pain

A dear friend let his dog go yesterday., with heart-wrenching pain.  We would  not wish that kind of soul-tearing on anyone and yet we set ourselves up for it time after time. . Loss is implicit in love:., and yet we deny it. time after time.   Love, they say, is deathless and never dies. But love's object dies  and then love goes searching, clawing, writhing, howling. twisted and stricken with pain. What is there to say in the face of such torment?I I feel for my friend as I remember my own pain, past now, not as acute, paved over with scar tissue, but still there.  There is no comfort, no present comfort, no balm to ease the wound.  Only time.  Only time can do anything and then it doesn't assuage the pain, it just distances it.  For a while. Oh, my friend, what can I say, what can I do?  I' am so sorry for your loss. Hang in there,  Hold on.  Nothing but obscenities.  In the Anglo-Saxon poem, Deor's Lament, a warrior who has suffered physical and mental pain and who has nothing left comforts himself with bleak reassurance:  "That passed; so may this."  I guess.