By Bob Deits, in Life After Loss: A Practical Guide to Renewing Your Life After Experiencing Major Loss
. . . In one winter two disastrous events happened at the same time, each of which made an impact on my life. First, a number of men were killed in a mining accident . . . The other tragic event was having our 15-year-old cat ‘put to sleep.’ Can you guess which of those events caused me to cry my eyes out? You guessed it — the cat!
There is scarcely any comparison between the loss of human life and the end of a semi-crippled old cat. But Samantha was my cat. I loved her. She was a permanent part of our history. Her loss was not an academic thing. I didn’t look at television or newspaper accounts of her death and say, “That’s too bad!” and go on to the sports page. She was mine. Her loss plunged me into grief . . . This was my loss and at that moment, as far as I was concerned, it was the worst thing to happen in the whole world. I didn’t want anyone to tell me how great it was that she didn’t suffer, or how far beyond a normal life expectancy she had lived.
I wasn’t very objective about the loss of Samantha as compared to the mining disaster, or the loss of my parents some years earlier or the starving masses in the Third World. Grief is like that. It isn’t helped by saying, “How childishly you are behaving over a cat!”
I have known deeper times of grief . . . I have held the hands of friends as they died, baptized stillborn infants, helped families decide when to disconnect life-support systems and worked with parents whose children were murdered.
Each of those experiences was painful. Nevertheless, at the moment my cat died, her loss was the very worst kind of grief for me in the whole world . . .
Never apologize for grieving. Remind yourself as often as needed that the very worst kind of loss is always yours. Learn to acknowledge that your loss is worthy of grief . . .
