Just Lost A Pet, I Am Supposed To Feel Something Right?

[Fadeaway]

I just lost one of my ferrets. She was my first. Why don't I feel anything? I should be grieving. What is wrong with me that I don't grieve normally. When ever I experience huge loss, I always do this. I feel abnormally serine and calm. I know I should feel sad. I loved her to death.

It really bothers me because I feel more calm and at ease than I have in the last 6 months. I know what is going to happen too. A few months from know I am going to break down in to tears and not be able to stop crying and not know why. Eventually, I will make the connection and realize why I am crying, but not at first. Happens every time. Why?

 

[shad]

This has happened to me before as well. I always thought it was something like my mind suppressing my emotions until it can't take any more and gives up months later. My therapist says it's a dissociation thing though.

 

[Leah123]

There is no right or wrong when it comes to grief. Silence, shock, numbness are all just as valid as sadness and tears. Try to have compassion for yourself and accept how you are as perfectly fine in this situation. I'm sorry you lost your ferret.

 

[Hope4Now]

I'm so sorry for your loss. Sometimes losing a loved pet is harder than losing a loved person because people who don't have pets don't understand. There are no rules for grieving. We all process things in our own ways in our own time. There's nothing wrong with the way you react to loss. Just accept whatever you're feeling when you feel it. It took months before I began to grieve my father's death...and truthfully, it wasn't until this winter--6 years after he died--that I found myself sobbing while listening to a song and realized it was coming from the last bit of unresolved grief over his death. I've always been a late reactor to loss.

 

[Sammyiam]

Hi Fadeaway,

I have just done the same thing, my best friend and mum (well not true mum but she said she loved me more than my mother so she said she would take her place) just died after a hard fight with cancer which she lost, and I was with her when she died and I just sat there holding her hand looking at her still body, thinking to myself I should be crying but no tears were there, I just sat there in space thinking nothing, it didn't seem real and we had talked at the hospice everyday so I knew it was coming, but still nothing, it's been 6 weeks and her funeral is this weekend as she wanted a party later instead of a funeral three days after she died.

I am thinking that I'm still feeling nothing, not sure if it's going to hit later like you say or what, but your not alone fadeaway.

Take care

 

[Fadeaway]

I am worried more about my husband, they had a special bond. He keeps saying he is just worried about me, but he is trying to distract himself in every way possible. On top of everything else today I got attacked by a dog outside a store today that looked just like my moms demon possessed dog that always used to bite me. So I felt fear and terror from that, but not anything concerning the loss of my pet, how screwed up is that? Can one eventually just loose too much that they just don't care anymore?

 

[KP the nut]

There is no right or wrong when it comes to grief

Well said.

We all react differently. Ease up on yourself, be kind. You feel how you feel.

 

[Go Hungry]

It's not that abnormal. When my aunt died I felt nothing. Still don't, not really. It was just something that happened. It may be because I got to say goodbye to her first. Then when my grandfather died I was just angry. It was because I had to miss my yearly bacchanal and 'why did he have to die NOW, of all times?' Even that sort of thing, anger at a disruption in your life, is completely normal too.

At first I thought I was some kind of psycho for feeling nothing, but I spoke with a friend who had the same thing happen at a funeral, and the truth is that people simply deal with grief in different ways, including by deferring it indefinitely sometimes. I still wonder if some day I'm just going to break out bawling, but I doubt it. Who knows?

The point is, don't worry about it. You're just doing what people do, you're grieving, even if you don't know it.

 

[unreality]

Hi Fadeaway,

I've experienced this too. I call it my "delayed grief". I've found that the important thing is acceptance. I had to accept that my response to death is not immediate. It used to take me years to finally feel emotions and grief from the death of someone. I found out my uncle died in a freak accident and even though I was standing in the hospital with my family surrounding his body and everyone was crying, I felt totally numb to all of it. I felt guilty about not showing tears and questioned whether I was so beyond repair that I just couldn't even feel anymore. I judged myself on behalf of other people, assuming they must think this or that about me, and then drawing conclusions about myself from it, which was always negative. That whole process of judging myself just put up these mental walls of defense and made it even harder for me to feel grief.

Once I started accepting my grief process for what it is and stopped judging, the delay between a loss and a reaction grew shorter. It was a few months then a few weeks, now on death anniversaries I grieve a few days to a week later. It's easier to accept when you look at it as another biological process, rather than linking it to the blame game of "why did all these things happen to me to make me this way and why do I have to have those disorder" (at least that's what I used to do) because linking it all back in just feeds the disorder. Looking at it like metabolism for example, is better. It's a biological process that we can't necessary control and the speed of ours is not the same as the speed of someone else's.

Also, I started putting dates or anniversaries of deaths in my phone calendar to remind me, so when I started feeling all sorts of emotions out of nowhere I could look at the date and see if it was near the anniversary. This let me activity grieve, I was able to recall memories of them and cry it out which helped with the severity of the ptsd symptoms over time.

It also depends on how close you were to your pet. My cat was my best friend but I didn't even feel or cry right away when he died. It came later that night and throughout the following weeks. But I'd had him for 10 years. So anyway I'm sorry if this all sounds rambly, I just wanted to say I understand where you're coming from and it will get better, but just accept yourself and your own processes for what they are without judgement. I'm sorry for your loss Fadeaway. When you do feel the grief, know that there are people who do care.

Love,
Sammy