Pet grief

Kim and I have entered into a strange, colorless and empty land where we are grieving for the passing of our cat, Halo.

It's been nearly two weeks since we made the decision to put her down. She was suffering from arthritis, 100 percent renal failure and quite possibly lymphoma, which probably accounted for her drastic weight loss in her final months. There was no coming back from this. 

Halo

It's not as if this kind of grief is anything new for us. In our nearly 44 years of marriage, we've had cats in the house for about 41 of those years. Five cats over that span, actually. And now we've buried all five.

But the grief we feel for Halo is somehow subtly different for us than it was for the others. We made the deliberate decision that we will no longer have any more pets. I am 73 years old and Kim is 64, and we just don't want any future pets to outlive us.

I asked Kim if she was feeling the difference in grief we felt for our other cats in the same way I was, and she said yes. We tried to put our finger on it.

The grief we have for Halo seems sharper – harder – because we know there will be no more pets in the house. There's a finality in that.

There are times when I feel a sense of guilt because my grief for Halo – as well as for our previous cats – sometimes seems to transcend the grief I've felt for some humans, even family members. I've talked with a few other pet owners about this phenomenon and they pointed out that we are with our pets nearly every day. We are their daily caregivers, almost from their birth to their death. If you do have any emotional ties to your pet, it's almost inherently impossible to divorce yourself from them.

Having a pet is both a total commitment and an unspoken promise. You do that because in return you receive an unfettered loyalty and – dare I say it? – an unconditional love.

And as Kim pointed out, Halo was a solo cat. At no time in her nine years with us was there another cat in the house. Maybe that's what made her seem different to us. She was her own cat. She was independent, as cats are, but she also needed us as her stewards, as pets do. I call it independent dependency.

So now Kim and I are in that colorless, empty land where the urge to get another cat is starting to pull on us.

I kind of knew this could happen. A day after Halo passed, I collected everything in the house that belonged to a cat – scratching posts, litter boxes, toys, food, medicine, anything – and donated them to a local cat rescue. I'm hoping that by giving that stuff away it reinforces our decision not to get another pet. It's removed a lot of the household triggers to our grief.

We do have one reminder. We've kept an old cloth basket that at some point all of our cats have curled up in. That stays. For some reason, there is no hurt in that basket.

There are neighborhood cats around, so it's not as if we can't get our cat fix.

And I can sense with each day that passes, the grief is diminishing. I guess that's healthy. I don't think we'll require counseling.

As with anything that passes, we have our memories. We know we kept our promises to Halo. That will be enough. 

Halo wants her chair back.