A couple of weeks ago, the cat of my partner died, and I basically managed the entire process. From contacting a vet that did in-home animal euthanasia, to holding firmly but gently the scared cat while the sedative was injected, to put him in a box and then find and excavate the right spot in the garden for him. I love animals deeply, and I accept that it's kinder and more humane to help them go instead of keep them in a state of continuous pain. For my partner isn't that easy. Maybe because he wasn't raised like me on the countryside and didn't have many pets, so he hasn't been exposed like me to animal suffering during his formative years. The cat, named Milo, was his first pet in decades and helped him prepare his hearth for more animals, two dogs and another cat to this day, so he has a special place in his heart as the first one. His birthday is close, and since it's pretty hard to find high-quality photos of the cat to print, especially because he died of a skin cancer that plagued his face for the past year, and he wasn't the kind of cat that liked posing, I decided to spend the most valuable resource ever, time and effort, to reconstruct the image of Milo. The rainbow colors come from the fact that a rainbow showed up the day of this death, and the shooting star because a few days later my partner said out loud "Milo, give me a sign that I made the right choice for you", and an actual shooting star crossed the night sky.
Those might be ordinary coincidences for Summer weather, but quite comforting.
Ha, and the meadow is something I've put in. I've been reflecting upon the day I will have to say goodbye to my dog (quite distant, she's just two) and the image of her running in a meadow and looking at me before disappearing in the tall grass is quite stuck in my head, and it brings me to tears every time I invoke it.
I wish painterly style wasn't so out of my comfort zone, and I seriously bet on him not knowing how my expectations were. But I can say that I've learned *a lot* doing this, and my process of applying shadows and colors will benefit for sure. I will happily go back to my sweaty hulking dudes going hard on each other, but this was a very arduous and intimate journey. I won't share it because it will an unwelcomed downer for the most of my audience, but I feel like I can be a bit more vulnerable here.