I don’t think I can say this without sounding like a self-centered dick, so I’m just going to go for it. Grief is my excuse!
You don’t know how I feel. You think you do, because you’ve lost pets before. And trust me, I appreciate that you want to support me. I love you for trying to compare our pain so I know I’m not alone. I’m not ungrateful so much as uncomfortable when you compare my canine loss to yours. I don’t think your loss was any less terrible, but I do think it’s different.
Because:
You can’t know how I feel. You tell me about your dog that died of this or that. Maybe yours even had gastric carcinoma (aka stomach cancer) like mine did, and you had to clean up its vomit for over a month while it wasted away and lost the energy to do its favorite things. Maybe it even panicked during euthanasia like mine did, and you had to hold it and feel its heart battering the inside of its chest as it struggled desperately to stay with you.
It’s possible that you met your dog as an adult, and that in the beginning, it owed you nothing except a place to stay. That it ignored you when you gave it commands, and you spent three years in a constant battle of wills to get the damn thing to stop dumping the garbage on the floor or licking your face when it had cat turd-breath. Maybe it wasn’t raised to love you, and it decided to of its own free will.
The similarities become distinctly unlikely when we get this far, but it’s even possible that you’re a person in a minority group at high risk for getting your ass kicked by people who don’t even know you. Perhaps, once in the middle of the night, when you were alone, three people decided you looked like a punching bag, and they moved in on you like a pride of meth-peddling lions, and you were terrified because they were accusing you of getting in their way, and explaining how they were going to remove you, and what the hell could you do because you’re a hundred and twenty pounds and never been in a fight in your life. And it’s possible that you touched your dog’s collar, hoping it would understand. Maybe your dog lunged at them like mine did, snarling and ready to rip their throats out because it already knew what was going on, and it would rather fight three full grown men, each of them three or four times its own size, than let anything happen to you. It’s possible that you got to watch those pieces of shit turn in silent tandem and go back the way they came, that you saw that out of the corner of your eye, because you got to act all cool and look straight ahead as if they weren’t even there and you’d never heard their challenges, because your dog was so awesome.
It’s possible. But I doubt it. Even if I have another dog capable of that courage and loyalty, I hope it never gets the chance to prove it. And so I won’t know, will I?
The next dog I own will probably be just like yours. I will love it, and it will love me. I never thought that wouldn’t be enough until I found out there was more.
R.I.P., Shai. It took me awhile, but I loved you as much as you loved me.
Hi!
OK, I’m more than a stranger by now, but we used to “know” each other years ago, if “know” = “we were both on LJ when LJ was life.”
Skinnyways, I just got a craving to check in on people that I “knew” years back, but when I came to your blog, and read this post, I feel more like I was led here. Maybe because all dogs go to heaven!
As you stated, I don’t understand your grief, at all. But I understand what it is to grieve over an animal when nobody else outside of your household gives more than a fleeting care. “Your dog died? Aww, I’m sorry!” (end.)
When we lost our pup last year, I sat on my bed and cried outloud for hours, with the last memory of the terrified, confused, painful look in her eyes pounding into me.
I didn’t cry like that when my grandmother died, though I loved her “more.”
I just loved my pup… different.
I can’t tell you what will happen for you next, but I can tell you that in the 6 months since her passing, the hurt of her death has faded away, and now, when I think of her, I smile.