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I’ll miss you when you die years later: Grieving a pet’s death in advance
Anticipatory grief at first appears to be premature, unnecessary pain, but it helped the writer in unexpected ways.
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The writer had grieved her pet’s death for about a decade before the cat died.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF DENISE CHONG
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My pet kitty Daphne left a fuzzy, cat-shaped hole where my heart was when she died at a ripe old age of 17. So far, I have been quietly mourning her for about a decade after she died, but perhaps peculiarly, I had actually grieved her death for almost as many years before I saw her draw her last breath at home.
What had triggered this seemingly premature, anticipatory grief, and was it needless pain or did it help me in unexpected ways? After all, she didn’t have any close brush with death in all those years with me – she had been in good health until shortly before she died.
