07/08/2025
🐾🌈 Pet loss is LOSS 🌈🐾 and you have every right to grieve, however, and for as long as you need
Despite knowing for over a year this moment would come, and it would come far too soon, nothing could ever have prepared me for this loss. Or how deeply it would affect me. I am still crushed. The grief comes in waves. Some days it's a calm ocean lapping at the shore, and others, it hits me like a tsunami. The losses we've suffered since Puddin's have made the grief feel like it's swallowing me whole some days. My heart will always be with the difficult cases: the medicals, the special needs, the hospice. Someday soon I will welcome another, that is PUDDIN'S PROMISE. For now, we let our hearts heal.
The 5 stages of grief:
○ Denial
○ Anger
○ Bargaining
○ Depression
○ Acceptance
Grief isn't linear, it is messy, and all over the place. For me, it started when we got Puddin's diagnosis. He was only 6 months old when we were told he was hospice. That all we could do was love him fierce and keep him comfortable until his kidneys would ultimately fail him. My journey with grief began with anger. How cruel could this universe be? To bring this perfect baby into this world, my world, just to take him away? Just for him to live through so much pain? How uncaring could humans be to allow this to happen? It wasn't his mama's fault she ended up pregnant. Or his fault for being born into this world a stray in need of medical help. Some human somewhere failed him in some way whether it was him directly, his parents, his grandparents or so on and so forth. When he celebrated his first birthday is about when the denial came, and with it the bargaining. Now that he is gone, I am just left with an overwhelming sadness. I am working towards acceptance, settling into this "new normal" with just the old man and my Po'Boy. It all still just feels so "off". So unreal.
So here's to those of you also going through something similar. You are not alone. And don't you ever let anyone tell you that you should be "over it" or that "you should be done crying by now". This is your grief. Own it. The only way out is THROUGH. You take all the time you need 🤍.
