The Memory of Pierre
Animal Stories from All-Creatures.org

By Joanna Lucas, Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary
September 2013

Given his crippling disability of blindness, it would have been easier for him to become a recluse, to hide and avoid contact with the bewildering world of the sighted. But he didn't. He offered his love to everyone who sought his company, and trusted that it would be returned. It was. His eyes may have been blind, but his heart was gifted with exceptional vision.

Our beloved boy, Pierre, died last Monday, one year and one day after his arrival at the sanctuary. Despite everyone's desperate, and protracted, efforts to save him, he succumbed to the congenital heart defect that had silently stalked him since birth. Even though he was with us such a short time, his presence changed us -- and everyone who knew him -- profoundly.

If, without our protection, Pierre would not have survived in a world where beings like him are butchered to please depraved human appetites, without Pierre's light -- without the light of beings like him -- we ourselves would be neither fully alive, nor fully human.

Pierre was born blind. He had no access to and no memory of light, yet he was one of the brightest lights, he radiated light, he illuminated the world, and our lives, with his own life. Pierre, whose heart stopped 20 years too soon, restored the heart of everyone who entered his world to full, brilliant life.

Given his crippling disability of blindness, it would have been easier for him to become a recluse, to hide and avoid contact with the bewildering world of the sighted. But he didn't. He offered his love to everyone who sought his company, and trusted that it would be returned. It was. His eyes may have been blind, but his heart was gifted with exceptional vision. It allowed him to see so much more deeply, so much more accurately, so much more intelligently, and so much more compassionately than most of us. It called him to open his completely vulnerable being to the beings of all others, and, in so doing, to heal their visible and invisible wounds by the light of his heart alone.

With him, every soul -- no matter how battered, no matter how crushed, no matter how defeated -- got to see, and feel, just how brave and beautiful it really was. Even the charred hearts of those who crush beings like Pierre for an evening's amusement glowed in his presence with the light of their own forgotten humanity.

Good night, sweet Pierre. You honored us with your love, you humbled us, you healed us, you broke our hearts. Your light shines on in the darkness of every heart you broke open. Now and always.

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