Grieving Pet Loss : The Day Sasha Went Missing
It has been nearly two years now since my little Sasha disappeared. She was six years old and beautiful black British shorthair. She had golden eyes and a chirpy yet gentle nature, continually looking for a cuddle, yet at the same time she was so easily startled by any noise.
As a family, my wife and daughter used to travel to the beach about once every month for two or three days. Sasha was used to being left in the house because she was always fed by our neighbours who regularly visited her to feed her and give her a little pat.
So we went away in Easter 2008, and returned on Easter Monday evening. Sasha didn't come when she was called for dinner that night, but that was nothing unusual she often took her time coming in although it was a little strange that she didn't come to see us on our return.
We didn't think anything more about it although by Tuesday morning we started looking around the neighbourhood, checking with neighbours whether they had seen her, and just generally looking for her.
No one had seen her, our neighbours said they had last seen her on Sunday afternoon when they gave her a regular feed. They were, and remain, wonderful neighbours who joined us in the search, but we had no luck.
I don't want to go on and on about this, so I will just say that we never saw Sasha again. We never heard about her, we never found any trace of her and no one in a neighbourhood had seen her.
It took us about two weeks to accept that she probably wasn't going to come back. But I can still remember thinking that I heard her meowing late at night at the backdoor. Several times I jumped out of bed expecting to see her licking her lips at the glass door waiting to be let in (she never liked to use the catflap anyway!), but it was always a phantom I had heard in the night.
After about six months I was able to tell myself that she was gone forever.
For some reason, although all of us felt very sad, it was worse for me or at least that's the way it felt. I am not downplaying the grief that my wife or daughter experienced, but it was clear to everyone that this loss was much harder for me for some unknown reason.
As life slowly returned to some sense of normality for me, I began to read about grief and loss. I think I experienced a complicated mourning process and, believe it or not, I visited a grief counsellor to discuss my feelings.
I learned that a death in any family can result in a broad range of complicated personal reactions. There are patterns that emerge during this process, but every individual is different in some way. I think in Sasha's case it was by the fact that we never found her and we can only assume what may have happened to her. For a long time I imagined her having been viciously killed or taken. Alternatively, I imagined her running around the neighbourhood looking for us and being struck by a motor vehicle, her body washed down the drain never to be seen.
All these grisly imaginations, my counsellor told me, were a normal reaction to the loss of some someone very precious, the death of a pet is no different to the death of a person.
As my grief process continued my counsellor assisted me in developing new theories about Sasha's disappearance. I have now come to accept that I will never know what really happened and so I have made a choice to believe that she was whisked away, stolen or kidnapped and that she is enjoying a life with someone else now. I choose to believe that, because she was such a loving and compliant cat, she became so highly desirable, that someone else wanted her for themselves.
Of course, we have another cat now and life has returned to normal, but I still think about Sasha every now and then, I guess I always will. I have incorporated the memory of Sasha into my everyday life just as I have about the memories of friends and family who have passed on too.
In some way I think that they are all sharing a new existence together, and that makes me smile.
