One of the many unexpected things that hits after pet loss is what I describe as a “craving for presence.”

It happens when the world cruelly and adamantly continues spinning despite the pain you’re navigating. It almost makes the loss feel imagined, like you were living in a dream and now that you’ve had a cruel wake-up, your pet and the life you had with them never existed.

(Keep in mind that our brains do crazy things while in grief.)

For many, this feeling manifests as a kind of cognitive search party where you’re constantly on the lookout for the pet who passed.

You might look for them at the front door when you arrive home each day.

Or maybe your eyes flit to the particular indent they left in a couch cushion.

Or toward the corner where their bed was.

Or the spot by the window where the sun hit just right in the afternoon and you could always find them savoring a luxurious afternoon nap.

For me, it was the dog bed under my desk. Large enough for a hundred-pound dog, it was where my two Cavaliers often cuddled and where I’d find Koda snoring at my feet during early morning writing sessions.

After he passed, my early morning writing sessions looked like me crawling under the desk and curling up in his spot on the red velvet cushion. Then I’d cry. Then I’d try to… I don’t really know. Feel his presence, I guess you could say?

What I understand now is that this stemmed from my own urgent need to hold onto something that connected us, that said he was real and our morning ritual was real and the love doled out from that ruby-furred creature was absolutely real. In other words,

Also, this search for realness following pet loss isn’t pathological. And it’s not just me who did it — I’ve heard loads of other people describe similar experiences.

It’s about love that’s gone missing, that you instinctively go try to find.

So today I want to talk about tributes, because they serve a similar function. It’s a way to say you are not forgotten. You’re still here in my heart. I know you and love you and remember you.

This Research Flipped What We Thought We Knew About Grief

For a long time, grief psychology operated on a clear assumption: healing meant detaching. Cutting the cord. Not looking back. Focusing on the future.

We know now that this model was not just incomplete. For many people, it was actively harmful, and if we’re being really honest… it stunk.

Especially when it came to helping someone come to terms with a loss.

The Continuing Bonds framework, developed by grief researchers Klass, Silverman, and Nickman in 1996, introduced a different idea. It was about the upside of maintaining an ongoing relationship with the one you’ve lost, through memories, rituals, or tributes.

Most importantly, these actions are not a sign of unhealthy grief. Quite the opposite. For most people, it’s exactly how healthy grieving works.

This matters especially when it comes to pet loss, where cultural permission to grieve is already thin to nonexistent. The idea of actively honoring your pet after they’ve passed can feel indulgent. Even strange.

Why There’s No Wrong Way

The best tribute is the one that feels right to you when it comes to remembering and honoring your pet. There’s no correct version; no wrong way to do it.

Maybe you opt for

• A photo book with handwritten captions — not a polished slideshow, but the kind you’d sit down and look through slowly, commenting out loud.

• A small altar or dedicated corner: a photo, a candle, something of theirs. Different cultures have created these spaces for centuries — the Japanese butsudan, the Mexican ofrenda.

• A letter to your pet — one you don’t send to anyone.

• A donation to a rescue in their name.

• A memorial tattoo.

• A custom portrait.

• A tree planted somewhere meaningful.

• A recurring remembrance on the anniversary of the day you got them.

When Koda passed, I went through my phone and printed every single photo I’d ever taken of him — even if he just happened to be in the background of something else I was taking a picture of. It was important to me to have the photos in my hand, not just on my phone.

When my grief would get unbearable, I’d thumb through the photos, remembering the many days of happiness I had with him. Most of the time, I had his collar around my wrist while doing this.

So it wasn’t a fancy or grandiose tribute, and it wasn’t on display and I didn’t share it with anybody. But it helped me, and that was the whole point.

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When to Start Your Tribute

A lot of people ask me when is the right time to make a tribute, and again — there’s no wrong time. You can create a tribute long after your pet has passed, or you can start on it when you know their beautiful days will soon be coming to an end.

But there’s one thing I’ve noticed about tribute timing, which is that most people who look back say the same thing: they wish they’d started earlier.

Not because earlier is better or because grief has any kind of schedule. Rather, it’s because creating a tangible tribute — gathering photos, writing a sentence, lighting a candle — gives you something to do with your hands and your mind when grief has you otherwise feeling helpless and formless.

Grief researchers also note that meaning-making activities like tribute-building are among the more reliable predictors of healthy grief integration over time.

Note that this isn’t rushed healing or tidy resolution. It’s just a way to honor our very human need to make tangible something that deeply mattered to us.

Also, don’t think of it as something that needs to move to completion. You certainly can create a tribute and feel like it’s complete. You can also consider it an ongoing process, adding to whatever you create as the memories drift through your mind.

