- Joined
- Dec 22, 2017
- Messages
- 80
- Purraise
- 83
Thank you so much Margret. Thank you for letting me tell my story to you; to someone who has been down this road. It makes so much difference to talk to someone who has been there. I know you're right. And deep down I want to believe I did all I could. Guess I just have to work through the guilt to get to the other side of knowing I truly tried. It's just such a helpless feeling when there is nothing you can do. What you have said will truly help me getting through this. Thank you for being there for me and others who have lost their fur babies. Bless you.homoki2002 , please re-read the portion of my original post dealing with guilt:
Now, think for a moment. Your Greta was dying; there was no way you could prevent that. And your Greta was starving, and you could find only one thing she wanted to eat. What is the best food for a cat? Don't bother trying to figure out the answer because I'll give it to you for free: the best food for a cat is the healthiest food that you can persuade your cat to eat. And if there's only one food that your cat is willing to eat then, by definition, that is the best food for your cat.
You can kill yourself worrying at all the what-ifs. The answer to all of them is "We don't know what would have happened if we'd done something differently. In fact, we can't know." What is, is. And what is, in this case, is that you did the best you could for your Greta, given the resources you had available to you. This is what we all do for our cats, every day. We muddle through, doing the best we can for them, knowing that the only certainties are that we love them and that no matter how good we are at taking care of them someday we will lose them.
If we truly had God-like powers Greta would never have gotten sick in the first place, nor would my Sweet Thing; we would be able to prevent kidney failure, and cancer, and all the other ails that cats are prone to. And if we truly had God-like powers our cats would have much longer basic life spans, and would like the foods that are best for them, and would stay strictly away from poisonous plants, and would know how to clean their own litter boxes! But we can't make any of that happen, because we're merely human, and we mere humans are the people our cats love. And maybe this is one place where we should accept the wisdom of our cats -- being human is also being lovable, no matter how much we wish we had God-like powers. So forgive yourself for not being God; your Greta loved you for who you are. Honor her love.
Margret