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.

- Denise Chong

The writer grieved her cat's death for about a decade before the pet died. PHOTO: DENISE CHONG

(DENISE CHONG)

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.

Well, here's how it sort of started.

At my previous home, Daphne used to leap like a tiger into the great outdoors every day, but later, I moved to a home where she became an exclusively indoor cat. She then became so much more of a part of my life that it felt like she had moved into where my heart was.

There she was on a chair at home, with her paws tucked into her chest, looking like a loaf of freshly baked bread, with her big green eyes following my every move.

If her eyelids were half closed on the way to her hundredth cat nap of the day, her ears would swivel without her head moving to follow the sounds I made at home, like when I was doing the laundry or pouring a lot of milk into my cup of tea.

Mmm, milk.

She would get up and pad over to take a little milk "tax" from my beverage before going back to being half asleep, wearing a satisfied look on her face.

Here she was on the table, with her warm tummy resting on my arm so I was unable to move the computer mouse easily.