User blog comment:Goldenshane/"Cause All Too Soon, the Clock Will Strike Midnight... And He'll Be Gone.../@comment-1874924-20110614054324

My wife and I almost always had animals in our houses, so it may seem odd that we haven't had any pets since we've been married (8+ years, now). In the years that I lived with my parents, we had we had as many as 3 dogs at a time (though more commonly one or two) and as many as 5 cats (not counting kittens--in my preteen years, my parents had a purebred burmese female that they bred for profit.) The 5 adult cats we had at one point included four strays that adopted us--the word had got about that we had good drugs, in the form of a catnip bush in the backyard--and the fifth came from the pound. Where I'm going with all this is that I well know what it's like to lose a well-loved pet.

I have a poem that you might like: "Last Words to a Dumb Friend", by Thomas Hardy. The poem is actually about a cat, but only the 1st and 3rd verses make reference to specifically feline attributes; the other four could apply to a variety of animal types. Here it is, with verses 1 and 3 omitted:

Never another pet for me! Let your place all vacant be; Better blankness day by day Than companion torn away. Better bid his memory fade, Better blot each mark he made, Selfishly escape distress By contrived forgetfulness, Than preserve his prints to make Every morn and eve an ache.

Strange it is this speechless thing, Subject to our mastering, Subject for his life and food To our gift, and time, and mood; Timid pensioner of us Powers, His existence ruled by ours, Should—by crossing at a breath Into safe and shielded death, By the merely taking hence Of his insignificance— Loom as largened to the sense, Shape as part, above man’s will, Of the Imperturbable.

As a prisoner, flight debarred, Exercising in a yard, Still retain I, troubled, shaken, Mean estate, by him forsaken; And this home, which scarcely took Impress from his little look, By his faring to the Dim Grows all eloquent of him.

Housemate, I can think you still Bounding to the window-sill, Over which I vaguely see Your small mound beneath the tree, Showing in the autumn shade That you moulder where you played.

P.S.: This verse quotation will appear in LTDI to mark the passing of Bunny, which launches an important secondary storyline.