Our cat, Freddy, died at the beginning of August in Hampden Animal Hospital where he had a second thyroid removed. He has been on a drip since the operation as his calcium levels didn't recover and he has had to take calcium tablets as his para-thyroids (which regulate his calcium) didn't operate as they should to control his system. Despite the best efforts he had a seizure probably due to his heart having been weakened and damaged by his thyroid problems this year and last. We reckon he was 18, which is 3 years more than the average span for his breed.
All this, I admit, was a sharp learning curve for me as I was not a “pet person” and had never set out to get a cat. We didn’t choose Freddy, rather he choose us. He was the neighbour’s cat who tended to “wander in.” often we would see him at the back wall and he would wait until we signalled for him to come before he bothered to get down from the wall and come in. Soon we would find him outside when locking up at night and he would invite himself in and snore his head off for the night. How we wondered at his amazing bladder control! When my father – in-law came to live with us Freddy and he developed a little routine. Freddy would appear at the back door around 10.30 in the morning, stare in until he was let in and snooze on the settee while dad in law organised lunch, watched television and so on. After lunch he would go up for a snooze on his bed and so would Freddy. This arrangement had its hiccups like the day my father-in-law was startled from his slumber by the phone ringing and jumped out of bed. He didn’t realise that Freddy was sleeping soundly on his leg and was catapulted towards the ceiling!
At around five in the afternoon he would let Freddy out the front door and chuckle when the neighbours arrived home saying “poor Freddy, have you been out all day?” Freddy would demand food and soon, even though we didn’t have a cat, we found ourselves picking up cat food in the supermarket. A Cat’s ability to train its humans is well known. So when our neighbours moved to Spain and we agreed to take Freddy on he was not a stranger but we worried about the practicalities of the handover, we needn’t have as he figured it out for himself and on the appointed day he walked out of their front door, in our front door and without skipping a beat made himself at home.
Cats are the world’s longest domesticated animals. Humans kept them close to protect their grain stores, a pre-requisite for survival until the next harvest, and the humans for their part fed them and protected them from predators. The relationship between people and animals has changed in the last 50 years from keeping them as pets who are “working” animals to being human companions. This change in terminology implies a mutual relationship between humans and animals which has been described as the ‘human-animal bond’. It is this bond that makes pet bereavement acute and painful.
When Freddy died I felt a real sense of loss but at the same time felt alternatively stupid that I was having these feelings about an animal and guilty to be so upset. Partly this guilt was from the fact that two people I knew had lost family members in tragic circumstances around the same time and my feelings somehow suggested an uncomfortable parity between human and animal loss. I needed to understand and rationalise why I was feeling this way.
I found that cat bereavement in particular can have a lasting effect upon us. We establish a special bond with our pets and when they pass away the loss which we feel can be very deep and acute. For many people the death of their pet is less stressful than the death of a human member of their immediate family, but more stressful than the death of other relatives. The loss of a pet and pet bereavement may have many more implications other than the loss of companionship. The absence of the pet often creates secondary disruptions resulting in the loss of enjoyable past times or a loss of emotional support that a pet offered. This in particular affects older people or those who are on their own and whose sense of routine has been reinforced by their interaction with a pet.
One overlooked area of pet bereavement is known as symbolic loss where the pet represented a last link with special people now departed. The pet’s death removes those links and old losses are re-grieved in conjunction with current ones. Grief due to symbolic loss is often very intense and certainly in Freddy’s case it brought back memories of our father-in-law who also passed on. There has been much publicity recently about a cat in an old person’s home in America who could tell when residents were near death. What is certain is that they can detect illness in humans. When my father-in-law had a blackout and fell down the stairs Freddy rushed to comfort him licking his face. We took him away but he followed him out to the ambulance and the ambulance staff had to bring him back and lock him in the house. But when my father-in-law came back to the house before going into a nursing home 3 months later Freddy avoided him. Later that week he was diagnosed as suffering from cancer. Did the cat know?
Another manifestation of symbolic loss surprised us. Freddy had been around the road for 12 years so the neighbours children had grown up with Freddy, indeed they used to call and ask could he come out and play with them. So they looked out for him and looked after him when we were away and now they sent cards to let us know how sorry they were that “their” Freddy had gone.
Grief is an almost inevitable consequence of pet bereavement. There are many myths relating to grief that actually prolong the grieving process - such as remaining strong and composed, or staying busy . So, to answer the question, it is OK to mourn a cat, the answer must be Yes! Grief over a pet bereavement is a very natural thing and should be allowed to happen openly and freely. As with all loss the secret of coping is to keep a sense of proportion, get on with life and concentrate on the happy memories.
As T.S Elliot remarked in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats;
>“ That Cats are much like you and me
And other people whom we find
Possessed of various types of mind.
For some are sane and some are mad
And some are good and some are bad”
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