Grieving Something Other Than Human

Grief is a very funny thing. And most of the time when we think of grief, we think of people losing other people. Losing lovers, parents, siblings or children. We think of unspeakable tragedy, we think of lives being lost too soon. When someone says, I lost my ___________  we understand that it's sad. We understand that we don't understand, and we understand that grief is a process that people experience in different stages and ways.

Take this example, when I was at work once, perhaps at some point last year, I received a phone call from a staff member's family. It's not someone who had ever rung the shop before, and all they said was that my colleague should call them when they could. I could tell from his tone that it must have been serious. My colleague calls back during his break, and obviously it's a personal call because he leaves out the back door to take it. He's gone for quite a while. When he comes back, everything seems okay. He just seems a bit quiet, a bit subdued. I then found out through word of mouth that he'd gotten a call that his mother had died. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know if it was alright for me to express my condolences because I didn't even know if it was alright for me to know. This wasn't a colleague that I was particularly close to, so what was the right way to go about it? I didn't know, and I still don't. But, that kind of loss, it's tangible. It's something concrete. When someone says, 'my parent died today', we just understand. We might not understand what they're going through, but we know the emotion is Sad. We know to give them time, to not force ourselves on them, to let them work through the loss at their own pace.

I've never really lost someone close to me. When I was about nine or ten, my grandpa died, and I suppose that was a loss, but I was so young when he died that I didn't really understand what had happened. I knew what death was, of course. I understood that he was gone, and I understood that he wasn't coming back, but at that age, you lack any sort of tact to help anyone process their emotions. I remember that my mum had to ask special permission from my school to take me out during term time so I could go to the funeral. In the end, I didn't even go, because my mum said that she didn't want me to see him like that. I had no idea how my mum felt when he died, and I still don't. She just seemed to carry on as normal. If she grieved, she must have grieved so silently that I just didn't notice.

Earlier this year, in March, I flew out to see my boyfriend for our anniversary, and I had a great trip. We had a perfect anniversary day we just stayed in and watched crime documentaries and basically didn't get out of our pyjamas. And when the week was over, though I was sad to leave him, I was excited to go home and to see my ginger monster of a cat. After I got off the plane and got to where my parents were picking me up, my mum said that there was something she had to tell me, and that it would wait until we got home. I asked if it was about our beloved cat, and she didn't need to tell me that he'd passed away. I can't quite describe how I felt when I found out. It was devastating. Our cat, creatively named Gingi, had been a part of our family for years. We'd ended up with him after a friend of my sister's went to university in Belgium and couldn't keep him anymore. He was so shy. So shy in fact that he didn't come out from underneath the bed for three days when we first got him. He would shoot off upstairs whenever someone would come to the door, and I even caught him jumping at his own tail a few times. He was truly a scaredy cat. But he was so lovely. He was a huge, fluffy cat  and when he eventually started purring around us, in the beginning you could barely hear him, but after a few years he sounded like a miniature tank. He was also a massive pain. He was incredibly spoiled when it came to food, and would only eat when you sat down next to him and stroked him gently.

I remember coming home and feeling how empty the house was without him. The house just felt cold without him. For the first time in years, I could sleep with my bedroom door closed, and it was awful. It was awful because that was the first sign that he was really gone. However, being without him wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. It was hard, it was very very hard, but in a strange way, I think it helped that he had been poorly for a long time. He clung on, and I truly do believe that he had nine lives. Whilst he didn't improve, he also didn't get any worse, and I think I managed to convince myself that he would eventually get better. We would find the right dosage for his thyroid medication, he would start eating again, he would put on weight, and everything would be okay. Of course, that didn't happen. I think I knew that something was terribly wrong when he started throwing up all of his food. It started happening a few weeks before I went away, he would eat like there was no tomorrow and we thought that the medication was finally helping him, only for him to throw it up a few hours later. I don't know what it was, but that morning of my flight, I had a feeling that I wouldn't see him again. Maybe it was some kind of intuition, or maybe somewhere deep down I knew that he was much sicker than I was ever willing to admit. And the thing is, after I came home and I'd found out that he'd died, I couldn't remember if I'd given him a snuggle the morning of my flight. And that tore me up, because all I wanted was for him to understand how much he was loved and wanted. When I mentioned this to my therapist in my last session, I spoke about how upset I was that I wasn't there when he passed, and I felt so guilty, I felt like I had abandoned him when he needed me most. She told me that instead of thinking that I wasn't there, I should instead think about all the times I was there, and how much love he received, and how he must have known that, because animals just know these sorts of things. And that really helped, reminding myself that we had some great times with him.

