What is Grief and why can't I get over the death of my kitty?

How is it possible that this little kitty was the love of my life and I don’t feel one dab of remorse or grief or sadness about his passing? I asked myself this over and over after my dear friend Benjamin More died. 

It was truly confusing to me because 3 months earlier, his buddy, my ‘fur daughter’, Pia had succumbed to liver cancer. Both my partner and I were overcome with grief; it felt like it broke us. It did help break our marriage. It took me over 13 years to find out why her passing was so difficult, despite the visitations that occurred - not dreams; she showed up, and each time that happened I felt her energy with me for days. 

So why was I not in pieces about Ben? He loved me unconditionally. No one ever loved me like that, before Ben or since. Every professional animal communicator I spoke to would start Ben’s conversation with some version of, ‘He wants you to know if you wanted to give away all the other cats, he would be fine if it was just you and him.’ So ok, he was selfish? Manipulative? Not perfect? But maybe…these were just his secret desires because Ben never argued with any of the others, was kindest to little Pia, who also did not carry a dissonant cell in her beingness. 

So what was different about Ben’s passing, to me? How could I have not felt enormous amounts of grief? 

Because that’s not what grief is really about. Grief is about unresolved emotions or beliefs we hold sub or unconsciously; it’s about misunderstandings of who we are, projections of our light shadow onto the one who has passed. They leave with all the good stuff, all our gifts, all our joy and treasures, it seems.

But that’s not what really happens, of course. We all know our beloved animals would never do that anyway.  What really happens is something along the lines of human core beliefs operating: Your unacknowledged worth, or sense of being not enough…if we can’t own it ourselves, we will definitely see it in the beautiful being we are so close to, who is more than willing to reflect our disowned light back to us in the hopes that we’ll recognize it as who we are. So there we go, enjoying glimpses of that throughout life…until this furry little one cannot maintain a physical body anymore, and it’s time go, to move into a pure spirit state.

What happens next? We are left with our own humanness and lack, with both our dear friend and pieces of our own most vibrant energy, seemingly just gone. We feel abandoned by our own inner light as well as our friend. This is grief - the loss of the parts of ourselves that we have projected onto others - asking them, please hold this light til I am able to hold it for myself. 

Animals can show unconditional love - in this way they have greater capacities, are more, than humans. 

My relationship with Benjamin was purrfect. He loved me unconditionally and I knew it and returned that love in kind - because that’s what he gave me, I could respond that way. He taught me how to reciprocate. Can I love someone unconditionally who does not initiate that type of love? I don’t know. I know I loved him that way. Ultimately what I came to understand is that unconditional love gave us the gift of wholeness unto ourselves. Neither of us became entangled in codependence or projections within our relationship. We simply loved each other and maintained our sovereignty in our hearts. And that’s the way I began to understand it on a rational mind level when he passed:  We were complete. He lived in my heart, still does, and that is that. 

I loved Pia immensely - did I do something wrong, what was wrong, I searched my mind in my grief. What was incomplete? Why was this so different? She was so perfect, in her givingness.

And that was part of it - she gave so much. She was the only one of our five-cat family who established a loving relationship with my ex, who I found more difficult to love due to daily neurodivergence experiences he fought with. I wasn’t very good at that challenge, but she was. In a sense, she was our daughter. And in the fray of a marriage unraveling, she stepped in to help, absorbing some of the grief of the pain of relationships that don’t work. When she was diagnosed with liver tumors, ‘It’s grief’, is what my homeopathic vet told me. Whose grief? No one has died. I didn’t understand then. She rallied, she gave us extra time but the tumors grew and made her body uninhabitable. And when she passed, we let our hopes and dreams go with her. Our hearts and our marriage were all empty without her bright light encouraging us, giving us hope, reflecting the best parts of our union and hearts. That’s grief - when the lights go out inside because we’ve pinned our highest versions of our selves upon the ones we love the most and desperately hope will save us…from our own perceived disempowerment and lack. 

So how many years would this take, to begin to understand what happened with Pia? It only took a short time for the marriage to dissolve, but pain of loss remained. 

For me it wasn’t until my new kitty, Juliette - who oddly wore a similar gray and white fur suit like Pia’s - showed me. 

Juliette roamed the land freely as a stray for the first year of her life in the community she was born into in southern New Jersey. I saw her in a Petsmart window about a year after Pia passed. I was all the way at the other end of the aisle and she saw me, stood up on her hind legs and began madly pawing at the plexiglass. That’s all it took. We were driving back to the city in a few days, and I made arrangements to pick her up on the drive home to keep things simple.

As soon as I turned north on the parkway instead of south towards the shore community she grew up in, I glanced back at her in the carrier and saw a look in the eyes that instantly told me this did not work for her. I immediately realized she was intimately connected to the land, the salt air and sound of the waves, and needed those to thrive. Error message, quite clear. There was nothing I was willing to do to immediately solve this. I refused to return her. I ran through all kinds of partially true justifications in my mind as we drove north: If I took her back, she could get adopted by someone who wouldn’t let her outside, etc. I would at least be able to offer her that when we were at the shore…

Over the next 12 years, I packed us up and went to our South Jersey house as much as I could when it wasn’t rented. She lived for it - she was a different cat there. As the years went by, she became  more and more intolerant of apartment living in the city. I bought a large pet stroller and got us out to Central Park every day that I could. Not the same, but these excursions were at least a trickle of lifeblood for her. I got hot water bottles and a battery operated heated pet pad, wrapped her carrier that sat in the carriage in my down blanket when it was below 40. We survived. But more and more now, she cannot tolerate the city as she gets older, and each time we spend a few months or weeks in the apartment, she withdraws from life. I sweat - is she just unhappy or physically ill? She’s 13 now and has some issues that we manage. 

I’m taking an emergency aid course in homeopathy, and am always looking to understand this on an energetic level. In considering the classic remedy for symptoms of grief and stress, Ignatia Amara, it occurred to me to try it with her in order to sort out what was going on when she disengaged from life and spent 23 hours a day in her cat bed.  I did.  It was shockingly transformative. She got up, she engaged, she began looking me in the eye, speaking to me in her little cat ‘Mmmphs!’ whenever she or I came into the room. She wanted to join us at mealtimes…she played! She became a normal cat, once she began to heal from the grief of the loss of her paradise and the stress of being away from the sound of the waves and the smell of the salt air. 

I was so astounded that I took a dose too. I don’t recommend this with homeopathy; of course I am not a vet nor physician and not a homeopath either, but it works with flower essences - I take whatever I give them, and many other people do too. So on myself, I experimented. 

An hour later, I found myself lying in bed inexplicably happy. Just happy. I couldn't figure out why. It had been a rough day, I had the flu, all my daily issues were still there. I was so happy. Then, I realized what grief was - finally, in the absence of it. I begin telling it to 'Go! Go! Shoo! Get out the door! I release you!’...all of it. I saw that Juliette’s happiness in the land of her birth was very similar to both Pia’s innocence, and that of my own inner child self, who lost that early in life along with any hope of getting what she REALLY wanted. There it was, my own unacknowledged grief that had flattened into deeper layers, trying to release through Pia’s passing but had gotten stuck in the fracas of life and loss. 

Ben and Pia mapped out this space of grief and not grief and my questioning what is that?  And Juliette led me into this place, demonstrating what could be. I was willing,  I drank the Ignatia Koolaid, and I found out more about what grief really is when I finally found myself without it. 

I am telling this story so that perhaps you can use this map and sort yourself and your furry friends accordingly as  you will, and heal and come to love each other with less conditionality rather than more.