Funeral QuestionsMy Boss Said 'It's Just a Cat' When I Asked for a Day Off — Was I Wrong to Ask?
Asked by tepid_orchard8 ·
My cat Biscuit died on Sunday. She was 14, I'd had her since I was 22, and the vet came to the house to put her to sleep because her kidneys had basically stopped working. Monday morning I messaged my manager asking to take the day as personal leave because I genuinely wasn't in a state to be useful at work, and she replied "of course, but try not to make a habit of it, it's just a cat" with a little laughing emoji at the end.
I didn't say anything back. I just took the day. But I've been turning that message over for two days now and I feel stupid for how much it's bothering me, like maybe she's right and I'm making too big a deal out of an old cat dying. Is it actually normal to be this wrecked over a pet, or did I overreact by even asking?
3 Replies
You didn't overreact, and I want to say that plainly before anything else: fourteen years is most of your adult life spent with Biscuit in it. That's a genuine, long-term attachment, not "just a cat" by any reasonable measure, and grief after a loss like that is real, not an overreaction dressed up as one.
What you ran into has a name: disenfranchised grief. It just means grief the people around you don't fully recognise as "real" grief, so you're left carrying it with less support than you'd get for almost any other loss. Pet loss is one of the most common examples of it, alongside things like losing an ex-partner or a pregnancy. The grief itself isn't smaller because of how it's received; it's just less visible. This piece on coping with the loss of a pet goes into why this attachment runs as deep as it does, if it helps to see it laid out plainly rather than just felt.
You don't owe your manager an argument about whether Biscuit "counts." If it comes up again, something simple and factual is enough: "she was with me for fourteen years, it hit harder than I expected." You don't need her to agree with you; you just needed the day, and you took it.
Adding the vet's-eye view, because I sit with families through this moment more than almost anyone. The grief I see in that room after fourteen years with an animal carries the same weight as any other grief, just for a different kind of relationship. People who haven't lived with an animal that long sometimes genuinely don't have the reference point to understand it, which is probably closer to what happened with your manager than any real dismissal of Biscuit specifically. That doesn't make the comment land any softer, but it might help to know it's more often ignorance than malice.
I see this constantly on my side of things: people bringing in an animal after ten, fifteen, even twenty years together, just as undone as anyone I've seen after a family death. Nobody who's sat in my waiting room with a cat carrier at the end of a long life has ever needed to convince me it was "just" anything. For what it's worth, the people who say things like your manager did are almost always the ones who haven't had that kind of animal in their life yet. Give it time, not an argument.
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