When I first found out he'd passed, the thought of him not existing at all was too much to bear. So I loved to imagine him in the afterlife, sleeping under a lovely shady bush-and it's a beautiful never ending summers day. There's birds galore for him to hunt, but mostly I just thought about how he would no longer be in pain. And I don't know what happens when we die, I don't know if this is all there is, I don't know if it all fades to black, I don't know if we have spirits or souls or anything. And as scary as that is, nobody knows these answers. All I know is that we should live our lives with as much love as possible, and to show the people close to us that we love them, and that should be enough. And if there's an afterlife, when my time eventually comes, I hope I can find him again and give him a cuddle and let him know that I never ever stopped thinking or missing him.

When I first started writing this post, I actually had to stop at one point because it became too difficult to continue writing it. It's been over half a year since I lost him, and it honestly doesn't feel like it's gotten much easier in terms of grieving for him. And that's okay. Just because he was a cat instead of a person doesn't mean that my loss is any less valid than anyone else's, and this is something my boyfriend actually helped me realise. When I saw him last month, I was there for the Day of the Dead. And honestly, I think it's a wonderful time of year. We made a little altar, we lit some candles, and my boyfriend had printed a picture of my cat, and I'd brought over some of his favourite treats, and we'd bought some marigolds. And it was really nice. It felt like he was there with me, and it was nice to remember him fondly, rather than remember him the way he was before he died. And maybe that's how we need to look at loss. Not that we've lost something, but remembering all of the great times we had with that person, or animal, and knowing that our lives were better for them being in them. Something that helps me when I miss my old cat too much, is imagining how much he would hate our new one; he's a little black cat called Chico, and they could not be any more different. Chico is a furry ball of energy and affection. He'll follow you all over the house, desperate to not miss something interesting. Our old cat hated all of that. When we first bought Chico back from the shelter, I felt guilty. I felt like we had replaced our old cat. We definitely got a new cat very quickly, pretty much a week after I'd got home from my trip we'd gotten Chico home. On the drive home from the airport, my mum asked me if I would like to get another cat, and I said of course. Now that we'd had one, I couldn't imagine my life without a furry little beast. They'd gone to have a look at the shelter before I'd gotten back, but they hadn't adopted yet because they wanted to be sure that I would like him.

They needn't have worried. I fell in love with Chico instantly. He's jet black, and he's got huge green eyes and he adores people. I couldn't wait to bring him home. However, when we brought him home, it felt like a betrayal of our old cat. Suddenly, I sort of resented Chico, because yes, he was sweet and he was a cat and it wasn't his fault, but I realised that I wasn't ready to have a new cat. My parents might have had more time to grieve our old cat, but I hadn't. To me, the loss was too much, it was still brand new. And sometimes, I still feel that way. I love Chico with my whole heart, and he brings so much joy to my life; he just knows when I'm upset and he just sidles up to me and purrs like a tank. But that doesn't mean that I don't miss my old cat. And that doesn't mean that I love Chico any less. It just means that grief is a lot more complex that anyone ever truly understands, even ourselves.

I think the expectation is that with the death of a pet, you'll get over it a lot faster, even though pets are in our lives for years and years. When they leave this world, it doesn't mean that their lives mean less than their human counterparts, and it doesn't mean that we aren't allowed to miss them. I had a colleague at work once tell me about a friend who had lost her dog, and they'd gotten his ashes back and had scattered them where his favourite walk used to be, and she thought that was too much. But it isn't, we need to honour and remember our death, and that includes our animals. They're our friends, they're our companions, they understand us better than we think, and they love us, and we love them unconditionally, the least we can do is to make sure that when they're gone, we continue remembering and loving them.