Fear of taking a knot

[Resident Hyaena]

I don't know if this will be of use, but at another forum, a similar situation was presented under the title "How Does A Zoo Deal With The Death Of Their Animal, How?".




This was the answer I gave, itself a re-presenting of my reply to an even earlier post:




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I had addressed the situation in a reply to another post, a poll, titled "Where Are Your Zoo Scars?"


But that thread is several pages away now.


Here is that reply:



"Where Are Your Zoo Scars?, Where's your animal lover left his mark?"


A small one on my forearm, where a dear partner and I during oral contact, lost balance and I caught a claw. She was unharmed. That was decades ago, and the pale scar has almost completely faded away.


But as said by others before, the largest, deepest, most persistent, most painful, and most crippling scars are in the mind, aka, the "heart". She died of age, and that scar of her death is and will always be far deeper and more present than all the scars and debilitations of all the physical wounds I have received over my sixty years.


The same with all the others in my life that have fallen to the ravages of time.


And it goes beyond the cardiac metaphor also. Recent medical studies have confirmed what many have long felt or known, that the stresses of loss, mourning, and grief can cause actual physical damage to your heart, your immune system, your mental health, and possibly other physiological systems and functions as well.


In that respect, in extreme cases or with a pre-existing condition, people can actually die from a "broken heart".


The damage from these losses can never be wholly undone, the hole never filled, and the place they held in us never rebuilt.


The best we can do - and MUST do - is to build a NEW place in ourselves for a new love, never tearing down or "replacing" the old places, but having for them a brand-new place in your life, uniquely their own.


Never forget your lost loves. But do not let those losses shut the doors to new love.



Resident Hyaena ^..^