He's gone - worried about ds

[Tanfastic]

Had to have ddog pts on Wednesday. He was 15 and had deteriorated a lot and so it was the right time. Heartbroken and hardly stopped crying since we made the decision. It was quite a shock towards the end as he bit me and I've ended up nearly losing a finger. Ds who is 13 witnessed this and it was all very traumatic.

We let ds have the day off school on Wednesday as we thought he'd be distraught (as we are) but he's acting completely normal. He's not even cried, just carrying on as if it's not happened. Is this strange?

I've sat him down and talked to him about the fact I'm a bit worried about him and he said he's sad and doesn't know why he hasn't cried. Probably hasn't helped that he's been consoling me so much.

How did your teens react when a pet dies? Ddog had been in his life since birth and he loved him. Delayed reaction maybe?

My DC's have always been pretty mellow about the death of our dogs.

Our last dog to be pts in March they seem to see the situation for what is was an elderly dog that they loved but now was finding life hard and that they saw the dog was suffering.

They buried the ashes in the garden made me a photo book and then moved on. He (the dog) is talked about a lot. We also have other dogs so they are also involved with them so that may help.

I hope/think this is a normal reaction

When we lost our boy last year I was really worried about how my dcs (11, 16 and 18) would take it, especially my eldest, who has ASD, OCD, a huge fear of death and was closely bonded with that particular dog.

As it turned out they all coped a lot better than expected and actually, better than me.

We had a similar talk and it seemed they had all accepted that he was very ill (had been for a long time) and we would definitely be losing him soon. We had been very open about that and it was something we kept a dialogue open about as time went on. They each said they had processed his loss before it happened. The day we lost him was sudden and a shock, not how we expected him to go at all, but it seems they had already done their grieving and were able to move on to being relieved he didn’t suffer and was free from his horrible illness.

I would imagine they each shed a few tears but, being teens, they will have done it when they were alone and not wanted to share it.

We have always had dogs though, some of them prior to dcs, so we have lost a few in their lifetimes. This dog was relatively young at 7 years old and the first one they had all actively been involved in raising from a pup, so I thought they wouldn’t cope as well with his loss, but they were all very mature about it.