As a society, we’re not particularly good at grief. We don’t know how to heal from loss ourselves, and we don’t know how to react or what to say when the people in our lives experience loss.
One of the areas where we’re especially inept: when someone’s pet dies.
Pet loss is often discounted and minimized
If there’s a loss where people feel like their emotions are swept aside and discounted, it’s when a beloved pet dies. Not only that, but we often have a host of conflicting emotions about our pet’s death and our part in it.
When I was 16, I adopted Hobbes, a female orange domestic shorthair cat. She was a tiny frightened thing I found at the shelter, about 5 months old. Our eyes locked through the bars of her little cage and I knew it was destiny. She was coming home with me.
She was timid at first. It took me days of coaxing her to eat food before she began to settle in. She loved my Mum and spent hours cuddling her in bed, nursing my Mum through an illness she was going through.
She eventually became a mighty hunter. Snakes were her favorite prey and she’d parade around the back yard with a long garden snake in her jaws trailing beneath her belly.
Hobbes traveled with me from Florida to North Carolina to New York to Oregon over the course of her 19 years. She witnessed two marriages, two divorces and two kids. But the summer after my Mum died, she began to deteriorate too. That fall, I finally made the choice and made the call to have our vet come to the house to end her life. She’d also developed a cancerous lump in her abdomen and was losing use of her back legs and had begun pooping all over the basement.
It was the right call. And one I felt bad about – because I was relieved.
When your pet dies, you often have conflicting emotions
I’d become allergic to cats over the years and couldn’t snuggle Hobbes the way I did as a teenager. She also reminded me of my many losses over the years and, when I was with her, I felt vaguely guilty. (Or what I thought was guilt – I didn’t have any intent to harm. It was really regret and unresolved grief.)
Many people feel a similar mix of emotions when their pet dies. We want the best for them and we have to speak for them as they don’t have a voice of their own. If that involves us making the decision to end their suffering, you can easily be left with unfinished and uncomfortable emotions.
Grief doesn’t just go away on its own
While many folks are initially sympathetic after the loss of a pet, their sympathy doesn’t often last long.
Within days you’re expected to bounce back and either forget about your pain or get another pet. Feeling sadness weeks or months after your pet died? Puhleeze. At least that’s the reaction you’re likely to get.
It was “only” a cat / dog / bird / fish / reptile / ferret / rat / horse / bunny / ferret / guinea pig / (I know I’m forgetting some) etc. after all, right?
The grief you feel when a pet dies – no matter the species – is real. You can form a deep and loving relationship with any kind of pet, much like you do with someone of the human species. Given the unconditional love and acceptance animals can offer, sometimes that bond feels even deeper.
And the pain of the loss doesn’t just go away on its own.
Hobbes died 7 years ago and it was only recently that I finally adopted another cat (a mostly hypoallergenic one that I can be around). Because I haven’t fully completed my relationship with her, I still have unresolved pain around her life and her death.
This is totally normal.
Even if you adopt another pet, if you have unresolved feelings about your past pet, the relationship often isn’t quite what it could be. It’s like getting into a new romantic relationship while you still have a broken heart. You’re afraid of being hurt again, so you try to simultaneously protect yourself and fall in love. It’s hard to do well.
So what can you do?
The Grief Recovery Guide to Pet Loss is the best book I’ve found to help you heal from this grief. It addresses the unique relationships we have with our beloved animal companions. Because while people may react to your loss differently than they do a human loved one, the feelings are the same. And they can have just as much impact on your life.
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