What no one ever tells you

[BendyMom]

growing up you hear about all the opportunities you will have
all the wonderful thiings there are out there
you spend time making friends, falling in love, bonding with pets, finding special places

and time goes on

and then you find that life is about loss
some friends betray you
some get sick and die, or die by accident or their own hand
stupid interpersonal politics destroy organizations you adored, and you watch them crumble never to be the same again
falling in love may or may not turn out so great, a lot of times it doesn't
and your pets
ah, your beloved pets. you watch them grow and play and be happy and get old and get sick and die
and maybe they don't even have the chance to get old, they just die in your hands as you watch, powerless.

life may be about love
but life is also about loss and grief
in fact I think grief and pain are a lot more of life than love.
and so many people want to damp down teh grief and pretend it doesn't exist say stupid things like "it wll be all right" or "time heals all wounds"
nonsense, total, utter nonsense.

grief is just as strong and visceral as love.
it needs to be given the same respec. It is an individual experience. There is no right or wrong way to grieve. Some people are destroyed by it, maybe instead of telling them to get over it people should help them work through it.
don't tell me to feel better
don't tell me to keep my chin up
you want to help heal pan? then be a friend. be supportive of the ways I process my grief, maybe even try to help with a gesture or two of your own.
that is what heals. expressing it, findiing a way to process it adn work with it, not stuffing it down and painting a stupid smile on.

[CarolC]

All true. And I think it is different for some people than others. It is one thing to have a family dog or cat that never had special needs, and love them dearly and take care of them and enjoy their companionship, and then to lose them. But you are even more involved with pets that have special needs, that you save when they would not have made it otherwise, and help intimately daily, and establish this special bond with, and get your joy from seeing their success and recovery. It is much more of the heart's work. Your heart and soul and physical being are more entwined with a pet like that than a normal pet you just brush and feed and take for annuals. And there are rare people like you who do this special care for a houseful of pets, and have many losses, unlike the average person who has the family dog or cat they are very attached to, and loses one every 15 years. It is a lot for anyone to lose a pet they love, but it is different when you have even more involvement with the pet. I don't think everyone's grief is the same. What you lose is tied to what you gave.

And when you lose one that is the light of your life, everything that was part of that life you had together matters, both for itself and because of the association, and you don't want to lose any of it. So potentially the loss continues when something happens to that special blanket, or when the vet that took care of your pet retires and you may not see them again, or when pets that were part of your household during the good years begin to pass one by one. Loss does not end, it kind of continues. And if you want to work through grief, sometimes it is just too hard to go there. But the bond you had with the pet or pets is still in your heart. Taking pictures, journaling memories, paying attention to what remains that was part of the best time of your life, is a way to honor and memorialize the life that made you alive. And we might wall off or divert our thoughts when we just need to get through the requirements of another day, but it is all still there to come back to again as soon as you are free.