My Take | Grieving over your beloved pet who has died is perfectly OK
- The real moral problem is not that we mourn animals who pass away, but that we fret over the suffering of some people in the world but not others
I have never met Richard Eskow, a well-respected journalist and broadcaster in the United States. But I knew exactly how he felt when he wrote his latest piece in Common Dreams, titled “Grieving the Family Cat in a Painfully Violent World”.
His cat died recently. “I’ve been a little reluctant to admit how much I’ve grieved. Who am I to mourn so much for one small creature?” he wrote.
Richard, I feel for you. My wife and I have been there so many times over the years, as our elderly dogs, cats, guinea pigs, a hedgehog and a duck passed away one after another. There were Ginger, Pegagus, JJ, Snowball, Trifle, Zorro, Siu Pak, Ah Gree, C.F.C, Yung Chai, Guik Guik and Fungus.
That tends to happen when you have kept pets most of your life and you are now hitting 60. The rest of our canine and feline family are all past the age of 10, except one-eyed Victor the Pomeranian, whom I found abandoned in a green field outside Toronto.
The thing about grieving over dead pets is that there is no getting around it. If you love your pet – and there is no point keeping any if you don’t love them – you just have to put up with the grief, and let time take care of it.
Eventually there will only be memories, but not all of them are pleasant. Snowball was a puppy when he died from poisoning more than a decade and a half ago. His twin sister, Snowflake, is still with us.
