Shallow Look at Coping With Feelings When Beloved Pet Dies

When Your Pet Dies: How to Cope With Your Feelings by Jamie Quackenbush MSW, and Denise Graveline (Simon & Schuster: $15.95)

You pick up this book for only one reason, but when you pick it up--considering the state you’re in--it had better be good. Within the last six months, our family dog came very close to death. And that’s the reason I picked up this book. To be able to recollect in some tranquillity the storm of terrible feelings that whirled through the house; to approach some understanding of what the grief for a “dumb” animal means, since almost all of us have gone through it one way or another.

Instead, the reader comes away with yet another set of feelings to cope with--a strong urge to whack Jamie Quackenbush and Denise Graveline on the head with a folded newspaper and lock them out in the backyard until they get a better grip on things.

The Obvious Explained

Here’s the main point for them--and us--to remember: Just because you lose your pet doesn’t mean you lose your wits. “When Your Pet Dies” is written in pre-primer prose, about pre-primer sentiments to an audience that is presupposed to be unable to fix dinner, pass a driving test, pick up a phone. An audience they obviously think is made up of driveling morons, except that’s unfair to driveling morons everywhere.

You’re going to feel bad when your pet dies, the authors tell us. You’re going to experience guilt, anger, denial and depression. Then they go on, giving examples that would bore a 3-year-old: “I couldn’t help her,” or “I’ve seen pet owners kick cars,” or “It’s almost as if she didn’t really die and might come home any minute,” or “I know I only had him three months, but I’d become very attached to Blade. . . . I still cry when I think about him, which is all the time. I’m single, and I miss his great company.”

These quotes (and the last is part of a letter from a pet owner whose real grief has been put to an extremely dubious use here) don’t explain--they reiterate. It’s as if someone served you a plate of beans and said, “These are beans. They are round and red. They seem lumpy in your mouth. It is necessary to chew your beans. They taste mealy when you chew them.”

How, the irate or grief-stricken reader may ask, do I cope with these feelings? I know what they are, for Pete’s sake, that’s why I picked up the book! How do I deal with them? Where do they come from? What do they mean? How do I stop crying about Blade? Or why am I crying about him in the first place, since--as the quote plainly shows--I only knew him for three months.

There’s a form of displacement of affections that goes on with family pets that this book does not address. Pre-Christian Hawaiian beliefs suggest that highly evolved dogs and cats are just one step away on the reincarnation stairway to becoming the human “lower-self” or--switching to Freudian terms--the id. At least something like this provides the beginning of an explanation as to why our animals allow us to display such uncomplicated emotions to them.

It might be interesting to follow another line of speculation: that our pets compare to children; not to our own children who demand constant attention, responsibility and adult behavior from us, but to the child in us, that forever affectionate and forlorn creature who is eternally susceptible to the bliss of love, the agony of abandonment.

This book, filled as it is with examples of headstrong couples who insist that their rabbit have cosmetic surgery even though they’ve been told by the vet that rabbits often don’t wake up from anesthesia, or tales of dogs crushed by trucks or riddled with tumors, is not going to tell you how to cope.

Somehow, this book seems to contribute to your problems of loss rather than alleviating them. “Euthanasia is a process with great tragedy built in,” the authors tell us, “possibly the hardest thing you’ll ever do. . . .” What about burying your mother? Serving in a meaningless war? Having your son turn out to be a serial killer? Those things are hard! The writers here have made themselves a part of the problem: They make no qualitative judgments on what they’re writing about, simply stacking ghastly examples of pet death one on top of another, and never drawing the line between animal and human.

After reading this book, if you feel less bad about your terrier than your mother, you’re going to feel guilty.