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“The suffering is proportional to the love.”
– Catherine of Siena, 14th-century mystic and theologian
I smiled and waved at the teachers in the school drop-off line. Once home, I handed my baby over to her Grammy and headed upstairs to my office.
That’s when it all came flooding back.
The emptiness, the shock. The sharp burst of pain in my chest.
I didn’t even hesitate this time. Setting down my coffee cup, I crawled under my desk into the oversized velvet dog bed.
And the tears began to fall.
The Secret Life of Grief
It had already been two months. People were plenty nice when they first found out my dog died. Kind words came over email. Hugs were frequent.
It was a little awkward to tell clients I was taking some time off because I’d lost a pet, though they were plenty sympathetic.
My sister took it to the next level. She convinced a manager at my favorite café to deliver a whole pie to me at home. I’ll never forget how touched I was by her thoughtfulness, and by the big, dog-loving heart of that manager.
But seven days after Koda’s passing, it was back to life as normal as far as everyone else was concerned.
I retreated into my secret grief and floundered there for months. I couldn’t understand why this instance of pet loss was so much harder than other beloved pets who’d passed.
I also couldn’t understand why the guilt and anger and sadness felt immobilizing.
And so I began a daily ritual of hiding my tears and counting the hours till I could steal away and cry again.
Can Pain Be Measured?
If you’ve ever experienced this deep heartache, the kind that lingers and incapacitates even as you try to hide it…
Then I hear you, friend.
It doesn’t really matter whether you’ve lost a pet or a human. Grief is normal, uniting, and so, so, hard.
Grief is also universal — a sign that love exists across cultures and borders and species.
It’s not something to be compared to others’ hardships. Because that’s what we all do, right?
My grief is bigger than your grief because I lost a grandparent and you lost a pet.
Your grief beats my grief because you lost a sibling and I lost a dog.
But there is no comparison. Grief doesn’t care whether you’re separated a few generations from someone. Grief doesn’t care whether you’re two different species.
What does matter to grief is the nature of the loss and the relationship between you and the one departed from your life. In other words, it matters how you lost them, whether you were prepared, and what they meant to you during life.
But also, grief is a uniquely personal experience. We don’t grieve similar relationships exactly the same as each other because we are all individuals.
That said, there are still societal expectations that we grieve certain types of relationships harder and longer than others. And when it comes to grieving lost pets, the societal expectation is pretty much
“yeah it’s sad, and you’ll get over it soon.”
Yet, there’s so much more that goes into grieving pets that is not widely known and rarely addressed…
The Similar Worlds of Grief and Cheese
Just as there are myriad different types of cheese in the supermarket…
So are there different types of grief.
I was raised on cheddar and the idea that sad is sad. So when I became an adult and got introduced to the wide world of cheese, my perception of that magical food expanded exponentially.
There were the soft, melt-in-your-mouth cheeses, the hard and crumbly cheeses, the cheeses weirdly kissed by mold that makes them a hundred times more flavorful… and that’s just the beginning.
The same is true of sadness. Sadness isn’t just about feeling down and crying.
Sadness can be rage. It can be regret. Despair. Sorry. Agony.
Grief is a deeper, longer-lasting level of sadness. Clinical flavors include
- anticipatory grief, where you get to prepare for the loss,
- traumatic grief which is characterized by a sudden loss and the possible experience of post-traumatic stress,
- complicated grief, which means you’re stuck in your grief and it grows in intensity till you’re one big wreck of a person,
- and finally comes pathological grief, the worst of all of them, characterized by such deep and immobilizing sadness that suicide becomes a risk.
The bond you had with the being who passed can complicate your grief, and that’s as true of animal grief as it is of any other connection.
“Socially unrecognized grief,” which is a tragic phrase on its own, also complicates your journey from hurting to healing. On the human front, this includes perinatal death, overdoses, suicides, and HIV/AIDS.
Animal grief can fall into this socially unrecognized and vastly biased pit. It depends a lot on the people around you, the culture in which you live, and your own ability to process emotions.
But with all these types of grief, understanding the pain is the first step in the path to healing.
Beauty In Death and Dignity
One of the first people to make waves in understanding the world of grief was Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, the psychiatrist who came up with the now well-known five stages of death.
Originally from Zurich, she participated in volunteer work after World War II, which included healing rebuild war-demolished communities. During that time, she visited a concentration camp in Poland.
Kübler-Ross later wrote about the halting contrast between the horror that took place there and the small symbols of hope etched into the walls of the camp, like butterflies.
It was the beginning of what became her lifelong belief that death should be approached with dignity.
Kübler-Ross went on to become a psychiatrist and then an instructor at the University of Chicago. She turned heads in the medical community when she began interviewing dying patients in front of students, motivated by her observations that the terminally ill were isolated and neglected (they were; this was the sixties).
Those experiences led to her groundbreaking book, On Death and Dying, asserting the five grief stages as shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
I believe we’re all indebted to Kübler-Ross for opening up this world of grief understanding, which remains complicated and multilayered. So it’s worth saying that her five stages aren’t meant to be taken as script.
