The Right Thing to Say

It’s not uncommon for a service dog team to walk into a grocery store and, throughout the course of a half-hour shopping trip, have at least one customer and one employee approach them to tell them about their pet. This happened to me on a regular basis. I heard about everyone’s German shepherd, half the Chihuahua’s and yorkies in Huntsville, and the odd dozen cats or so. I often wondered if these people actually listened to themselves talk when they walked up to me and didn’t even bother introducing themselves or explain why they felt entitled to interrupt my conversation with my husband to tell me about their dog, but I usually kept these musings to myself, smiled politely, made noncommittal comments, and hurried on with my shopping. I don’t like shopping to begin with, and while I do enjoy meeting new people, if all I hear about is how smart their pet is, I’m not actually meeting the person, or being talked to because I’m a person. It’s annoying, being used to make someone feel good about themselves. I feel invisible, like the only valuable thing about me is that I have a dog, so it gives someone the convenient excuse to talk about some minutia of his or her life – mostly her, it’s almost invariably women, and usually over the age of forty.

When Prada died, I fully expected to be pommeled by dead pet stories, and I did not look forward to that. I can’t nod and smile sympathetically when someone’s using me like that, not when my beloved partner, who actually saved my life, was ripped from my life so suddenly and so early!

But God has created a logical universe, which officers us protection in ways we don’t think about. Now that I walk with a cane, nobody approaches me at all! And most people who knew I had a service dog didn’t dare bring up “dead pet stories,” because they understood the relationship is very different. The respect of my friends and colleagues has been wonderful. My mom cautioned me multiple times that most people wouldn’t understand and would tell me their dead pet stories, but I think she has had that experience more than I have because the people she talks to never knew me and Prada as a team. I had the privilege of telling her that the people who knew us were kind and respectful and supportive and did nothing at all to diminish Prada’s memory. In fact, many of them asked if I were going to hold a funeral, as if she were a person. No, I didn’t, and won’t. I’m developing other memorials for her. My sister is creating a photo album for me, and I have a nearly-completed shadow box of her TSE ID, collar, and pawprint, and a friend has offered to knit her tags into a scarf for me. These things I will keep, and share with her friends, but I don’t feel the need, nor have the time and resources, for a funeral. But the question from my friends shows how they understand, or at least understand that they can’t quite understand. It’s such a unique relationship, after all.

Grief changes over time, though. Just last week a friend tried to sympathize with me; he had gone through a similarly rapid decision to put a pet down when he was much younger, and tried to explain that he understood how fast the process can be, how it can move so fast it takes the earth out from under you. I didn’t let him finish the sentence; he got as far as “I understand – “ before I responded with “no, you really don’t.” He was admirably gracious and acknowledged that, then went on to explain the different direction he’d been planning to go with that comment, and even apologised for sounding disrespectful. He needn’t have; I was the one who was disrespectful, my response was a protection mechanism for myself. There is always just a little fault on both sides in a miscommunication, even if it’s simply a mistake, not an error.

Just seven days after that, today, a friend hesitated to tell me that her dog might have cancer. She was sensitive to the fact that my grief is still fresh, and that the diagnosis of cancer hits a little close to home, but still, she’s understandably uneasy, waiting for the diagnosis, and she a very close friend of mine. Inner circle, you could definitely say. Anyway, I assured her that I was ok, I’m on the peak of the sine curve and haven’t hit a trough in a while, and those troughs are getting shallower while the peaks come more frequently. And I told her pre-emptively that if she did get the worst news, I was more than ready to be there for her during her grief for her pet.

So what changed between last week and this? Or did anything change at all? Is this simply different enough that I’m ok with it?

We humans try our best to label, categorise, and compare things to understand the world. Kenneth Burke calls it being “goaded by a spirit of hierarchy” (Burke, 1963). Theologians call it the imago dei, part of our identity as beings created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26-28). God names the day and the night and Adam, then tells Adam to name the animals and woman, giving us a divine heritage of naming and organising things. So naturally, we try to compare and categorise grief and trauma. A dead pet isn’t as sad as a dead service dog, which isn’t as sad as a dead spouse, which doesn’t come close to a dead child. A dead pet this year is sadder than a dead pet five years ago, but still not quite as sad as a dead service dog five years ago, but maybe close to one that died ten years ago. Freshness and closeness, degree of innocence and/or service provided, length of relationship and senselessness (unexpected cancer, natural causes, murder) are our determining factors. We gather up all these facts in our heads, fit them into an equation, and spit out a conclusion of where on the tragedy scale your loss fits in comparison to our own or someone else’s that we know.

