I don't know if it's a comforting thought, but my partner really loves rats and has had rats as pets for many years. In his experience, rats are happy, loving and trusting creatures, very intelligent. They have fun. Even though their lives are short.

Regarding reincarnation, I believe in it but not in the sense of the ego being reincarnated. It's more that energy itself is incarnated again and again.

I wrote an article about it here: https://ladyreverie.medium.com/overlapping-re-incarnations-dcd852698228

I also wrote about how you will never experience your own death here:

https://ladyreverie.medium.com/death-amnesia-and-the-nature-of-subjective-aliveness-7d19c254f5f

Alan Watts has some very comforting words as well:

"“We can say the body is the I, but the body comes out of the rest of the universe, comes out of all this energy — so it’s the universe that’s I’ing. The universe I’s in the same way that a tree apples or that a star shines, and the center of the appling is the tree and the center of the shining is the star, and so the basic center of self of the I’ing is the eternal universe or eternal thing that has existed for ten thousand million years and will probably go on for at least that much more. We are not concerned about how long it goes on, but repeatedly it I’s, so that it seems absolutely reasonable to assume that when I die and this physical body evaporates and the whole memory system with it, then the awareness that I had before will begin all over once again, not in exactly the same way, but that of a baby being born."

Basically - from this perspective, you (Cai) won't have any more responsibilities, or any memories, or duties or any of the exhausting things that make you not want to reincarnate. But life itself, the feeling of "I Am" will recur again and again, as it has before you were born. After all, we are all "I am". All life is.

Anyway I hope that it's OK that I shared these ideas, feel free to discard them if they don't serve you. I've been thinking a lot about death myself recently and I found this perspective to be comforting, that's all. :)