Anonymous post please if I could
We lost one of our guinea pigs today my girl is 6 and we have had them since she was one when I fist told her one had gone to heven she initially got really upset as expected as this is her first experience of loss but shes not shown any sign of grief since acting and playing as normal me and her dad are obviously going to support he in any way she needs. My questions really are do you think she has understood hes gone, will the grief come in a few days or might it never come. And how do I support her in the coming weeks to help her talk about grief and help her not bottle it all up inside her if thay makes sense she has autism and doesn’t always understand things like others do and she can bottle things up not understanding her emotions until they get the better of her then she can lash out with either hitting and kicking me or drawing on her walls and toys ect I just want her to know she can always come talk to me with anything thats in her head or any feelings shes not sure of
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It could be an age thing and an autism thing my Son was nearly 6 when his Dad passed away, he definitely did not grieve the same way as my older 2, nearly 2 years on if they are upset because they miss him he tends to just stare at them and ask why they are crying
My daughter is 5 and we lost our cat a few months ago, we went through pics of the cat and told story’s about the pictures, she doesn’t understand her emotions and struggles to regulate. So making the memories positive seemed like a good idea and also encouraged conversation. We also put some wild flowers in the garden where we buried the cat so my daughter can sit and spend time with expressing her grief in her own way. This has been successful for me. X
Years ago when my boys were similar age . I spent ages explaing guinea pig gon to heaven. They just said .”can we get another one “
I have lots of animals (some may call it hoarding 😅) and my children experienced their first loss with our oldest dog. My oldest son was around 6, he sat with her a while before we took her to the vets and he was extremely upset but it came in waves. One minute he was fine the next he was crying. It was usually triggered by something like walking past her bed and seeing it empty he would get upset. What I found hard was that I had to explain to him that she wasn’t coming back, he couldn’t understand that part for a while. My oldest son is diagnosed asd and adhd so I thought he would struggle to understand and grieve. He still now gets sad when we talk about her 3 years later but it’s more of a soft grief now he talks about everything he loved about her rather than the sadness of her going. I would expect some outbursts for a few weeks, they will probably seem like they are over nothing but just let her know her feelings are valid and very normal.