Sasha is in the city today working on a film and I am writing through a veil of tears that somehow will not stop. 

This morning our veterinarian arrived at our barn to administer that painless but fatal cocktail that will terminate an animal’s life. The diagnosis for Ceiara was so dire and the rate of her decline so rapid that it became intolerable to endure. 

By yesterday we were unable to keep her sternal, which means that every time I checked on her she had flopped over onto one side, her lovely long neck no longer upright but flat to the ground. The veterinary examination determined that Ceiara’s spinal cord had been, by whatever means, so badly damaged that she could feel no deep pain in any of her limbs. She would never walk again, never graze in the fields with her companions, never be able to leave the confines of the barn. By this morning she had ceased to eat or drink, her neck curled awkwardly behind her, her big beautiful eyes empty and very far away. 

Over time and over buckets of tears, we have come to see this stage of the journey, replete with all the heartache, as an integral part of the responsibility that accompanies our stewardship of all the living creatures in our care. We are family, after all, and our hearts have beaten in unison for more than a decade. To end her time with us was an anguishing choice and not one taken lightly, but we are long past the metaphysics and the guilt some would have us feel for “playing God.”  It never gets any easier.

Before daybreak this morning as we positioned her listless body in the barn, agreement came without any words. We have loved Ceiara far too long and far too much to let her suffer any further. Although my partner needed to be elsewhere, I was there to cradle her neck, her companion until the moment when she crossed the rainbow bridge. I owed her that much. 

In pacem requiescat, my beautiful girl.