(((Trace14))),

I am sorry you lost your cat. From what you described you were also with your cat when her body was finally failing her and that really is a very difficult thing to experience. However, your cat was so lucky to have someone there for her in that last struggle of her life. Your cat was so lucky to have someone in her life that took such good care of her and clearly loved her.

That being said, what I am hearing from you is that your grief in this loss goes deeper to where you are feeling guilt about possibly not doing enough or if you may have failed her. You have shared that this experience triggered some very challenging strong emotions about your father's suicide.

While what you have described having so much additional pain from that is so hard on you, it's also giving you an opportunity to talk about how you are grieving what happened with your father that you still need to work on. This has to do with your history of growing up with a parent that himself had some significant challenges that interfered with his ability to bond with you in a healthy way.

Often when a child lives in a dysfunctional home, there are things that they see that frighten them and often that leaves the child with a deep desire to find some way of "fixing" it. This is something that human beings are born with that has to do with "surviving". Human beings instinctively prefer finding ways to be able to "predict" because in being able to predict, there is less stress.

However, there is also something else human beings have built in that is another instinct/drive that helps assure survival. That is the ability to produce adreneline where human beings get a rush of energy and will to go forward in spite of unpredictible and dangerous environments and challenges. You have talked about having an ability to harness this adreneline where you became an individual who had the ability to be in situations that were traumatic, dangerous, unpredictible and yet you remained calm and focused. Some human beings are much better at developing this ability then others, it is these individuals that were very significant in overall survival of humanity.

In your threads that you have shared your experiences with your father, you were always so challenged in connecting with him in a healthy way. That became something you developed a strong desire to overcome. Unfortunately, while you did gain in having a relationship with him, he was still a very challenged human being and got to a point in his life where he made a choice that was extremely traumatic for you to experience. His choice ended any effort you could make to finally have a relationship with him that was healthy and rewarding.

For someone like you that is wired so well to go into something that can be so dangerous and unpredictible, experiencing what your father chose to do left you nothing to reach out to save or fix. You were there for your cat and that was/is a difficult thing to experience, but you are questioning what you may have done that could have prevented that. It's important to be able to also put that into perspective too Trace, because it is that feeling that has also been important to human survival because many human beings that felt that way made it a point to figure out what could have been done that has led to so many things done in medicine that has healed and prolonged life as well as the quality of life.

When it came to your father, his challenge began long before you came into his life. There was no way you could have understood that private challenge much less fix it. Your father also chose to self medicate with alcohol and while that presented him with some sense of relief, it also became toxic, especially to his brain. Your father had gotten to a point where he made a choice that is something you simply could not have changed or fixed. That is where your cat and your father's loss of life is very similar. And for someone like you who is willing to rush into danger, the unpredictible, to save a life, to attain a calm in self in spite of the dangers and uncertainties, it's very hard to be in a position where there is a loss in spite of your presence. This is an experience that often produces what is called "survivors guilt". This is often something that is experienced in individuals who are so strong and have very strong capabilities to have the capacity to run towards a danger instead of running away from.

Your brain has experienced such a trauma that the brain itself has changed. This is not meant to signify any weakness, it's just the brains way of witnessing something that presents an individual with so much overwhelm in emotion that the brain retains the significance of whatever it was. Anyone who personally experiences this most definitely has deep regret, is very sensitive, and while they were strong in the moment of trauma itself, the real strength is in surviving these after affects that we call PTSD.

What you are working towards now Trace is finally getting the point where you can finally accept what happened with your father and also work on helping yourself with finally coming to terms with how there really wasn't anything you had the power to do that could have changed that. Also, it's important to know that your cat and your father are no longer suffering or in pain. What you did give both of them, is your love and they both experienced someone caring about them. That in itself brought quality to their lives.