As per task,
Share a story of suffering and healing that you have experienced, whether it was you who was in pain, you who witnessed or accompanied someone in pain, or you who caused the pain. How did you feel during this experience? What was the outcome? Who or what did you turn to for support, comfort and guidance?
Your reflection may be in any format you feel appropriate.
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Repsonse,
I had an article submitted to the Dunnville Sachem some odd years ago. I wrote a letter to the editor in regards to the untimely death of our family member, "Angel" a dog with a sweet smile and a great deal of people/friends who will deeply miss her.
"I have written a letter to the editor, I kept it as short and sweet as possible without revealing too much personal information (I really hope that this piece could be published). For the sake of knowing, (as I didn't put details in the piece) our family's long time life companion-Angel was hit by a car.
Many animals are hit by cars everyday, many family pets pass away everyday, but this animal was special for a number of reasons-and however old she was, she was healthy and well, probably had a few more happy years left in her as well. I wouldn't be writing a letter to the editor if my parents had the peace of mind that it was an accident and someone felt as equally bad about doing it as my parents were to find her corpse on the road like a common piece of roadkill. But, that is exactly it-someone who was being careless hit an aged dog and just kept going. They didn't stop to check, leave a sorry note, nothing. Probably some young jackass with more important things to worry about. Nonetheless, had it been a small child-an elderly citizen, would this person have stopped? That is a bit of the kick in the pants. People think, "well, its just a dog," but is it "just a dog?" Not even for the disrespect shown towards the family that rescued and saved her, but what would have happened had this jackass hit a person? Is our community that rural that we should feel unsafe crossing the roads just because no one is there to catch us when we do something wrong? I don't want or expect police to sit near the house because a dog was hit, I don't want compensation, or even an apology (a letter of condolence would be nice for my parent's heartache though), I am just looking to let people know that when you are on the road, walking down the street-our actions do impact those around us. We may at times, have the cowardly ability to not empathize what may happen after-but it could very well happen to you, and until it does, you really will never know how heartbreaking it is."
The piece got published, we haven't seen any other of our animals hit, but we still see people speeding down the road-from time to time we see police at the stop sign at the end of the road, but I mean, I'd like to say that someone saw the article and understood, I know there are others on out road who spoke about it with my folks after it was published (in agreeance), they shared stories about their dogs/cats or even mailboxes being struck by speeding vehicles.
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