Grief and Our Pets
by Vicky EdgerlyI had to say goodbye to my dog recently. His name was Jangles and he was the youngest of 3 Labs that my late-husband and I raised together. My 'Baby Boy'. I cradled his sweet face in my lap and whispered words of love and gratitude into his ears as the drugs sent him off to sleep. You would think that after burying both of my children and my husband, losing a pet would be inconsequential to me...but it isn't. It isn't at all.
I have a vivid memory of a woman grieving her deceased dog that used to spark a lot of anger in me. You see, my own son had taken his life at the tender age of 18 just a few weeks before, when a women I worked with announced the death of her beloved dog of some 15 years over the weekend. This was during a time in my own journey where the grief over my son's suicide was still very much in the driver's seat. I prided myself on how far I had come because I could go to the office and hold it together for the required eight hour day (although the floodgates would burst open as soon as I pushed through the exit doors at days end and hot, wet tears would be pouring down my face and bouncing off my shoes by the time I reached my car).
The bereaved Dog Mommy was having a rough time with her own loss. Her emotional state would periodically require her to get up and abandon her desk to go sit in the lunch room until she could get her tears under control. This left me to handle her job of answering incoming calls, which seemed like an extreme hardship for me at the time as my still traumatized brain struggled to function properly in the workplace.
My anger toward this woman, and others like her was very real and demanded my attention. How dare these people compare the grief they feel over a deceased pet to that of a mother who has buried a child or a young widow who has had to say goodbye to the man she thought she'd spend her life with? Really?
"That grieving dog Mom, as it turned out, had lived a life full of abuse, neglect and abandonment."
