It has been a hard week - and still is - post losing our cat. It is the first major grief I've faced since going through SIF. Although my SIF grief was dealt with as best as it could possibly be; it still remains, as possibly a part of me forever and most certainly resurfaces when another type of loss occurs in life - as it has this week. It's not so much the angst of not being able to not have another child that is up there. It is just the feeling of loss that has just become part of me - the broken feeling that I have accepted and had to embrace in order to move on that has come up as a result of another loss. Because I am so devastated around the loss of my beloved cat, that has been there through several rocky patches over the last 11 years; I'm feeling broken once again.
Just as I was coming to a place of accepting that life would be okay with just the three of us - the four of us including our cat - life changes again. I've been through enough grief over the last four plus years to know that some good will come out of this. It is heartbreaking losing a much loved pet; but the end of his life signifies the end of an era - but it is early days to understand just what exactly that means.
Our profile is now out of date as we had a page in our profile about our cat including photos. We will get another pet when the time is right so I won't bother changing the profile at this stage. The main message to get across I guess is that we love animals and that pets will probably always be part of our lives.
With the cat passing, our daughter has felt the smallness of our family even saying herself "Now there are only three of us!" She often referred to our cat as her brother - I know it is a huge loss for her. If we are to remain a family of three - as in three humans - then I think we most certainly need some fur companions to balance things out.
The day I went in to have our cat euthanised and was waiting for our turn (the longest five minutes in my life) ; I saw a family come out of the one of the consulting rooms with four children and their cat and the children were holding cat toys they were about to purchase. One was a cat toy that my daughter had bought our cat for Christmas. It was hard to not have some mother of many envy flare up at the sight of a big family and their cat as we sat there - our small family, about to say goodbye to our beloved Warren.
Our daughter is missing her eight year old niece who she spent time with over the Christmas holidays. She is having a hard week adapting to being home alone after all our visitors have left, after a busy period of time - and without our cat who filled the gap in our family. Our daughter did struggle with sharing our home with a one year old for four nights though. Although she craves the company of children - she also needs a lot of personal space. The older she gets; the harder it will be I think to add another child to our family so probably a good thing that we will be in the pool for prospective adoptive parents for just 18 months.
Grief comes in many forms in life - and each time I feel a loss, I'm always surprised at how deeply I am affected. Right now in my grief I would choose our cat and one child - the one we have over any other variation in our family. I miss my fur-baby who in many ways was my second child.
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