I lost a dog at 3 and a half years almost to the day to a congenital defect, that we didn’t know about until he was already very sick. I’m a guy who will cross a street to meet someone’s dog. For over a year afterward I would cross the street to avoid walking past the same breed and color of dog. The way people avoid pitbulls.
And that was just a dog. I can’t even imagine what happens when your child dies, especially if your job or social circle involves them.
The author said he has a therapist, but I wonder if he’s had one the whole time or if he failed to process at the time and is now paying for letting it sink into his bones.
He's been writing about Rebecca and his family's journey since pretty early in her diagnosis if I remember correctly. I remember when he posted about her passing too.
Grief comes in waves. Long after you think the storm has passed. We all process it differently. A 16th birthday is pretty big milestone in the states. I imagine that can be a magnifying glass for grief and pain. I know my friends feel the weight of their son's birthday and the date of his passing quite heavily.
I lost my mom 16 years ago. To this day something can remind of her and it's like time stops. It's dizzying as the world around me moves on. Then I catch up again until the next wave.
> I lost a dog at 3 and a half years almost to the day to a congenital defect, that we didn’t know about until he was already very sick. I’m a guy who will cross a street to meet someone’s dog. For over a year afterward I would cross the street to avoid walking past the same breed and color of dog. The way people avoid pitbulls.
> And that was just a dog.
Depending on the person and/or situation, losing a dog can rival the pain of any other loss. Especially if the bond between person and dog is reinforced through daily activities.
I guess what I'm saying here is loss is loss. Some losses may be painful longer than others, for sure, but the pain of losing a being you love is universal.
A friend of mine described the pain of this type of loss thusly;
Think of the pain like a ball bouncing around in a box,
with a button at center-bottom which activates pain every
time it is touched by the ball.
At first, the ball is almost the same size as the box
and hits the button constantly.
Over time, the ball shrinks but the size of the box
and the button remain the same. All that changes is
how often the button is hit.
I don’t want to diminish anyone else’s experience but my neutered dog did not miss out on growing up and starting a life of his own. Pursuing a career, falling in love, having a child.
At three a dog has had many of the milestones he will have in life. What I miss is the time I and my circle lost with him. Not the experiences he didn’t get to have, or the new people he might have brought into the world, and their experiences. I would have shown him more of the same life in minor variations, not things I wouldn’t even dream of doing myself.
I did not interpret your post as diminishing anyone.
The main point I wanted to share is that loss has a commonality in it always precedes pain and must be dealt with similarly. Comparing its form was never my intent nor do I hold there is any fundamental difference between them.
> Depending on the person and/or situation, losing a dog can rival the pain of any other loss. Especially if the bond between person and dog is reinforced through daily activities.
I guess what I'm saying here is loss is loss. Some losses may be painful longer than others, for sure, but the pain of losing a being you love is universal.
This is beautifully illustrated by this line from Leonard Cohen's "Everybody knows":
"Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died"
As someone who has lost both a parent and a dog, I can relate completely to this.
It was relatively common for parents to lose children (every second child was expected to die before 5y) but even then, with all that death around them, the tragedy remained as great as today. Back then, most did look to their God for solace, though: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1goyaco/when...
In the present, orthodox practitioners of Abrahamic religions, in particular, may stoically overcome such profound grief by attributing it to divine will.
That reminds me the story of Mozart's parents. Their first 3 children died less than 1 year old. I can't imagine the despair. Out of 7 children, only 2 survived infancy.
I forget which book I read this in, but the author in their autobiography described their "real man" father as someone who they'd only seen cry three times in his life. When his wife died, he was all stoic about it and didn't show any upset in public. But when his favorite dog died, he broke down crying.
Many people who don't understand how upset one can get over a dog, have never had one. I have a photo of our first family dog and it still makes me upset if I look at it for too long.
I had an unrequited love thing in college that never got resolved but I gave up and started trying to date. The second one sat me down one day and said we were only ever going to be friends. I was grumpy the rest of the night but when I got home I just crumbled to dust. We would have been a terrible match, so it was the right thing to do. I don’t even know that we would have been friends except we had one in common. I didn’t understand why I felt so unanchored around her and so we stopped hanging out. Which I realized is just the sort of thing women complain about with male friendships but what can you do.
It took a while to realize I wasn’t grieving her. I was jammed in the Denial phase of a previous loss and adding a few more rocks to the pile caused an avalanche. I’m betting that’s what happened with your goldfish.
Hmm, I've not really found that to be the case personally. Past that initial shit period up until my late teens, subsequent losses and grief has been quite different.
Well humans are aware of their own mortality and can talk about it with one another. Your man can find peace because he would know his wifes outlook on life and her wishes
We are entirely responsible for the health and welfare of domestic dogs, like young children.
