A therapist’s personal journey
Over the past 2 and a half years, my partner and I have lost a parent each and 2 dogs. The pain we have experienced is like nothing we have seen before.
As we are both therapists, we thought that we should be able to handle these deaths but to be honest, we have struggled. Working with bereavement was off our agendas for a while as we couldn’t ethically help others.
It all started with me saying goodbye to my little Shih-Tzu, Franklyn. Franklyn was a little diva, he had to be involved in everything and have things his way. He would be on the sofa, on the bed, sat on the chair behind me whilst I worked with clients online. He wanted his presence known at all times. At 12 years old, I knew I was lucky to still have him running up and down the stairs and sharing my toast with me at breakfast time. He was a feisty little dog who wasn’t shy around big dogs, in fact the bigger the more he wanted to be mates.
He had a heart murmur which was gradually getting worse but he was full of life. Until the day he wasn’t ok. To cut a long sad story short, following a trip to an emergency vet, Franklyn was taken back to our own veterinary surgery where my daughter and I said our final goodbyes. I had never felt pain like it. My little ball of fluff was not going to be there anymore.
One month later, my partner and I watched as his mother slipped away from us. Stage 4 cancer was the cause this time. Watching this strong vibrant lady disappear became the hardest thing I ever had to cope with. Val was beautiful, funny, sophisticated and warm. She was always fun to be around and was probably the most sociable person I had ever met. Losing her felt wrong.
My job now was to support my partner through his loss and funeral planning. There were so many thing to do and neither of us had ever gone through this before. It was hard. Mark took time away from work to look after himself and to sort out his mother’s affairs. This was a hard lonely job for him but I was at his side the whole way.
If things couldn’t get any worse, my father had also been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and although we hoped for a few more years with him, he became very ill very quickly and was gone a week after going into hospital.
Now I really understood pain, what I had felt before was like a practice run for the real thing. I was upset losing Val and seeing Mark struggle but this was a whole new ball game. The physical pain of losing my dad was unbearable. I was angry, sad, disbelieving, lost and felt like a small child who was desperately trying to find their father. I wanted my dad back; I wanted him to tell me everything was going to be ok. I wanted it all to be a dreadful nightmare.
But it was real. It was so real that I had to switch off for a while. I stopped work completely for 2 months. I spoke to people about grief, I read books but all I wanted was the chance at another conversation with my dad.
I supported my mother; they had been married almost 50 years. I shut off my feelings and tried to carry on in the form of some kind of unemotional robot in public but in private I was broken. I would lie in bed for hours in the hope that I would fall asleep and it would all have been a dream.
But crisis hit when I realised I was hiding my feelings from Mark. I had been through this with him and I didn’t want him to feel as though he needed to look after me as he was grieving for his mum. It could have broken us as a couple but our dog, Coco kept us going.
Coco was a rescue Border Collie who was in all but title, a therapy dog. He was loving and knew exactly what people needed from him. He sat with me for hours on end and he helped me to open up to Mark about how I was feeling. Coco became my sidekick who would give me all the love I needed. I felt closer to Coco than I had felt to anyone for a long time and he enabled me to feel closer to Mark again, for us to talk about our parents and what we had been through.
We took Coco on holiday to Weymouth, he had a fabulous time in the sea, he was living his best life. We were able to laugh at him, throw balls for him and walk for miles. We cleared our heads, talked and cried and found each other again.
Life was starting to become manageable again, our new normal was not what we wanted but we were learning to navigate through the sadness. Coco allowed us to see that life did have some positives in it. He had been adopted by Mark in 2015 and after having been in and out of Dog’s Trust, he had his forever home.
Coco was now 11 years old, still full of beans and running around like a bit of a nutter. Nobody believed his age, he looked and behaved like a puppy. He would ask for a walk at 6:30pm every evening. He would continuously bring you a ball to throw for him and he would explore the bottom of the garden each night where frogs jumped about, he loved life.
In December 2023, Coco started to struggle to walk properly and was diagnosed with arthritis, we had to cut his walks a little shorter and not let him run around as much. It felt wrong, he was such an active dog. But he was still happy, sitting with us in the evening, covering us with his ever-shedding fur and longingly watching us eat sausages and bacon at weekends. He was the best.
In March 2024, Coco went to the vets and didn’t come home. He too had cancer, we were devastated. The vet couldn’t guarantee treatment would work and as he was 11 years old we didn’t want to watch him suffer as we had watched our parents. We said goodbye to him and came home to a very quiet house.
Coco had become the focus of our lives and our emotions from our losses, and now he too was gone. It all seemed so unfair. How can one couple go through much loss in such a small space of time?
Then I remembered something I once heard, “the price we pay for love is loss”. We were feeling so much pain because we had loved so much. We had seen pain in our parents’ eyes but when it came to Coco we were able to take that suffering away from him. We put him first, as he had done for us. His love was unconditional and so we made the sacrifice to let him go and be free from cancer.
Nothing ever prepares you for losing a loved one, no amount of training or client work can shield you from true devastation. In all of this I have learnt that loving and losing, whether they are people or pets, is always going to be painful. Those emotions are what makes us human and I never want to stop loving and feeling.
Victoria Warwick-Jones Counselling 