That’s a sweet sentiment but I think it answers the wrong question. The question — implicitly — is what the purpose is of short lifespans in the pets we love. The correct response, I think, is “why seek purpose in the first place?”

There are some things which simply are. We don’t ask why 2 + 2 = 4; we just know it to be true, because it is. Some animals live x years, some y years, and asking the reason for that seems, to me, a little like asking the clouds why they rain sometimes. It’s just the nature of life.

It’s terrible to love and lose that love. It’s also inevitable. The reality of suffering and its cause is starkly limned in the Second Noble Truth of Buddhism.*

Of course, in order to be fully detached, we may have to lose one of the more poignant things that make us human. I don’t want to do that, and I don’t think most others do either.

So we weep. We love, we rail, we sorrow when we lose that to which we’re attached. The clouds gather and the rains fall, and life ends and it continues.

There isn’t a reason. Or at least I don’t see a reason. And that, hard as it may be to handle sometimes (cf. Job and the Whirlwind, wherein JHVH asks the question “Where were you when I made the earth and the heavens”) — as hard as it can sometimes be to handle the utterly inhuman, unfair nature of nature … that’s what’s good enough for me.

It has to be. There’s nothing else.

Thanks again. Really.

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* Attachment is the cause of suffering.

Someone told me once that the “reason” we outlive our pets is so to better appreciate them, or somesuch. That’s good enough for me.

I’m so sorry Sputnik had to leave you — in typical cat fashion, he picked his own time and place not wanting you to be a witness to his defeat by death.