One phrase in my vocabulary gets more usage than any other: “People are the worst.” As a lifelong, card-carrying cynic, all the evidence I find seems to point to this statement as a core truth. But no matter how I crunch the numbers, somehow, saying goodbye to my best and closest friend made the world a better place.
My world, at least. It’s coming on a year since my beloved corgi passed, and as time drags me towards this gloomy anniversary and the Earth completes its first full spin without him, I’m surprised at how much my perspective has changed. This is the first big grief of my life.
I’ve lost grandparents with whom I wasn’t close, a sick friend who had enough time left to say her goodbyes, and the family dog, but that’s it. Losing Viktor, closest confidant and most loyal companion, didn’t shake my world: it cracked its foundation and dropped a nuclear bomb on it. Credit: Robin Cowcher I know that this, in itself, is an immense privilege.
To those who have lost a child, partner, close friend, sibling or parent, the comparative pain of losing a pet is barely a pinch. But all emotions are relative, right? The worst thing to ever happen to you only holds the top spot until something else comes along and gives you another, worse worst thing to take its place. Grief is ugly.
It’s not a Joni Mitchell song and a single tear rolling down your cheek, or tracing their picture with your finger while you eat ice cream from the carton. Grief is suffocating and isolating and destructive, and when I was rooted firmly in the “anger” part of the healing process, I wanted to be cruel. I wanted to be unreasonable.
I wanted everyone to acknowledge that Viktor’s passing had fundamentally altered the laws of the universe, and admit that gravity had quadrupled the moment his heart stopped. I wanted them to sob with empathy as they assured me that no one had ever, anywhere, at any point in history, ever, ever, ever been in as much pain as I was in. The worst thing to ever happen to you only holds the top spot until something else comes along.
I’ve been braced to hear it for a year: “He was just a dog.” I couldn’t wait for someone to dismiss my grief, because their indifference was permission to tear shreds from them. And then .
.. it didn’t come.
Nobody said this — at least not to my face. How inconvenient..
