'd come back a little beat up. Didnt stop him from wanting more though, the little maniac.

Around the area I'm in now though... ye gods, no. If I had cats here, there's zero chance I'd let them out, and anyone trying to do so would be subject to quite the rage fest. The constant presence of roaming coyotes is too much of a threat.

That all being said.... yeah there's no easy way to deal with something like this. There was one particular cat, named Runt, who I was very close to. She died years ago. I try not to think of her much, because it only takes about 60 seconds of doing so before I have yet another breakdown. Even all these years later. Ugh, I'm tearing up just typing this, so that's enough out of me.

Good luck to you, I hope you all can feel better soon.

 

[UberScout]

Thank you all. Sophia is absolutely distraught over this, but we've managed to help her move on, a little. The vet sent us his paw print indented in clay and "The rainbow bridge poem". Maddog decided he be laid to rest next to a fishing spot, one of his favorite types of places to go. We picked some posies and azaleas (I live in NC) to go on his grave.

I tell ya, I may not have cried when it happened, it's actually kind of difficult for me to do that, but when it first happened and Maddog broke the news to Sophia, I sat next to her, and I felt exactly what she felt, right down to the last detail. It was like a wave of hopelessness rooting me to the spot, as if a torrential downpour of rain fell through the roof of our house. I may not have cried but the spirit of grief was swirling through both me and Sophia. I've never seen the child in such an array of sadness. I even began to worry she was suicidal at one point, but she didn't say anything about any sort of feelings like that, though there were a few subtle hints about thinking the world itself is evil and she hated that.

I didn't want to agree with her, but hell man, what was I supposed to say? She's not wrong...

 

[Mary Terry]

That's so sad. I always cry when one of my pets dies, and I still mourn for my old yellow lab who died of cancer 10 years ago. In some ways, he was my best friend. We have a pet cemetery on our farm, studded with homemade wooden crosses and tombstones crudely carved from limestone rocks with the pets' names. All of them are there, above the lake, under the trees, near our picnic area.

We have a lot of red tail hawks and some have taken several of our chickens over the years so we put bird netting over the chicken yard to keep them safe.