So I invite you to just start. Start whatever feels right to you. Just getting started is enough to say that the loss of your pet’s life mattered to you, and that’s really the first step in honoring your grief.

There’s something a lot of grieving pet owners think but never say out loud. They keep it locked inside (I know I did). There’s guilt. It’s this:

If you relate, you are definitely not alone and you’re not a bad person and you’re not selfish or broken or weird.

Grief researchers have lately been studying this phenomenon seriously. What they’ve found actually makes complete sense when you look at the nature of the bond we have with our pets.

The Pet Relationship Is Something Else Entirely

Think back on what your day-to-day life with your pet actually looked like. Chances are good they were by your side constantly from the time you got up until you came home from work, school, or any other activity.

They were there on sick days… on lazy Sunday afternoons… throughout weather events and holidays and flu season and everything else that happens in normal daily life.

But more than just being there, your pet was always glad to see you. Not just some of the time, not even most of the time, but every single time, without exception, without condition.

Can you think of a human in your life who models that?

Don’t get me wrong — human love is beautiful. And it’s complicated. We have histories with the people we love. There are old arguments that were never fully resolved and weeks where we were too distracted or too caught up in our own challenges and stresses to show up the way we wanted. There were expectations, disappointments, unspoken feelings, and all the things that come with having a relationship of any kind with anybody.

But your pet?

Your pet didn’t bring any of that. What your pet brought you was constant, consistent, uncomplicated, beautiful, loving presence every minute they were with you.

Dr. Julie Axelrod, a grief therapist who has written about pet loss, describes the human-animal bond as uniquely non-transactional. Your pet asked nothing of you except your presence.

When you, as a human, receive that kind of love, fully and repeatedly through the years, it shapes you in ways that are profoundly painful to say good-bye to and genuinely hard to grieve.

And when that connection and adoration disappear from your home, your routines, and your life all at once, you feel the absence in every second.

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That Pain You’re Experiencing? It’s Backed By Research

But here’s where relieving validity enters the picture. Research shows that this type of grief really is comparable to losing a person in your life. Going back to the early 1990s, Dr. Mary Gerwolls and Dr. Laura Labott published findings that show grief symptoms experienced after pet loss were equivalent in severity to those following human bereavement.

Not kind-of-sort-of-like-it, but analogous. Equal.

A 2022 study in PLOS One found that people who had lost dogs showed significant depressive symptoms, and that the intensity of grief correlated directly with the strength of the human-animal bond. What didn’t correlate was the pet’s age or how long they might have been ill before passing or any other factor for that matter.

There’s also a phenomenon researchers call “broken heart syndrome.” It’s a documented increase in cardiac risk in the days that immediately follow a significant loss. Your chest literally aches, and it’s brought on by an actual physiological cause.

The research also shows us something else: people who felt most bonded with their pets — who described them as a central source of companionship and emotional support — showed the most intense grief responses.

And while, yes, it’s pretty obvious that it’ll hurt more if you loved more, this also shows us that how much the relationship mattered is measurable by the emotional effect it has on you.

The reason people question this is because of the disenfranchised aspect of pet grief. Most people think it’s not supposed to hurt as much as it does.

But consider that if your emotional bond to your pet is measurable, and if that bond is massive, then your grief will be massive. It all makes sense.

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The Hidden Challenge In Finding Support

So if you’ve been minimizing your own grief because it was “just a pet,” then please hear me clearly: The connection you had was absolutely real. The loss is real. The pain is directly proportionate to how much you loved your pet, and you don’t have to justify any of it to anyone.

Part of the reason I was so traumatized when I lost my little soul dog, Koda, is that the grief was so big I didn’t understand it. I was afraid to talk about it with anybody because he was my dog. I didn’t think anybody would understand. I thought I was maybe a little too emotional or too sensitive, or it was because I had small children who’d used up all my emotional reserves.

And I want to be clear that it wasn’t because I didn’t have amazing and supportive people in my life. I was surrounded by wonderful family members and friends who were empathetic to my loss and sympathetic to other things I’d been through, and who likely would have been safe for me to go to.

But I’m the one who chose not to go to them because I’m the one who thought my grief was ridiculous.

I don’t know how they would have reacted. I didn’t give them the chance really to see me in my pain.

Looking back, I’m pretty sure not a single one of them would have called me silly or made me feel less than because I was still struggling. They probably would have helped me considerably had I just been able to open up.

But being vulnerable is not necessarily celebrated or taught in our human culture. (Though I think it should be… we’d all be a lot happier knowing we’re still lovable in spite of our fears or weaknesses.)

