The Appropriate Weight of Grief – Men, Cats, and the Writing Life
medium.com
medium.com
When my mother died from cancer, there were two extreme reactions from immediate family and friends: the first group believed that I was no longer a functioning human being and needed acute help, the second group told me a few days after her death that I should be over it by now since parents die and everybody is fine with that. The interesting part is, both reactions happened without me knowingly showing any outward signs of extreme grief, I had simply told them I needed some time to myself. I'm very very glad that I didn't try to make people "understand" how I felt at the time.
When my cat got sick and died from congestive heart failure two years ago, some of the reactions I got were "I bet you failed to take care of her properly and that's why she died", and "whatever, just get a new one, they're interchangeable". Again, I didn't communicate to the outside how I felt, because it's utterly pointless. If people react like that without any data, I can only speculate how bad and besides the point things would have gotten had I actually opened up about it.
As soon as you grieve publicly, people will start telling you how to move on and why your grief is inappropriate. But grief is not for other people to participate in the first place, it's a personal experience. Especially when it's a pet (and the male cat owner is probably the most stigmatised culturally), many friends and family won't understand, and it can't be your mission to make them understand.
In my opinion, being outwardly stoic while grieving is almost always the best option for everybody involved.
Recently while reading Shakespeare I came across Constance's statement on Grief from King John which expressed to me how persistent grief can be.
Constance: Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form; Then, have I reason to be fond of grief? Fare you well: had you such a loss as I, I could give better comfort than you do. I will not keep this form upon my head, When there is such disorder in my wit. O Lord! my boy, my Arthur, my fair son! My life, my joy, my food, my all the world! My widow-comfort, and my sorrows' cure!
For those pets, parents, grandparents, and others that have passed, I continue to miss them, perhaps more than I should. Don't we all?
> I bet you failed to take care of her properly and that's why she died.
This is an awful, awful, sub-human thing to say, especially for someone who doesn't know anything about the situation. Among the responses that I got when my cat passed away, the one that meant the most to me was from my vet, who said "you must have taken very good care of your cat for him to have lived to the age that he did." This helped an enormous amount with the intense guilt that I felt.
As such, and particularly to stand up against the assholes who said otherwise, I hope that I may say that I'm sure you did everything that you could for your cat, and made her life as healthy and happy as possible.
I do wonder about the need to tie it into gender, though. I (a man) cried, sobbed, bawled when my cat died, in the vet's office, and later in private with my wife, and nothing in anyone's reactions suggested to me that there was anything inappropriate about my doing so. I believe, and hope, that, if a man feels that it is inappropriate for him to show emotion, then that says more about his own self-perception of manhood than about others' perceptions of him. (This is not meant as a criticism of the author, but as good news of a sort: if I am right, then he need only liberate himself from his self-imposed strictures, rather than fighting against the censure of a broader society.)
Not really. There is still an enormous amount of regressive social pressure heaped on men to never show or admit weakness, not even with a spouse or close friend, and crying is one of the most widely stigmatized actions within this framework of pressure.
Then luckily for you, you know people who are very different than some of the people I know. Off the top of my head, I can name at least five men who would make fun of another man for crying over the death of a cat.
It's well known that the rate of completed suicides for men is far higher than that for women (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide). I suspect a lot of this comes down to the fact that society expects men to be tough and hide their emotions, and thus there is more of a stigma attached to them getting the help that they need.
Personally, one of the saddest things I've seen related to the death of an animal (and not just any animal, but a goose, which I'm normally not too fond of since one chased me when I was little). I was visiting my father's work one day, and I saw a single goose standing alone in the parking lot, looking confused. My dad told me that there had been a flock of geese, and one of the geese was standing in the road. A car with a driver who was clearly annoyed (or psychopathic) had sped up and intentionally killed the goose standing in the way of his car. There was a dark patch on the road where the goose had been struck. As you may know, geese tend to mate for life, and when the rest of the flock had moved on, this goose's partner remained behind. I don't know if the goose knew that its partner was dead (as opposed to lost), but the way it just stood there barely moving was one of the saddest things I've ever seen.