(Written August 24, 2026)
We lost our beloved cat yesterday.
I think it must have been related to old age; we’re actually not sure how old he was. When we rescued him from the shelter eleven years ago, they thought he was around three years old, but they weren’t completely sure.
Nobody else was home with me when he died (besides one of our living children, who was napping in the next room). I was able to comfort him in his final moments.
Losing a pet is a devastating loss. My experience losing my beloved cat after having also lost my infant daughter felt even more complicated. I found myself repeatedly (and involuntarily) comparing both experiences. The memories of my daughter’s death as I compared both losses were very visual; it was like I had gone back in time to when those kind of flashbacks of my daughter were much more frequent and intense. I didn’t want to compare the two losses in that way, over and over again… it was just where my mind had to go. It was like my mind was trying to understand, to put everything in the order it was supposed to be in.
In addition to the flashbacks, I kept expecting to see our cat everywhere as I moved around the house. When he was alive, he was everywhere. Always underfoot. He was more like a dog than a cat, honestly. Incredibly social, and very much a lap cat. He had an incredible personality. The constant jarring reminders that he was unexpectedly gone as I moved throughout our home, coupled with the flashbacks of both his and my daughter’s deaths, made my usual evening routine tough to endure.
It happened late on a Sunday afternoon, so I asked for the next day off of work. I was a little worried that it would be viewed as an overreaction, but my grief is complex, and I wanted to make space for it in case I ended up needing it. (It’s Monday as I write this—I am so glad I did.)
My daughter’s death was not unexpected. It happened gradually over the course of many months. With our cat, it came completely out of nowhere. We knew he was older, but he seemed perfectly healthy. I thought we had a few more years left with him. And then, in an instant, he was gone. I’m still reeling a bit from the shock of it.
But I also have some things to fall back on now, to try to derive some comfort from, that I didn’t have with our daughter. With our cat, he had a long and happy life. With our daughter, she did not. I have many happy memories with our cat, and he had many, many happy moments throughout his life. It doesn’t fix the loss, and it doesn’t take away the grief, but it softens it a bit.
He was also “just a cat,” of course, but I loved him. He was a part of our family. And his death brought surging forward the complicated emotions and grief that are always swimming just beneath the surface for me, as I continue integrating my grief over the loss of my daughter into my life.
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