The Grief I Deserved

I used to judge pet people.

Not out loud, of course. I'm not a cretin, I know how to be polite. But when a coworker would miss work or go home crying because their dog was dying or their cat needed surgery, I’d offer sympathy, but in my head, I was thinking it's just an animal, it ain't that deep.

Except, of course, it is, I just didn’t know that yet.

When I met my husband, we were firmly on the same page. "I don’t want any more pets, I don’t want any more kids, and I don’t want a white picket fence and meatloaf every Sunday kind of life,“ he said.

Amen, I thought. Where do I sign?

Fast-forward to today: We have all of that shit now—every last bit of it.
And I mean that with all the love in the world, but make no mistake, I still don’t do meatloaf on Sundays unless the fam asks for it.
(Which they do, because even though it's turkey, it's reverently referred to as The Meatloaf. Or as the kids call it: bussin'. But I digress.)

When our daughter hit high school, he surprised me with, "I’m ready for another dog.” This, from a man who’d spoken about his last one with the kind of reverence usually reserved for soldiers and saints. Her death had gutted him, and he’d sworn for years he couldn’t go through that again.

But he was ready now, so we adopted Nala. Half-husky, fully allergic to literally almost everything.

Seriously—this is a dog on prescription food, special shots, the whole package, and she still drops gas that could clear a building. We’ve tried everything. Probiotics. Pumpkin. Switching proteins. Nothing helps.

She’ll stare you dead in the face while you’re eating dinner and let one rip that makes you question if love really is unconditional.

She was wild as a June bug at first, bolting through doors and chewing through furniture, but she eventually mellowed with time and training. She’s loyal, sweet, watchful, and adores my husband. The rest of us are a close second, but we don’t mind.

She was our only pet for years.
And then came Molly.

My brother-in-law died tragically and alone after years of addiction and self-neglect. They found his body in his apartment in KY after a welfare check, but no sign of his precious Molly.

She was eventually found cowering behind a toilet. She’d been in the apartment the entire time, terrified and silent while strangers came and went.

The plan was to give her to my mother-in-law, who’d wanted Molly as one last connection to her son. But, quelle surprise, someone in the family had a problem with that, because of course they did.

But before anything could be resolved, we found out she had late-stage cancer. She never got to say goodbye to her son, and she never got the cat.

So Molly became ours. Which meant, mostly, mine. Now, I didn’t want a cat at first. My husband is allergic, so why would I want one?

I used to think cats were all the same: aloof, independent, emotionally unavilable little assholes. And Molly didn’t scratch or bite, but she made it clear from the jump: don’t test me.

Now, she had good reason to be wary. She came to us filthy, matted, and scared. She’d just lost her person and watched it all until his body was removed. She hadn’t eaten in who knows how long before she finally showed herself.  

I should’ve known from the start what we were in for. We planned to drive her home in a crate like responsible adults. But she managed to Houdini her way out of that crate and up front with us twice before we'd even gotten out of the neighborhood.

So we gave up and she curled up under my legs for the whole 7-hour drive, staring up at me like a creature who’d survived a war.

That was Molly in a nutshell: stubborn, unbothered by rules, and always determined to do things her way.

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At the time, we were empty nesters, and I worked from home. So I gave her space. I didn’t baby-talk to her (gag). I just fed her, said hello, let her be, and went about my day.

Then one day, she followed me.

Soon she was everywhere, threading herself around my ankles, curling up at my feet, watching me work like she was memorizing every move.

And then one night, she jumped into my lap and curled up like she’d always belonged there.  From that moment on, she was mine.

I didn’t know it then, but she was the last thing I’d get to call mine for a long time.

She tolerated my husband, bless his heart (I think all the sneezing had something to do with it...and between us, why do all dads sneeze like they're being exorcised?), but she avoided nearly everyone else.

Nala, bless her gentle heart, just wanted to be friends, but Molly would hiss at her like it was her job. Nala would retreat, dejected, every time, which just broke my heart.

But she loved me, so I became that woman; you know, the one with the mean cat everyone hated? That was me.

Molly was a fat, grumbly mess who destroyed furniture and woke me at 5 AM every morning, demanding food like she paid rent.

And she was smart – annoyingly smart. If I ignored her, she’d shimmy under my bed, stretch her full weight against it, and push until the platform under me literally vibrated. And she was a big’un, so that bed shook like a tuning fork.

My wake-up call was a daily message of I own you.
And she did.

She loved open windows. Even in winter, if the sun was hitting just right, she’d wedge herself into the sill like a loaf of bread and zone out for hours.

At night, she’d obediently sleep on the floor by my side of the bed, but every chance she could, especially when my husband was away on business, she’d jump into bed with me like it was her rightful place.

And I’d sigh, knowing I’d have to wash everything before he got back because of his allergies, but I let her stay anyway. She was pretty smug about it, too.

She’d only sit on my lap if we were alone. If anyone walked in, she’d leap off like she’d just been caught in a compromising position, like, No one can ever see me be loving!

And she'd grind her teeth all the time, this low, odd sound you could only hear when it was quiet. Like tinnitus, but weirder.
My husband swears it was something his brother used to do. I never knew if he was right, but I believed him anyway.

She was also weirdly healthy. Until one day she wasn’t.

She stopped eating. Just…stopped.
The vet said her liver was failing, and they didn’t know why. I asked her what she would do if it were her cat. She said, “Get her tested.”

Hindsight is always 20:20, and I know now I should've just taken her home. I felt it in my gut when the vet simply said, “I’m so sorry”.