While this may be a valuable exercise, it is not a completely accurate method for determining if and when you can or should talk about grief to someone else. It leaves out the human factor, that variable which accounts for how each person handles grief differently. This factor may well be on its way to being quantified, thanks to the fields of psychology and neuroscience, but for now it’s a vague, nebulous, fluctuating variable influenced by a dozen external equations about which most of us are cognizant.

Dr. Phil Monroe of Biblical Seminary recently posted a blog entry about how not to relate to people experiencing or who have experienced trauma. He uses the chorus of a Lady Gaga song to explain that without firsthand experience, it doesn’t matter how much you want to sympathize or how well you know the person, you’re in no place to try and empathise, so “Stop giving advice!” he says. He also makes what sounds like the most outrageous statement imaginable in this as-yet very young century when he says “But I don’t think Lady Gaga goes far enough.” What he means is that even if you are or have experienced the exact same grief or trauma as someone else, it doesn’t mean that anything you say will necessarily be helpful. People get so worked up over trying to find “the right thing to say” to someone, or find something that will ‘snap her out of it.” They feel compelled to do something to ease the pain and help the victim move on. This is a good instinct, the source of most compassion and acts of service. It should not be ignored. But it should be monitored and checked closely against what the person actually needs. And oftentimes the victim needs to feel listened-to, not comforted, and if you’re telling someone about your experience, you’re not listening. So let that person’s grief be the centre of attention for a while. Don’t’ try to upstage them, or accidentally upstage them with your own story. Relate when they ask questions, but before you do anything else, LISTEN.

So how does this relate to my two recent experiences? My friend who tried to empathise with me had been very good about listening, and he really did want only to relate to the swiftness of the experience, not the emotional impact, but I was on a hair-trigger expecting people to try and use me, steal the nurturing attention I needed so I reacted pre-emptively to protect myself from having to balance my compassionate instinct with my grief. His timing wasn’t great, that was all. It wasn’t bad, given that he and his wife live out of state so we don’t see them very often, but perhaps that comment could have waited for another 3-5 months for another reminiscing session. Perhaps. There’s really no way to know. In any case, he was far more gracious than I, and wonderfully compassionate, so thanks to him.

And my friend with the dog that might have cancer? Well, in the time that I’ve spent writing this entry she got the call. They have a week to say goodbye to their five-year-old Anatolian shepherd. Time for me to put into practice what I’ve written about listening and supporting. This entry took longer to write than most do because I stopped halfway through to call my friend and “sit with her,” even though she lives two thousand miles away from me. If my friend in japan could call me the night Prada died, the distance from Alabama to Oregon is absolutely no barrier at all.

It’s been a little over a month since Prada died. Am I ok to handle another dead dog, especially one with cancer? Yes, I am. I know that grief looks different on everyone, and that there may come a time in the next couple of months when I’m not ok, because grief is sneaky, it pounces on you when you least expect it. But right now, for the foreseeable future, all I can think about is how to help my friend. There’s that instinct we talked about earlier, that instinct that breeds compassion and service. See, Prada isn’t the only loss I’ve experienced. Those of you who’ve followed me since the beginning know that two weeks into my training with Prada I lost my pet sheltie, Lady. Additionally, I lost a cat named Joy when I was very little, and just recently (last six months) learned that my mom had to put down our old cat, Mittens, the one that used to torment Prada when we came home to Oregon for a visit. So that’s three pets and one service dog. And in 2004 I lost my grandfather, so there’s another loss. So, what my friend is experiencing right now is different then what I went through. The relationship is different, the grief is different, the loss is different. Different from Prada, but not from Lady, or Mittens or Joy.

Another difference is that this grief is happening right now. My friend isn’t after attention, isn’t walking up to some stranger and telling a story just to have someone listen to her. She and her family are grieving a loved furry companion.

So no, I don’t really want to hear about your pet that died five years ago, especially if I don’t know you. And seriously, have a little dignity and don’t stop random service dog handlers in grocery stores and tell them about Spot. But the greatest takeaway I hope this blog post gives you is a little better understanding of yourself and your losses, and how you can better help those around you thorugh theirs.