It was Sunday morning and after a cup of coffee, I decided to visit one of my friends. He had been sick lately, battling an unknown virus, and was finally on the mend. Actually, when he first got sick the prognosis was not good, but things had changed ... for the better.

The moment I entered his home, though, I could tell that something was wrong. As much as my friend had shared his condition with myself and others, he had been nothing if not frustratingly pragmatic about the whole thing. This was nothing new; the greater the pressure, the more rational he becomes.

So why the pained look?

It turned out that amid his struggle with his own health issues, his cat died. His eyes glazed over as he relayed the story to me.

"I knew something was wrong, he had lost control of his bladder," he said. "I thought it was an infection, but the vet diagnosed it as late-stage diabetes. Within a day he was gone. It happened so fast."

His eyes filled again as he talked about the loss.

"It's a cat, I can't believe it's affecting me this much" he said, trying to wrap his rational mind around the array of feelings coursing through him.

For all his effort, and sometimes it seemed visible, he could not make sense of the loss and more critically, he could not make sense of his feelings.

The human instinct is to try to "make things better" and in the moment I wanted his pain to go away, but not because I empathized with him. Instead, I was going through my own struggle.

My rational mind could not understand how he could be so matter-of-fact about his own health crisis and yet so distraught about his cat.

And so we both struggled. He poured out his heart and I sat and listened to two dialogues; one was his and the other was mine.

Over the course of the next hour the world changed just a little bit for both of us. He gave himself permission to feel deeply without needing to understand. (The feelings, it seemed, were enough.) And I realized that the world does not discriminate when it comes to suffering. We all hurt and at the heart of the pain is a doorway and that doorway is surrender.

While not human, pets point the way to our own humanity. We are often our best selves when we are around our pets, and perhaps that makes the loss all the more painful. As my friend mourned the loss of his cat, I swear some of the tears were for himself and all he had been through lately. I watched as he surrendered.

We humans worship the rational. We spend our days wrapped up in work, cut off from our feelings, afraid that we will not be able to understand ourselves, afraid of the dark. We keep busy, clinging desperately to those things that make sense. We schedule and plan, dissect and analyze and trust our life to reason.

I wonder though, if we don't have it backwards. Maybe we need to lose our mind and find our heart; open up the calendar for a day and claim it as our own to sing, dance, cry or hang out with the dogs without it ever needing to make sense.

Maybe it is the irrational that transforms us from merely human to the wonderfully humane.

Michael C. DeMattos is a member of the faculty at the University of Hawai'i School of Social Work. He lives in Kane'ohe with his wife, daughter, two dogs and two mice.

Reach Michael C. DeMattos at (Unknown address).