I saw it in Molly's eyes when I put her back in the carrier. I heard it in the voice in my head: Take the pictures. Get the cuddles. This is it. This is the last time.

We'd long ago made an agreement, my husband and I: no heroic measures, no thousand-dollar maybes. And maybe in another chapter of our lives, we could've kept going and pushed further.

But we're raising someone else's children now. Their needs come first, whether we're ready or not. And that choice, no matter how responsible, shredded me. To this day, I still think about what else we could've done.

Despite our promise, we took her to the ER vet anyway, and they didn’t know what was wrong either. But they did know how to stall and how to charge for it. I kept waiting for someone to say, It’s time.

Instead, they kept offering hope in carefully worded, thousand-dollar increments while she continued to steadily decline.

So we brought her home.

By then, she was not herself anymore. She was drugged and dazed, staggering inside the house but already gone. She died in my arms just hours later.

Her death wasn’t peaceful or gentle. It wasn’t like in the movies, where the pet just blinks slowly and slips away quietly in your arms. No, it felt almost violent. Fast, but not fast enough to spare me the memory I still can't shake.

She seized, she spasmed, then she stretched to her full length like she'd been electrocuted before going stiff and quiet. I've since read it’s just a reflex, a final misfiring of the nerves that looks awful but isn’t conscious or painful.

But tell that to the person holding her when it happens.

The kids were with us while it happened. I tried to hold it together, tried not to cry in front of them over a cat. But the youngest wrinkled her nose. “Ew, that’s gross,” she said.

I know she wasn't saying it to be cruel; it was just her without a filter, as usual. She’s still learning how to name her emotions and read a room, and most days, we meet her where she is.

But that single comment felt like a slap in the face. I was already barely holding it together, so my husband stepped in. “This is about saying goodbye and giving respect.” And he was right.

I sat on the floor of my kitchen with that cat in my arms and bawled like I’d lost a child. Because in some strange way…I had.

We wrapped her in a blanket, still warm, and drove her back to that same hospital. Forty-five minutes of silence, except for the sound of our own breaths as I held her in my lap, stroking her fur, whispering a thousand apologies she couldn’t hear.

I’m sorry I didn’t listen to my gut. I’m sorry I left you there. I’m sorry I let our hope take away your peace.

We handed her off to a sympathetic stranger in scrubs who meant well. But that building will always be where I lost her twice.

I’ll always regret that.

Every morning, like clockwork, she used to follow me into the bathroom, which was always a little creepy. She’d just sit there watching me go through the motions, like she was supervising to make sure breakfast happened on time.

Then she’d race down the stairs ahead of me, beat me to the kitchen, and perch at her spot by the food bowl, watching, judging, making sure I opened her little tin of Fancy Feast before I could even grab my first K-Cup.

She’d eat, and I’d sit next to her with my coffee. And when she finished, she’d curl up beside me, purring like an engine while I scrolled on my phone.

We did that every day. For years.

And that first morning after she was gone…no little face by my bed, no creepy bathroom surveillance, no paws on the stairs, no cuddling while I drank my coffee…it hurt.

I couldn’t even sit in our "spot” anymore.  It just felt so wrong that I got up and moved to the couch, and I’ve sat there every morning ever since.

I paid for her pawprint, a lock of fur, and a small, cream-colored urn in a velvet bag. All things I used to call manipulative cash grabs.

Yeah, I know, I’m a hypocrite.
But I’m all the better for it now.

💬 If you’ve ever lost something that shouldn’t have mattered “this much,” but did, I write for you. Support the Work.

People have started suggesting I get another cat (including my husband, God love him), but I don’t want one, not now, maybe not ever.

Right now, the life I’m living doesn’t have room; I’m already holding up more than anyone knows.

And the space she left behind wasn’t empty until she made it so; any other cat wouldn’t be Molly, and I wouldn’t be the same person trying to love it.

Loss isn’t a competition, but we all think our grief has justification, reasons why ours should count more. We think the scale of the loss defines the scale of the pain.
But it doesn’t.

It’s not about how big the loss is, it’s about what it rearranges inside you.

When someone or something’s presence is that constant, that specific, fused into the otherwise ordinary minutia of your day, you don’t just lose them.
You lose your sense of balance.

Molly’s death hit me like a truck.
Nala, on the other hand, could not have cared less.

Nala's the kind of dog who intuitively knows when something's off. She'll sit next to you when you're sad, rest her head on your knee to show her love. So after Molly died, I was sure she’d act sad, sniff around Molly’s old spots, maybe whine a little.

Nope. She slept like a log and farted through my grief like she'd never even met the cat. It was jarring, honestly. Like damn, girl, she’s just…dead to you? Literally?

But it also reminded me that Nala’s loss will hurt me, too. We’ll all feel that one.
She’s been here through every chapter of this sideways life we ended up building.

But she’s getting old now. Her face is aging. She moves slower and sleeps longer. And I’m not ready to imagine the day she isn’t here to wake us up or stand guard at the door or fart through a movie like a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving.

But it’s coming.
I still won't be ready for it, but I’ll understand how to get through it.

So to anyone I ever silently judged for falling apart over a pet: I get it now.
I’m sorry it took me so long.

And I’m sorry it took me losing mine to learn how much she gave me. 

Heather P. is an essayist and longtime ghostwriter publishing unapologetic stories about trauma, reinvention, and the absurdity of real life.

Creator of Unfinished Business, a platform reaching readers in over 20 countries for its dark humor, emotional precision, and refusal of performative healing, whether the story is about grief, growth, or just getting through Tuesday.