The more you choose to feel your anger, the faster it will begin to dissipate and the faster you will make your way through pet loss grief and onto the road of pet grief recovery.

It is important to realise that Anger often doesn’t make sense so it is important to try and feel it without trying to make real sense of it or judging it.

The truth is sometimes life just sucks, life is unfair, the death of a pet is unfair and Anger is a natural reaction to the unfairness of the loss of a pet.

You may feel that your anger is all consuming and will never end. You may feel that you will never calm down and will be forever furious and full of rage.

But your anger will pass and then you will feel start to feel the underlying emotions underneath your anger such as pain and sadness.

I like to think of Anger as a lifeboat that rescues you from the sea of shock and numbness that you feel like you are drifting in when pet loss grief first hits you.

So when people were afraid to stop clapping for Stalin, they had good reason.
Here is how the Nobel Prize-winning writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the surreal scene in his great book, The Gulag Archipelago:

“The applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly…Nine minutes! Ten!…Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers.”

At last, after eleven minutes of non-stop clapping, the director of a paper factory finally decided enough was enough. He stopped clapping and sat down—a miracle!
“To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down,” Solzhenitsyn says.

That same night, the director of the paper factory was arrested and sent to prison for ten years. Authorities came up with some official reason for his sentence, but during his interrogation, he was told: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”