My parents would gently admonish me. Friends would roll their eyes. Boyfriends (and later, husbands) would think at first that it was sweet, cute, but eventually they, too, would just sigh and shake their heads.
It could be a dead cat on the side of the highway. A goose with a broken wing, or one that had lost her mate (they mate for life, you know). A dog stranded in the middle of the road near the concrete divider. A racehorse who shattered her leg in the final hundred yards of the race and had to be euthanized on the spot. Anything.
My heart would crack wide open, the tears would come. I would imagine their pain, their fear, their suffering, and suffer right along with them.
The older I get, the more I learn that not everyone loves them the way that I do, that tragedy and loss are a part of life, that we can't fix everyone's suffering. At least, I pretend to learn these valuable lessons, but secretly, deep inside, I go on grieving those souls. Animals cannot speak to us in words, but our pets,they give us the best that they have, they love us unconditionally. Animals in the wild live purely and without guile; they don't know how to be anything but exactly what they are. They are beautiful beyond words, beyond breath.
My daughter, she has this bleeding heart too.
Picking her up at the aftercare place the other day, I find her tear-streaked and sad-eyed.
"What happened, baby?"
"The other kids were laughing at me. They were horrible."
"I'm so sorry, sweetheart. What were they saying to you?"
"Well, there was this CAT, mom and it only had three legs. And it was kind of hopping along, and it was just so sad that I cried."
My heart cracks in two right along with her. "Oh, baby."
"The other kids all laughed at me and they were teasing me. They were saying horrible things like about a dog that got hit by a car and another dog that broke its leg. One kid was telling me about shooting squirrels. Shooting them!"
I hate their cruelty. Not just to my daughter, but that they could be so callous about the pain of a living creature.
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. ~Khalil Gibran, The Prophet
Yes, she has her own thoughts, her own heart. A bleeding heart, just like her mama.
