How did you deal with the passing of your pet?

Cried, paid lots of attention to my surviving pet, blogged about the loss, and eventually got a new kitten.

The donations to local cat rescue agencies made by my brother and mom also helped quite a bit.

The saddest I have ever been in my entire life is when I was 7 or so and my hanster died. He was walking from hand to hand and jumped. We took hiim to the University vet school by my house but they put him to sleep. I only had him for a few months but it made me cry and cry for a good 2 weeks.

I have had a 16 year old dog die (had him since he was a puppy), a grandpa, a good friend, and other close family members (people) die but nothing has ever affected me as profoundly as my hamster dying. Sometimes in retrospect I think it’s pretty messed up, feeling more grief for a hamster dying than anything else, but for the most part I don’t think it’s explainable. People deal with different things in different ways.

I’ve had a couple fish die on me. Its weird because i normally dont feel to much grief for the loss of the fish, but more because its my fault that the fish died, because i wasnt taking good enough care of it, or the water quality. So its like completely my fault that its dead.

There was one fish that died on me though that did kind of sadden me a bit. Loki was my angler fish. Cool as hell. One night i was getting up to go to the bathroom and i looked in the tank and noticed him acting really weird and kind of floating around. So i watched him for a while and after a bit i could tell by the way he was acting something was seriously wrong and he was going to die. Yet there was nothing i could do except watch it happen. I watched him suffer for about an hour until he stopped moving. By this time it was 330 am and i had work in the morning so i decided i would just remove him the next morning. I woke up late that day for work so i didnt have time to take him out so i left it until after work. When i got home from work i noticed that my starfish was wrapped around its body and began to eat at him. I didnt want to leave the fish in there because it would make the water quality shitty so i went to take him out only to find out he was still alive, and the starfish had been eating away at him for hours now. The whole left side of his body was a bright purple, but he was breathing. He lived for another day or two and then finally passed. I just feel like if i had gotten to him that night and separated him from everything else he could have survived but since i was lazy he got eaten alive.

I still miss the pets I have lost. Sometimes I dream of them so vividly it is like they are with me again.

It was brutal. My cat was 15 years old, I had gotten her when I was 11….most of my immediate family has died and it was like she was one of the “originals”...she had been with me through so much. It was like everyone left me all over again. I buried her in the backyard, although I won’t go near the spot now. She was one of the few pets I really felt like was “mine” – would only come if I called her, only slept with me, etc. I wrote an awful poem about how guilty I and awful I felt, and made my creative writing class dissect it. The only thing that helped was knowing she wasn’t in any more pain or suffering (kidney/thyroid disease).

For every single pet I’ve lost, I’ve cried my eyes out, listening to sad music and looking through pictures of the pet. Eventually getting through the grief, picking out the best photo and frame it with a little message from me to him/her (they’re not ‘its’).

When I was 10 both my pet fish died in one nigth I that had got when I was 3. I know 7 years is a long time for gold fish to live but they still could have lived longer. Some green stuff had bulilt up on the rock in the tank and I had just got a new toy. I was so sad that I burryed the toy along with them…. And there grave was next to the grave for frid the squid (who was a dead squid me and my aunt found at the beach) I didant say one word for a week but after aboult 2 weeks it was my birthday and my dad got me a terapin to go in there tank.

I’m so sorry. My heart goes out to you. It’s a very difficult thing to have to deal with. I just cried a lot. Reading the poem “The Rainbow Bridge” helped a little but mostly I just cried. Time does help but you’ll always feel an emptiness, which I guess is better than completely forgetting about them and all the good memories. Hang in there.

I had a rat when I was younger her name was Mandy. I loved her to death, because she followed me everywhere, and sat on my shoulder. She was very clean, and well trained. She even sat and ate bananas with me. She would sometimes get out of her cadge and sleep on my pillow. I loved her a lot because she was mine. She lived for about 3 years, a very good life time for a rat. Then she started getting sickly, all cold and stuff. We had to move her up stairs into my sisters room where it was warmer. The vet said it might be a circulation problem, or she was just getting old. I had been sleeping in my sisters room because I wanted to be close to her. Then one day I came home from school and my parents sat me down to talk. They were all serious and stuff, and I didn’t know what was going on. And then I blurted “What is Mandy dead?” and they said yes. I never wanted that to be the reply, and I don’t know why I blurted it out like that. But the second they told me, my eyes filled with tears. I missed her so much. I eventually got another rat, but she died to, I had two more after then and they also had very short life spans. I would like to think to get another one, but I think its best I don’t. I don’t think I’ll ever have a rat as good as her.

http://www.rainbowbridge.com to read that great poem for pet grief