Pet Parents

Guess this can go here

Sad article
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Luís Costa published his first volume of poetry, Two Dying Lovers Holding a Cat, in November. “It is not about cats,” he said. “It’s about two lovers who cease to be lovers. There’s just a lot of symbolism about cats.”

The next month, his cat, Pierogi (“dumpling” in Polish), fell ill. “He had his own Advent calendar. That’s when I noticed he’d lost his appetite,” says Costa. Pierogi had cancer, which had spread to his bowels and his liver. He died just before Christmas.

“A couple of weeks ago, while I was hoovering the house, I pushed the table aside and there was a whisker. He was a tuxedo cat, so he had white whiskers. The contrast with the floor was quite striking. That was very hard.”

Everyone who has lost a pet will have a friend or acquaintance who said the wrong thing. When my puppy died of canine parvovirus, my friend kept referring to her as “it”.

I’m not saying I have never forgiven her, but that was in 2003 and I don’t seem to have forgotten it. Other greatest hits include: “You still on about that?” and: “When are you getting another one?”

“As if you’re just replacing one furry body with another,” says Susan, who volunteers for Paws to Listen, the grief support service of the charity Cats Protection. She lost Tabitha recently.

“A very judgmental cat, certainly, but she was our difficult little madam,” she says. “And now she’s gone and it’s horrible. Her presence filled the house, so when she died … well, it’s just a house now. It isn’t a home.”

Hearing such recollections, and recalling my own loss, it’s clear that pet grief is objectively, indisputably real. Many of us don’t need to be told what it feels like, but wonder why this great open secret – that losing an animal is enormously hard – is so often minimised.

Diane James is the head of pet loss support at the charity Blue Cross. Its bereavement service, for all animals, has been running for 30 years. It takes 20,000 calls a year and advises similar organisations in the US and Canada.

“Some people are aghast to hear that it might be harder for someone to lose an animal than a person,” James says. But it depends on the person or the pet………

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeand...important-than-animals?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other