So please give yourself the gift of acknowledging that your pain is valid, that it deserves oxygen, and that there are loads of people out there — probably in your daily life and definitely in this community — who are happy to hold your hand and support you through your sadness.

For six years, they were a pair.

Sydney was eight months old when we got Koda, a fat, wobbly puppy. That first week, she looked at him like a specimen, disdainfully observing his confusion over his new surroundings.

Sydney eventually decided he’d be worth experimental entertainment. I watched the first time she tried to play with him — cautious, a little terrified. But something clicked. I remember she jumped down from the couch he couldn’t yet reach. She stole the stuffy in his mouth, dashed around the coffee table, and then tossed it back to him as she sprinted back to the safety of the couch and surveyed the scene.

Koda was genuinely confused over what had happened. But his tail was wagging, so she tried it again, and then again, and soon they were playing like besties.

From then on, they were inseparable. Playing. Tearing things apart. Snuggling. Often, I’d have one on either side of me. That was our system.

Koda ate faster, but Sydney, though smaller, could hold her own — she wouldn’t be pushed around, and Koda knew it. As they got older, the wild play settled into quieter companionship. A steadiness. They just belonged near each other, the way some friendships get so easy you stop noticing any effort. It just is.

My kids like to say they were married. I called them siblings. Whatever it was, they were bonded. They had something, and it was theirs.

But all that disappeared when Koda died, suddenly and traumatically. Somewhere in the aftermath of losing him, I lost all awareness of the bond they’d had. I became consumed with my own grief. I wasn’t thinking about what losing him meant for Sydney.

And Then I Watched Her Look for Him

In retrospect I feel great pain at not being there for her in those early weeks of grief. It wasn’t until I looked at her one day, noticeably thinner, that it hit me how much she had been suffering.

I thought I had done the right thing by bringing her his ashes and his collar and letting her sniff them and explaining to her with loving pats on her head that he was gone. But that was the only effort I made for her, and I’m sure it took less than ten minutes.

Everything else was about me trying to survive that particularly painful period. Gradually, though, as I began to pay attention to her, I noticed that she would go to the places he used to lie and just stand there. She’d sniff his things and then go lie down. She started sleeping more than she ever had before. Sydney had always been a little more independent than Koda, happy to be in the same room but not on top of me.

That changed. She wouldn’t even follow me from room to room.

She was quieter. Not sick, not in pain — just quieter. Like something in the house was off and she was working out what.

It went on for weeks… dragged out into months. She seemed to be functioning normally. But she wasn’t herself, and I knew what I was seeing even though I hadn’t ever considered it.

The thing that broke me open — and somehow, also helped me — was realizing that she was mourning him too. That the loss in our house wasn’t only mine. That Koda had mattered to her in a way that left a mark when he was gone.

What the Research Has Started Saying

Scientists were skeptical for a long time that animals experience anything like grief. The concern was projection — that we were reading human emotion into animal behavior.

That has shifted. A study published in Scientific Reports surveyed people who had more than one dog when one of them died. Eighty-six percent reported behavioral changes in the surviving dog: less play, less appetite, more attention-seeking from the owner, increased fearfulness.

These changes lasted months on average.

Researchers who study animal behavior now broadly agree that social mammals — dogs, horses, elephants, primates — form genuine attachments, and that when those attachments end, something happens in them.

Whether we call it grief the way we mean it for humans is still debated.

But the idea that animals simply move on because they don’t understand what happened? That’s not supported by the evidence anymore.

Sydney understood something. I saw it. And it turns out I wasn’t projecting.

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What It Gave Me That I Didn’t Expect

Watching Sydney grieve Koda gave me something I hadn’t anticipated: confirmation.

Not the kind I needed to believe my own grief was valid — I already knew that, even on the days it didn’t feel that way. But confirmation that their relationship, their bond, had been real. That Koda wasn’t only loved by me. That his presence had mattered beyond what I could see, in a whole separate relationship I hadn’t fully known I was living alongside.

That helped me. It made the loss feel the right size, in the way that real losses should — big, and overwhelming, and not something to be talked out of.

How to Help Your Own Pet Grieve

If you have another pet right now who is grieving alongside you, keep their routine as stable as you can. Structure helps when things feel wrong. Don’t push them to seem okay. If they want to be quieter, let them be quieter. If they want to be closer to you, be there. You’re both in it, and you’re both allowed to take as long as you take.

And if watching them grieve is adding to your own grief — I understand. It added to mine, and also, somehow, it helped.

