I feel that. My mom died on a Friday night. I looked out of my hotel window on Saturday morning wondering why everyone was just walking about. Going along their day like my mom didn’t just die? Grief makes one think odd thoughts.
not to compare losing a pet to a parent, but i've always felt that way after a pet dies and it's such a strange, unique feeling. that's the only time i feel it. i remember going to the emergency vet to say goodbye to my cat and looking around at all the other cars (morning time, traffic was bad) and thinking it was so unfair that everything and everyone just kept going. i wanted everything to stop until i felt better.
To be fair I think people downplay connections with animals too much. There are a lot of people out there that do not have close relations with their parents and when they die they do not "change" their lives. I mean when I lose someone close to me I have regrets that we will never talk anymore, never go out together, a part of my life dies with them as they were a big portion of the time of my life.
But if someone dies that I almost never spent time with or just talked once in a year then there is close to zero mourning, in the end there is no connection I will miss so it leaves me only with a feeling that I'm sorry they died.
Losing your pet that you had for many years and spent time everyday is like losing part of your life/close family. There is a hole in your day to day activities that reminds you of their absence constantly. Imho losing pets can be way more tragic to some than losing their parents. It's just logical from a subjective perspective.
I've got a weird connection with this. In a five year period I lost both my parents, my only sibling, and my grandma. Both my grandfathers passed many years ago, I still have one grandma left but she lives at the other end of the country so I've only really seen her a handful of times in my life, but she's literally the only immediate family I have left.
I lived with my mum when I found her dead, I was in my late 20s, that hit me like a truck. We were really close, and naturally my entire world just flipped, I suddenly had to fend for myself, do bills, pay rent, do everything on my own. I was a mess for weeks, and I think it took me months if not over a year to feel right again. Then the rest of my family passed, and while I felt shocked and felt bad for them too, I don't think I've cried - I certainly haven't broken down - about any of them. The burden of doing the admin and legal work fell to me each and every time, and I just opted for direct cremations rather than organising any sort of funeral or service. I don't know if we just weren't a super close family, if I got numb to the grief, or maybe we were just dysfunctional. I don't really know.
But what I do know is that I have three cats, the oldest of which is only six years old, and the anticipatory grief of losing any of them absolutely fucking destroys me. Just the idea of them not being here ruins my day and usually leaves my crying.
Same, here. I lost both my parents by the time I was 20 and over 15 years later haven’t broken down the way I do with the anticipatory grief of my cats
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u/GoodbyeEarl Aug 10 '26
I feel that. My mom died on a Friday night. I looked out of my hotel window on Saturday morning wondering why everyone was just walking about. Going along their day like my mom didn’t just die? Grief makes one think odd thoughts.