I've been a problem page editor for twenty-five years on British newspapers and magazines, and I noticed that whenever I put a letter on the page about the death of a pet, hundreds of people wrote in. Goodbye Dear Friend is the result, and there are dozens of moving case-histories of other people who have also lost their animals. It doesn't pretend to be a healing book, but just knowing you're not alone helps most people more than any amount of self-help tips. I've included information about pet funerals, whether animals go to heaven, memorials, guilt about having a pet put down and so on, and I've had tremendously good response from readers who still often write to me saying how much it moved them. It's very much an English book - being English myself - and naturally approaches death and grieving in rather a different way to the Americans. However, grief is grief anywhere, and I do hope that reading this book will make other people who have lost pets feel less alone, and more able to feel comfortable with their feelings when other people, as they so often, sadly, do, say: "But it was just an animal." It wasn't "just an animal" "It" was a personality, a warm, loving living entity, and part of a close and sincere relationship. Small wonder pet-owners often feel their grief so deeply.
The author, Virginia Ironside