I once read somewhere that human beings are the most afraid of/repulsed by two things. The first is expulsion of bodily waste. The second is death.
Our precious, almost-2-year-old cat Luna was put down two weeks ago. She was diagnosed with multiple organ failure. Even if we had chosen to put her in the ICU for a day, there wasn't much chance that she'd survive. We made the extremely difficult decision to put her out of her misery.
I put off writing about Luna's death publicly, both because of my own human aversion to death and because I didn't want anyone passing judgment on my husband and me for deciding on euthanasia. So at first, I decided the easiest thing to do would just be to put off writing about Luna's death until I couldn't keep it inside anymore.
Then I realized that suppressing the reality of death may be the natural thing to do, but it's also the last thing we should do. I think one of the best, healthiest things we can do for ourselves is accept the fact that, on some level, death is a part of life in this world.
I realized it's going to be especially important to accept this if I want to get into urban farming. I'm going to have to practically and spiritually deal with animal deaths as they happen. At some point, I may end up in a situation where the most loving thing I could do might be to end an animal's life as quickly as possible.
I realize I'm probably in for lots of loaded comments about how I'm a bad Christian for saying that death is a part of life. I'm probably in for comments on how God didn't create death, there was no death in the garden of Eden, yada yada yada. I'm not going to deny any of that, but I'm also not going to deny that death is a part of our earthly lives.
Maybe one day I'll stop feeling so human when it comes to death. Right now, it's still a work in progress.
