If You Can, Do It Now

Apologies for the lateness of this newsletter, but my Mum had an unexpected car accident recently (she is fine now) which has made me behind with everything. Despite reading and writing about loss every day, even I like most people, tend to take things for granted. I imagine everything is always going to be as it is today.

It’s an easy thing to do and to be honest part of it is an in built protection we all have to stop us continually worrying about all the things that could go wrong in our lives and cause them to change in an instant.

If we all thought about every potential danger or terrible thing that may happen to us and our loved ones, most of us would never venture outside. So for the most part we ignore all these things and it is only when something bad actually happens to us that we are reminded of the fragile nature of everything in our lives.

Until then most of us tend to put things off, and plan to do it tomorrow, or next week or next year. I’d been planning for some time having researched various ways of creating memorials for our pets, to get a kit to cast my dog’s paw prints, I’ve put it off for months and months, thinking I have plenty of time, and maybe I do, but my Mum’s recent accident has reminded me that our lives can be changed for ever in a second.

We should all really make the most of the time we have with our pets, and most of us do, but often we plan something in our minds like a trip to a special place or taking more photographs of them, or even planning a service for pets we have lost and we get waylaid somewhere else and it never happens. So I guess the best advice is, if you can, do it now.

Am I Grieving Enough?

Sometimes I get emails and letters from people who have read stories on the website and cannot understand why knowing how they loved their pet, they do not seem to feel as bad as some of the people who have submitted stories. This can make them feel very guilty and as though their relationship with their pet could not have been as strong as they thought it was, because they feel like they don’t feel ‘bad enough’.

They feel almost as though they are betraying their pet by not feeling bad enough or coping better than they thought they would. But there are many reasons for this and just like the stages of grief it is perfectly normal for different people to experience grief in different ways.

How and why you grieve depends on a number of factors. Firstly the manner in which you lost your pet plays a big part. If you lose your pet in an accident or due to a sudden illness for example, you simply will not have time to prepare yourself. On the other hand, even if your pet is ill for some time, if you have convinced yourself or had reason to believe that your pet will recover, it can still be deeply shocking. Some people subconsciously refuse to believe that their pet will not recover and blank out any notion of it, missing the chance to prepare themselves for the inevitable.

People’s reactions to grief can also be affected by their lives generally. If you are surrounded by supportive and understanding people who know how important your pet is to you, you will have a ready made support network and somewhere to discuss your thoughts and feelings. If however you are at a point in your life where you are perhaps single or far away from friends and family, this can make it much harder to cope with the devastation of pet loss. You will have noone nearby to share the experience with and are more likely to become stuck in the ‘what if’s’ or ‘if only’ stages.

This is one of the reasons I set up the website, because I really believe that whilst you cannot prevent the pain of grief, you can have a better understanding of it and be prepared, knowing what to expect in advance, and if you understand why you feel the way you feel, it takes away the fear. For those people who do not have this type of support network or who find it hard to talk to the people around them about their grief, I hope the site serves as a way to communicate with others in the same situation and to share their experiences and know they are not alone.

If your pet has been sick for some time before their loss, many people will experience anticipatory grief during this time and so may find that the grief they feel on losing their pet is not as bad as they were dreading. The grief you feel afterwards may feel less powerful in comparison to anticipatory grief but often this is just because we are prepared and in a way have become used to these feelings in advance. Anticipatory grief can often feel worse because whilst your pet is still with you you feel as though you should be doing something, anything to help them.

Many people also feel a certain amount of relief that their sick pet has gone to Rainbow Bridge and are no longer in pain, but they can also feel guilty for feeling relief. But guilt is just a natural part of grief and if you didn’t feel guilty about that, guilt would find something else to play on.

Your feelings of loss can also depend on how much time you spent with your pet and the role they played in your life. If your pet was your first pet, or has been your faithful companion since you were a child for example, it can be hard to remember life without them since a vast amount of time has been spent with them being a constant presence in your life. Many of us spend a great deal of time with our pets, and so we feel their loss much more acutely because everywhere we look we remember their presence. Even if your pet was just in the back ground of your life, you may be surprised to find that the fact that they are missing can suddenly be very obvious.

Your experience of grief depends on many things such as the circumstances of your pet’s death and your relationship with then, the amount of support you receive from those around you, the role your pet played in your life, your previous experiences of loss, but also on how you cope generally with big changes in your life. Losing a pet is a big change in your life, and so naturally it takes time to come to terms with and readjust to your new situation. If you have had to cope with many big changes in your life before, this may come easier to you.

Something that needs to be stressed is that your experience of grief does not necessarily tally with the love you had for your pet. People cope differently because of the reasons already mentioned but also because of their life experience generally. I for example love all of my pets equally, but I can honestly say that my feelings of grief on losing each of them has decreased the more pets I have lost. I don’t love my current pets any less than I did my previous pets, it is simply that I have grown to accept that loss is just a part of loving anything. I am also more prepared because I know already exactly how I will feel and think when I lose my pets in the future. I can’t stop myself feeling that way but I am no longer afraid that I will be unable to cope.

The truth is is whilst the Stages of Grief are intended to give people a better understanding of how they may feel, there are no set parameters for the way you may actually feel. There is no set time for grieving, no rules, no measures by which the level of grief determines the love you may have had for your pet. You may like me have loved your pet wholeheartedly, but have lost many pets in the past and have in a way grown accustomed to loss, you may be someone who felt that their pet was just in the background and that you did not spend much time with them, and yet find you are devastated by their loss. You may find yourself feeling as devastated as you expected or not as devastated as you expected.

None of these things mean we love our pets any less, it is just that everyone experiences everything differently and everyone copes differently. No pet is the same and so no grief will be the same, but most grief shares common attributes that we can learn from.