I have an old dog
Who has been dying for sometime now.
He’s got a *** leg
And bad hips
So he needs to be helped up all the time.
He mostly just lays in the same spot and sleeps;
He does it so much that a pressure sore developed suddenly,
Then got infected.
Now he smells very badly
Because of the festering wound
And he wears gauze and wraps
Like a diaper around his back legs.
He stumbles around
And takes too long to do anything.
He gets confused,
In his age,
Over what was always simple
And is almost always in pain,
But you can see, in his eyes, that he still wants to live
And to be loved.
So we haven’t euthanized him
And we still love him
But our younger, healthier dog,
Only four,
Runs up to us and seems to smile
And she jumps around in excitement
And seems to laugh
And she is much easier to love
So she gets our loves attention more
While the old boy looks at us wistfully
Until we call him over with,
“Awww, come here bud.”
To get our sad sympathetic love
More than anything else.
How many of our old
Are left rotting somewhere
With barely enough life to live
Only to be seen on occasional visits?
It’s terrible.
They annoy us with their needs.
The young do too,
But far less.
We help the young with passion,
Not pity.
Even if you call both of these love
I know which one is preferred,
Because you get far less
With the latter.
Yes, when it comes to love
It is better to be young, happy, and entertaining
Because we do it
For ourselves.