An Ode to my Friend

This is Friendship

I am turning the pages in time, and I stop at an old tale. It happened a few year's ago. The page is still marked and so it reads....

"Some months ago, we lost a very significant part of our small family to old age. We didn’t realize he was growing so old that he would be gone in a span of 15 days.  I have grown with him literally, from my college days to my days of working in offices to having got married and moving myself physically from his everyday presence.

Not one day had passed, when I haven’t regretted not being there with him, of losing my four years of willful separation- something which had to be done. I am referring to my 14 year young dog-Pepper, who left us helpless on 12 April, when he just refused to drink water or eat. His doctor, who has appreciated seeing him age so gracefully, without losing his innocence (we always called him a Puppy), could only say, “Let him Go. He has lived his share. His organs are giving up.”

Really! Was it time for this beautiful creation of the Almighty to mingle into the larger life in the cosmos? I wasn’t willing to accept this. No one in the family was accepting it. But he did his bit and left us stunned. While he gave him a respectable last rights in a wonderful facility available to pets in Chattarpur, Delhi, somehow the thought that 

Pepper wouldn’t be there to greet us at home, hadn’t sunk in.

There are innumerable sages and wise who talk about appreciating the life that has lived and then gone to rest for a possible resurrection (I can’t be sure of that). But I really wonder how people get used an absence of someone who you have lived and seen each day of your passing hours and days….

For all of us, getting used to not seeing Pepper each day is more of a battle than anything. It is coming in terms of the strange mystery of life called –Death, from where there is no return. It is a reality which sometimes scares me. Not that I don’t want to die peacefully someday, but I feel scared for those who I will leave behind to cope with my absence of no return.

My father wrote an ode for Pepper. I can only remember one line which makes me envy Pepper… “May you play with your favourite toys in the happy hunting grounds.” It seems there is no pain there and all the suffering of his loss in only for us to bear.  No wonder the wise say, it is always less painful to remain detached. Yes, indeed it is!"