I will be downvoted but that ("real man", no crying for the wife passing away...) tells more about subtle "machismo" and patriarchy that about how much people can care about dogs.
Grief is complex and deeply personal, and is not about fitting someone else's expectations... Losing a dog hits different because their presence is so genuine and uncomplicated. They provide unconditional comfort. That connection is usually way less complicated than the ones with have with people.
Let's add conformity to (wrong? IMO totally) social/religious rules like "you cannot divorce".
Because if your spouse passes away, either young or when it was their time so to speak, and you aren't genuinely sad, well, why were you two still together?
If you spent a happy life together with someone, you should be sad even if they passed away serenely, because hey, it was the person with whom you shared and lived almost everything.
If instead you were still together but actually secretly hating each other, or just because "it was always like that", well, the marriage should have not lasted til that point. If it did, it was most probably due to social rules to follow no matter what and/or patriarchy.
And if it was a young person, well, even more! A young loss should generate even more grief.
And the "real man" part...well, I think it explains itself.
I understand this can come off as simplifying too much but I believe it boils down to those reasons in the vast majority of cases. So, there can be exceptions of course but they are a minority.
We had a wonderful, affectionate, snuggly cat who also had a congenital defect. She only made it to a year and seven months old (having adopted her at around 8 weeks old). We lost her almost two and a half years ago, and I still cry over her memory once every couple weeks, and think about her multiple times a day.
I don't have children, but if I ever do, I am worried that my experience with this wonderful little cat will turn me into an anxious, unhealthily-overprotective mess when it comes to any children I might have.
When you hit college age is often when your odds of experiencing the first death in your family spikes up. Grandparent, great grandparent, oldest aunt. It happened to a number of friends of friends and acquaintances. Some people were a complete mess and others were more resilient.
The pattern I noticed was the people who had lost a pet were more equipped to deal with the loss of a human. The worst hit people never even had pets. Maybe a coincidence, but I suspect not. I don’t think it hurts any less, but you know better what needs to be done to move through it instead of getting stuck.
My mother died during my second year of college. My father died when I was in my 30s. My mother's parents died before I was born, and my father's had both died by the time I was 10 or so.
We had cats when I was a kid, and two of them died while I was in my early/mid teens. They were "mom's cats", and at the time I didn't understand why it affected her so deeply. It made me sad, to be sure (both cats had been around my entire life up to that point), but I didn't get it. Not until I lost my own cat, anyway.
In a strange way, a way that I sometimes feel bad about, losing my cat hit me harder than losing my parents.
> Life pro-tip: In your day-to-day human encounters, if someone mentions the pain of losing a child, do not bring up your dead dog.
Witnessing a cherished part of your life die, while you do not and can do nothing about it, is a uniquely powerless experience. Because, while you continue to live, a part of you dies.
If a person can empathize with this experience in a genuine way, what matter is it their loss?
But I don't think it's a valid criticism here because OP actively calls out they trying to find the most appropriate path for empathy ("support in") while deliberately not equating the two experiences of grief (avoiding "complain in").
I think this scolding behaviour is really out of place. The guy is saying "a much lesser loss caused me great hurt; I sympathize with your much greater loss and the hurt you must feel". People do this all the time normally, and secondarily humans have imprecisely expressed feelings all the time and the spirit has usually undone any harm that the worst interpretation of the words could do. But at some point in the early 2010s this scolding behaviour started getting really popular. I wonder if some sociologist has traced its source. It's obviously nonsensical behaviour to me.
If someone did that in front of me I'd probably be compelled to say "Dude, now is not the time for this" or something like that but I can't imagine any person in my group behaving that way.
I’ve just had a very close and traumatic loss myself. I can assure you that in some cases, a poorly chosen comparison of grief can have the opposite of the intended effect.
It’s a tough one, because the grieving mind isn’t particularly rational. You have to be especially careful of things that would otherwise be completely fine.
Much of it comes down to wanting real empathy -regardless of where their understanding of loss comes from. What isn’t desired is any kind of equivocation or comparison. And that is so dependent on how the message is delivered.
And I’ve lost dogs too, that can be absolutely devastating, so intellectually I get it, but the point still stands.
Thanks for sharing that. I'd think that the slight lean towards the fact that we're here discussing loss rather than meeting at a funeral makes it different, but I'll vary my view slightly. It's not a comparison I'd ever make because to me pets are pets and animals are not human. So I'll alter my view to not call out a scold on this topic in future in response to your comment.
And that was just a dog. I can’t even imagine what happens when your child dies, especially if your job or social circle involves them.
The author said he has a therapist, but I wonder if he’s had one the whole time or if he failed to process at the time and is now paying for letting it sink into his bones.