A consideration on Love
I thought that the grief of Roj-dog's passing was merely related to the timing of it, just as we lost our home and a whole load of other stuff just descended on our shoulders. But my daughter was never so right as when she pointed out the other day that I don't consider my animals to be other than people dressed differently, and that since I had 'raised her and her brother like animals' (ongoing family joke) 'I should be grieving still for a four-footed child. If she died would I not go on grieving forever?'

When they are first gone it is like a newly opened wound, painful and amputating to ones movement. I was very aware after Roj died that I could now step backwards without restriction - and it felt So Wrong!.
Then comes a period during which you gradually forget their smell, the feel of their touch (the bad breath *G*), until one day you think "oh good, that's done with" and within days the hole in your life will be gaping open again as something triggers a full-sensorium memory of that departed one.

It's a continual practice of recognising that death is another side of life, hard though it is to hold that thought as the pain rips through your heart.
To a certain extent, the loss of a companion-animal is different to the loss of a child or a partner to the Great Separator. Children, after all, carry the hope of our DNA into the future. But how does one measure love?

Love is!

My take is that it is more important that we have loved in one tense, and the love we had then is no different from the love we have now; but learning a different way to express that love can be oh, so hard.

Heck, just seeing the roses come up on Roj-dog's ashes has me dripping tears some days! But one day, I know, I will have learnt how to love my Roj-dog in this new way, and it will teach me the way forward when the day comes when I have to part company with my parents, who are no longer spring chickens, and I have to live without hearing their voices or feeling their hugs again. But I know that I will still love them, and that they still love me.

Perhaps we will meet at the Rainbow Bridge. Perhaps there is nothing at the end of it all but compost. I believe that the fact of having loved, be it people, animals or places, is important to the wider world, even if the wider world seems intent on not seeing life that way.

Goes back to the old Zen Kaon - if a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound?