(17, NY, USA) Anonymous - Silenced

Nobody likes to talk about pet grief. It’s as if because something doesn’t speak English and look like us, it isn’t worthy of our emotions. I didn’t know this to be true until a few months ago when my own pet died. The few times I would bring up the death, it feels like I would simply receive a whispered “sorry” and then be shushed for daring to speak. I think that the response I got from certain people would have been drastically different if it had been a person in my life who had passed. It’s upsetting, and from my experience it has caused me to not speak about it anymore. There is something so disheartening knowing that both in life and death, humans put themselves above everything else. Simply because an animal could not speak or dance or sing or be like us makes it unworthy of grief. Or at least to some extent, the grief of an animal is expected to be insignificant to the loss of human life. There is a stigma, undoubtedly, around this, that tells us to deal with our feelings in private, and if you dare to speak out loud, prepare to be judged. Animals are, in many aspects, better than we will ever have the capacity to ever be, and isn’t that part of why we can love them so much? The purity and selflessness of their love? They deserve our grief just as much as any human does.