Compartmentalization

I was thinking about my "romantic landscape' the other day, as I am prone to do, and I was making some connections between that and certain duties of my job. I was thinking about how I have this ability to compartmentalize sentiment, which is a trait that I feel is sometimes necessary in the kind of work I do. Often in working in the veterinary field, or with animals in general, you have to put aside emotional feelings in order to accomplish a task. Mostly I am referring to euthanasia. As a person who performs or assists with euthaniasia on a regular basis, you have to be able to put aside your grief or sadness over the loss of animals, or else you are in danger of becoming depressed, burned out, or suffering from compassion fatigue. There are many reasons and situations in which animals get euthanized, and most are very sad: a group of animals gets "culled", like at the facility where I work now for being unsellable, or at an animal shelter due to failure to be adopted and lack of room, an animal is old and sick and needs to be put out of its misery, an animal is hurt beyond the owner's ability to pay or cope, or the owner cannot deal with a physcial or mental problem the animal is having. Sometimes the owners are next to you, weeping at the loss of a family pet, and sometimes no one is weeping and the bodies are piling up on the floor, which is also sad.
I am very good at euthanasia. I am good at "turning it off", not allowing myself to feel unmeasurable pain, and being able to perform the duties asked of me. I also believe, though, in helping the spirit of the animal pass, and in dying with dignity. I hold their paws, I pet them and soothe them, I tell them they have been very good and have been loved so much, and that it is okay to let go. I tell them anything I know about their family or their history, how it showed how wonderful they were. I tell them their owners are letting them go to this wonderful place because they love them so. I tell them something nice about the way they look or act. I let the last words they hear be soothing words of comfort and love, even if they have no owner and nobody loved them. I do this because I love all of them collectively, even if I have never seen them before.
And myself, I put that love in a box. I pack my emotions away in that box in my heart and seal up the edges with strong tape. I refuse to look at it. I pretend it is not there. That love is there, and this is here, and if it is over there and I don't look at it, it doesn't hurt.
Sometimes I get so good at this game, I almost believe it. I sometimes think I put it so far away I become desensitized, and I wonder if I have become heartless. And so sometimes I let myself cry. I go with it, and it makes me feel real again, and reminds me that I care. I let myself grieve once for a Lab that I hardly knew, who belonged to a man I knew well. I knew how much he loved his dog and how he tried so hard to keep her alive, and it reminded me of how much I loved Rascal, and when we were done with her, I sat in a dark exam room, snuggling my friend's poodle and wept for an hour or more, weeping for all the dogs I never cried for.
Thinking about putting the sentiment in a box and forgetting it, putting that aside while I continued to function, reminded me of my love life before getting married, back when I was a serial cheater. Some people might not understand why I was able to be with a man I loved one night, and a man I was also sleeping with another night. When I was with each of them, they were all that existed, and I was having fun and was able to put my emotions for somebody else in a box and let them go.
Some people can't do this. Like my exboyfriend for instance, who says he cannot be friends with me anymore because it brings back old memories and interferes with his relationship with his wife.
I wish he could, because I believe in staying friends with the people I once loved. To me, the friendship is valuable because I still see the good in them and respect them. I keep my old memories in that box, along with the feelings I had for them, and don't look at it when I am with them, so I can just be friends in the here and now. Sometimes I wish everyone had that ability.