I think that’s because it’s evidence you’re not alone in your broken heart. So if you’re in a similar situation, I invite you to make sure your other pets know they’re not alone, too.

You’re watching your pet sleep, and the tears start to flow.

Even though they’re snoring right there in front of you, you know it’s not a forever-situation

That’s called anticipatory grief — the grief that arrives before the death. And it is one of the most painful, least-talked-about parts of loving an animal.

Most people feel like they’re doing something wrong when it happens. Like they’re being morbid, or rushing toward the end, or borrowing trouble from a future that hasn’t arrived yet. They’re not. They just feel deep love for a creature they’re terrified to lose.

What It Actually Feels Like

Anticipatory grief doesn’t look the same for everyone.

For some, it’s a low hum. Always there in the background, surfacing when you least expect it. Maybe triggered by a commercial about dog food, or someone mentioning their healthy, young pet.

Maybe it happens on a quiet evening when everything is fine and you suddenly think not for long.

For others, it comes in waves. There are days when you feel present, even grateful, followed by nights when you’re crying in the bathroom so your pet doesn’t see you upset. (Yes, many of us do exactly that.)

It can also show up as hypervigilance — counting their breaths at midnight, Googling symptoms you don’t want to find, hovering in a way that even you find a little exhausting. But you’re not being neurotic; you’re just trying to protect something in any way possible.

There may also be something happening in the relationship you have with your pet during this time — a strange, tender quality to ordinary moments that you can’t quite name. You love your pet, of course, but it’s almost like the love has a different weight now. Almost like your body, or your deepest intuition, knows something.

And even that knowing, as hard as it is, can make the remaining time feel more intentional, more awake.

The Research Says You’re Not Imagining This

Psychologists have been studying anticipatory grief since the 1940s, when psychiatrist Erich Lindemann first identified it in families of soldiers shipping off to war. What they found then holds true now: the grief we feel before a death is just as real as the grief we feel after it.

In pet loss specifically, research published in the journal Anthrozoös has found that people who know a pet’s death is coming often begin processing the loss weeks or months before it happens — and that this pre-loss grief period can be just as emotionally intense as acute grief afterward.

So no, you are not imagining it.

You’re not being dramatic.

Your nervous system is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do when something precious is slipping away.

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What It Can Give You, If You Let It

Many worry that feeling this way will somehow become a life sentence. But anticipatory grief is not a prophecy. It doesn’t speed anything up. It doesn’t mean you’ve mentally buried your pet before they’ve gone.

What it can do, if you let it, is make you more present — not less. Now that my sweet dogs are in the elderly stage of life, I find myself slowing down in ways I haven’t in years. I spend more afternoons on the floor with them. We take longer, slower walks, even when they can only manage a turtle’s pace.

Anticipatory grief is behind this new awareness. It’s turned ordinary, hustle-bustle life into something I’m stopping to savor.

Not that it makes the future any easier. A lot of people describe this season as one of the hardest they’ve ever navigated. Harder, in some ways, than the acute grief after the loss itself — because there’s no script for it and almost no support.

Friends and family don’t know how to respond. There’s no ritual. No meal train. Just you, loving your pet through borrowed time, trying to find a way to be present that doesn’t feel like practice for saying goodbye.

You can’t make this kind of grief stop. But you can stop fighting it. Notice when it arrives. Name it. Even something as simple as:

Think of it as a non-dramatic, white-paper-honest way of looking at the situation.

And then go be with your pet. Not in a grand way. Just there, just with them, in whatever way and on whatever day it happens to be.

When you lose a dog or a cat, the people around you usually at least try.

They might say the wrong thing, like “You can get another one” or “It was just a dog/just a cat,” and those comments are particularly awful.

But for the most part, they at least understand that you’re grieving something real.

On the other hand, if you lose a bird, a rabbit, a fish, a guinea pig, a snake, a gecko, a horse, a chinchilla, or any of the other number of pets out there, you probably get something different.

Something like “Er, I didn’t realize you could get attached to a fish.” Or “Are you kidding? It was literally a reptile/fuzzball/work animal.”

Or you just get silence… that polite, blank, not-really-sure-what-to-say kind of silence that lands like having someone tell you your grief doesn’t count.

Today I want to spend some time on that because I’ve heard from enough people in this situation to know how much that particular type of aloneness can hurt…

Not to mention how much any pet, regardless of how small or how different, can bring real grief.

Basic Animal Love Math

The depth of grief is not determined by the size of the animal, the length of the lifespan, or what species they were.

Grief is determined by the depth of the bond.

And bonds happen in all directions:

• The parrot who said your name every morning when you walked in.

