Dealing with grief

This week, I got an email from one of my clients who lost her beloved dog this spring. She attended a Pet Memorial Collage workshop at the Silicon Valley Humane Society and felt it was a really positive experience. I thought it would be helpful to share the information, in case any of you are still grieving the loss of a pet, and are interested in exploring this as an option to further process your grief. It doesn't matter if the loss was recent or a long time ago. There is no time limit for dealing with our feelings and there is no time limit for honoring those that we loved and lost.

The next workshop is taking place on July 24th, from 2:00-4:30pm. The fee is $30 if you sign up in advance, $40 if you pay at the door. The class is held at the Humane Society, on Ames Avenue in Milpitas. You can register by going to: http://giving.hssv.org/cal

My client shared a few words about the class and I am pasting them below, so you can see what she thought of the experience in her own words:

I thought maybe you would like to recommend the pet memorial collage workshop to your clients that have lost their animals. I enjoyed the class and the teacher. We introduced ourselves and shared pictures of who we would be honoring and a little about them.

We started by putting rocks in a glass (it was to represent the grief that we carry with us). Then we did a meditation to meet with our animal and get a message from them. We were then free to work on our collages. When we were done, we put them on another table so everybody could look at them. Then we shared our collages and the story it represented to us.

We ended with the option to take our grief back home with us or to leave it. I chose to leave it. It was just nice to share the stories and be with people who have a love for animals in the same way that I do. It was a nice way to honor our animals.

I hope everyone had a wonderful 4th of July. For me, it was a mixed bag. It was my first 4th of July without Lucky, which was both good and bad. It made me miss her . . . and yet what I didn't miss was the trauma she experienced every 4th of July . . . so it many ways, it was the most relaxing 4th of July I've had in 15 years.

The sound of fireworks can be overwhelming and downright dangerous for some animals. I worry about animals more on the 4th of July than any other day of the year. We can't imagine what they experience, because our hearing isn't as good as theirs, but seeing the reaction that many animals have to the sound of fireworks made me begin to really dislike the holiday.

I spent many years in the bathtub with Lucky, which was where she would go for refuge. She would be panting and drooling, totally inconsolable. I was always afraid she would have a heart attack and I began to dread the 4th of July. I tried every kind of holistic remedy for calming her. None of them worked. One year, I even tried a pharmaceutical drug to calm her down, (I was that desperate), and even that didn't help.

About 5 years ago, someone suggested that I take her out in the car during the firework displays, since my car was more sound proof than my house, so that became our new tradition. I'd load her into the car, bring along some cd's we enjoyed and we'd just drive. We'd get to watch the fireworks, in every city we drove through on the freeway, but we didn't have to hear any of the loud booms, which helped her stay calm and made me much happier.

So this year, I didn't have to protect Lucky from the sound of the fireworks, so I didn't need to fill up my car with gas. I was at my parents house and we were sitting in the family room, with both their dogs sacked out on the couch. When the loud booming began, my heart started to race, years of protective instinct kicked in and I was ready to jump up, grab my parents dogs and head for the car . . . and much to my surprise and delight, they both slept through it all.

I sat there feeling so grateful that not all animals are as afraid of fireworks as Lucky was, and grateful that she was on "the other side" where the fireworks couldn't bother her this year. My hope is that in time, I will start liking the 4th of July again. This year was a pretty good start.