A Visit to a Pet Cemetery: On Pets and Unconditional Love

-

I took our dogs for a walk at the pet cemetery at Laurel Hill today. The visit left me oddly emotional. Now, we go to the people cemetery for walks fairly often and those walks don’t make me emotional. As I stared at the little grave markers, tears burning, refusing to fall, I wondered why.

As a writer of gay romance, I write about love in all its expressions; yet it occurs to me that the purest expression of love is that of a carer for their pet. Love for a pet is almost entirely altruistic, for the adopted is unlikely to elevate one’s social standing or increase one’s financial bottom line. For our part, we lay no expectations at their feet—there is no expectation of a college degree earned, nor of grandchildren produced. Instead, we embrace our pets in all their cat and dog-ness. Their being is simply enough, the very hallmark of unconditional love. And when their time is up and the loan that is their life with up is called, they go, leaving behind a little dagger in our hearts.

And perhaps it was the inscriptions on those plaques, the articulated grief of the loss of a pure love, that made me cry.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Season of Joy: Songs of Summer 2024

-
Image
I feel silly for feeling nostalgic about Summer 2024 and its adventures—feeding the giraffes and a bison at the Elmwood Park Zoo; ziplining for the first (and last) time at Urban Air; watching our crepe myrtles release their blooms the color of cranberry sauce; listening to the songs that would form the summer’s soundtrack. It’s September.   The calendar tells us there are 20-some-odd days of summer left; yet we all know—Summer draws its last breath each year at midnight on Labor Day. School buses are back on the roads, tangling traffic; college campuses are buzzing with activity; people are closing up their shore houses; radio stations are rushing to name the songs of summer 2024. The latter has made me decide to name my own songs of this summer. More on that in a minute. Perhaps it’s a sign of getting older, but time seems to be passing lickety-split. June marked ten years of us being legally married. My brother and his wife will celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary this...
Read more

In Memoriam: For a Sista

-
Image
“She is gone,” she said, “She is dead.” “What?” I asked, wondering how this could be. She was only 35. She was the most alive person I’d ever met. She vibrated with life to the tips of her exquisitely painted acrylic nails. When I think of her, many adjectives come to mind: tacky—she loved red and black and leopard prints, unfortunately often in combination, and false eyelashes that perched like tarantulas over her big brown eyes, and lace-front wigs in blonde and Lucille Ball red, and lipstick in bright red and the dark colors of mourning—promiscuous; combative. She was unapologetically herself. She was raucous and raunchy. She had a heart of gold; sterling silver pumped through her veins. She was funny and clever and caring and supportive. When I first started working with her, she cheerfully took me under her wing sharing with me what I needed to know—things that weren’t mentioned in HR’s dry and out-of-date PowerPoints, or in my vague, slightly misleading job description. Of...
Read more

Notes From an Old Man: On Being 27 Years Married

-
Image
Today we’ve been married 27 years, using the date of our “commitment” ceremony, which was the only option available to us at the time—and our tenth (legal) wedding anniversary, thanks to the Pennsylvania state legislature who granted us the right to marry a year before SCOTUS declared in the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision which ruled that the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. From the time I was 12 years old, I knew I would marry a boy. I didn’t have a plan or a road map but, even then, I had a vision and no doubt that one day I would. June 28, which is the date of both our commitment ceremony and legal marriage, is also the anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion which kicked off the modern-day gay rights movement. We didn’t choose that date originally for its historical significance, rather it was a practical decision; we didn’t want to...
Read more