Also, the stages are absolutely not linear and everyone experiences them at their own pace, sometimes moving back and forth between stages. Navigating them takes effort. It’s hard work, and that’s something of a gift.
Grief. Is. Work.
I’d never heard of the concept that “grief is work” till I got walloped by my own grief.
Sigmund Freud was the first to write about it. He introduced the idea of Trauerarbeit (the work of mourning), and walked it out in a 1917 essay called Mourning and Melancholia.
Freud made the process quantifiable, proposing that a person in grief should systematically and consciously confront the emotions and memories tied to the deceased. This will “free up” the emotional attachment, all to pave the way for new attachments.
Sounds almost easy, right? Like all you need is a checklist.
Psychiatrist Erich Lindemann took it one step further, defining Grief Work as a three-part process:
- Emancipate yourself from the deceased,
- Adjust to your environment without the deceased, and
- Form new relationships.
But from the viewpoint of someone navigating deep grief, both approaches are pretty black and white. It’s almost to say Grief Work is a matter of rolling up your sleeves and checking off boxes.
It’s not nearly so simple in practice.
Yet, grief work really is all about detaching from a lost loved one. It involves emotional energy, physical energy, and often even a rewriting of your identity. This is absolutely true of pet grief, especially if your pet was a big part of who you are.
So perhaps it’s just a matter of reframing the work so it’s not super clinical. Consider these three steps:
- cry and rage and feel your emotions as you try to make sense of the loss,
- accept the habits of daily life without your beloved pet, and
- put energy and attention into the new life you have before you.
At the end of the day though, and regardless of how you phrase it, grief work is a necessary part of accepting pet loss.
It’s also the pathway to regaining your emotional balance. Not doing this work (aka, repressing your grief), just delays the process and may bring about complicated grief.
Grief to the Power-of-the-Greatest-Love
Another amazing facet of grief: Grief is not uniquely human — animals grieve as well.
I experienced this in the months following Koda’s passing when Sydney Roo, my other sweet Cavalier, showed a marked decline. She’d lost her brother, best friend, and lifelong playmate.
It’s often said that the amount of sadness you feel for a lost pet is directly correlated to the amount of love you felt for them. I agree. (I believe this is also true for animals.)
Consider that your grief is a beautiful, albeit painful, testament to how closely you were connected to your departed pet. The stronger the relationship, the more cruelly you feel the loss.
Maybe you feel shock. Maybe you feel like you’ve lost a whole limb, like a piece of yourself has been ripped from you.
Maybe it’s closer to the sensation of drowning in a void. Or like you’re walking through a distorted sense of unreality.
Anger and guilt may be present.
And then there are physical manifestations of the pain — it’s not uncommon for someone in grief to have trouble sleeping, or to lose their appetite, or feel random body aches and pains.
Strong reactions might feel standard. Grief that lasts weeks, or months, or even years — all common.
Your grief might be complicated by the circumstances or suddenness of the death, or whether you have unresolved grief from previous pet losses, or other mental-emotional issues you’re dealing with.
And the fact is, every single bit of that is normal.
You have a right to your grief, and your pet grief especially deserves to be recognized. If you’ve experienced pet loss, you deserve to get support, reassurance, and to have someone who will listen to your pain.
This is especially true in our culture. The biggest problem with pet loss is that our society and even the well-meaning people closest to us often pressure us to “just get over it” or “turn the page” or “get another one.”
But grief, and pet loss grief is no different, is something you experience at your own pace.
A Gift to Your Future Self
What I’d love for anyone reading this to take away is that grief is a journey. It’s universal and it’s unique. It’s marked by ups and downs and pain and intense emotions.
And if you’re experiencing this after the loss of a beloved pet, you have a right to grieve for as long as you need, in whatever way feels right.
Getting through the journey takes time. Give yourself the gift of patience and self-compassion. I look back on my past grieving self and feel so sad that I tried to hurry her up to get back to her regular, chipper life.
When you allow yourself the space to grieve, your pet loss journey can be an opportunity for personal growth. It might lead you to redefine the way you see life, or reshape the current bonds you have with others.
On my end, we ended up adopting a new dog sooner than I thought I could. But we did it for Sydney, my grieving pup. The gift that came into my life as a silver lining to losing my soul dog was Owie, a rescue Cavalier found on a Texas highway at six months old.
Sydney scorned him and kept her distance for weeks, but gradually began to eat again.
Eventually her tail wagged more.
Bit by bit, we became a family. Not without tender memories for our dear departed pet, but with a wholeness made possible by the expression of grief. I see now how much I fought it, but looking back, I’m so glad it consumed me and left me with no choice but to give in to the tears.
My family and I are on the other side of that journey, happy and whole, and with the hard-won knowledge that the next time we go through pet loss, we will celebrate and cry, rage and embrace, smile and mourn.
