When you suffer the loss of a parent early in your life, it can impact how you feel or empathize when you go through other losses later in life. That’s the case with Dale Earnhardt Jr.
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Dale Jr. was only 26 when his father, the legendary Dale Earnhardt Sr., was tragically killed in a last-lap crash at the 2001 Daytona 500. Junior, who turns 51 on October 10, has already lived longer than his father, who died at the age of 49. And that loss has steeled his emotions.
The reason this is so relevant is that, earlier this week, he and his wife Amy lost one of their dogs, June Bug, a 14-year-old Tea Cup Pomeranian. While Amy is still heartbroken and cried several times during this week’s edition of their weekly Bless Your Hardt podcast, Junior was sad but was not as emotional as his wife.
“He doesn’t have empathy,” Amy said about how her husband is handling the passing of their beloved dog. “Like his empathy chip is, it’s situational, I guess.”
Amy wasn’t being callous or nasty about how her husband is dealing with June Bug’s death. It’s just that Junior quantifies death differently ever since his father was killed. He admitted his father’s loss is, in a sense, what he gauges all other losses against. And it’s definitely understandable.
“I had a very big loss back in 2001 with Dad,” Junior said with a tone of solemnity. “That’s something that traditionally you expect to happen later in life, but you kind of get this unfortunate situation early in life.
“And so I have experienced something that a lot of people will experience later and that like hardened or seasoned or like now, when another loss happens in life, the next loss or the next person passes or a pet or something – even though I loved June Bug to death and I will miss him terribly – I feel like I can’t, I don’t grieve,” added Junior.
The younger Earnhardt opened up his heart and tried to explain why he finds it so hard to grieve about anything else. “I don’t know why I don’t grieve,” Junior said.
“It’s not like I don’t appreciate him and love him [June Bug], but like that part of me is not working right. I mean, I feel fine, I feel okay with how that’s working. I might not be working the right way, the way (his wife) reacts to it and how you’re dealing with it is traditional, grieving, and so forth,” he added.
In a sense, Junior was preparing for his dog’s passing for nearly two years, as June Bug suffered several health issues, including a collapsed trachea. So, he was able to prepare himself for over a period of time, while his father’s death was so sudden and immediate, and the pain is possibly hard to fathom even now.