• The rabbit who would come and press their head against your hand when you were sad (I don’t know how they knew, but they knew).

• The fish that you watched every single evening, whose presence in the tank became part of the rhythm of your home, and whose absence left something you didn’t expect.

The Assumption That Gets Made

There’s an idea floating around (unspoken, mostly) that grief should be proportional to something measurable, like the size of the animal. Or the number of years the animal was in your life. Whether they could be trained, whether they cuddled, whether they were warm-blooded.

But consider this: That’s not how attachment works in the human brain.

The brain doesn’t measure the animal’s characteristics and calculate how sad you’re allowed to be.

The brain forms a bond, and when that bond breaks, it hurts. Consider

…the hamster who sat on your shoulder every evening while you watched television.

…the turtle you drove forty-five minutes in traffic to get to the right vet when they looked sick.

…the parrot you held wrapped in a blanket on their last night with you.

These are real relationships, and the fact that most people don’t understand them is their limitation, not yours.

I mean, hey — I don’t understand every pet relationship myself. At least, not those I haven’t witnessed.

But what I have experienced, even from afar, has changed my view on this. Like watching my young son with his little orange corn snake. If you’d asked me prior to him getting that snake if one could get attached to a snake, I’d have said it was more of a hobby than a pet.

And then I saw my son’s heart break when said corn snake escaped. (Yes, in our house, and yes, he’s still on the run.)

Same thing when my kids got ferrets. Ferrets, to me, were previously just rodents. But to my kids, they were companions, playmates, jokesters, sources of comfort… the list goes on.

All to say, you don’t know till you’ve been a witness to one of those bonds.

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The Part That Makes This Especially Hard

Beyond the loss of a non-dog or cat, there’s this extra layer of challenge: any pet grief support that exists mostly wasn’t built for you.

Most articles about pet loss talk about dogs. Most communities are organized around dogs and cats.

When you go looking for someone who understands what it’s like to lose a bearded dragon,

or a horse you’d had since you were twelve,

or the birds that filled your house with sound for fifteen years —

you often find yourself in spaces where the grief being described doesn’t quite fit what you’re feeling.

That isolation on top of the loss is something I think about a lot.

I started this newsletter and this community because I believe grief is grief, and every bond deserves to be honored. That includes your special bond with your unique pet, whatever it was, however small they looked to the rest of the world.

And while I write about dogs and cats a lot, I’m committed to being all-animal-inclusive — even for those animals where a bond seems unlikely to those who’ve never seen such a thing.

The more you share about your own pet experiences, the more I can share those stories with the world.

So would you do me a favor, please, and tell me about your pet? Just comment below and tell me their name, what kind of pet you had, and one thing you miss. I’m listening.

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Maybe you let an important meeting slip by the wayside because you just couldn’t bring yourself to show up.

Maybe you’ve been eating nothing but crap food. Or not eating at all. It really depends on the day.

Maybe you cried in the car for 20 minutes over a love song that wasn’t necessarily written about pets but spoke directly to your heart, and then you were stuck in the parking lot for half an hour trying to pull yourself together before going inside to buy bananas.

Grief is unpleasant and awkward on any day, but more so when it’s pet grief because so much of the population doesn’t understand how deep it goes. But it’s not even really the sadness that keeps you stuck. It’s the fog.

It’s the sense that your brain isn’t working right, that you can’t keep your thoughts straight, and you don’t feel on top of things — or like you ever will be again.

Let me say upfront, you are not falling apart. (I mean, technically you are, but in a completely normal way.)

It’s just your body doing exactly what bodies are meant to do when navigating grief.

How Pet Loss Grief Affects You Physically

What a lot of people don’t realize is that grief is not just emotional. Meaning, it’s not just the feeling of sadness.

Grief is an all-encompassing state of being that affects you emotionally, mentally, and physically.

When you lose someone you were deeply attached to, your brain responds the way it responds to physical injury:

Cortisol (your stress hormone) shoots up.

Sleep gets disrupted.

Appetite shifts.

Your immune system can take a hit.

It’s well-documented and well-researched. In fact, researchers at UCLA found that social pain, the pain of losing a close relationship, activates the same neural pathways as physical pain.

Which means that the ache in your chest isn’t a metaphor. It’s your nervous system processing a real loss that’s producing real pain.

The exhaustion makes sense. The not being able to focus makes sense. The feeling like you’re moving through wet concrete, that makes sense too.

So if you’re losing your grip on just about everything, that’s not you being overdramatic. It’s you trying to deal with something that has a genuine and profound physiological impact on your state of being.

The Specific Things That Catch People Off Guard

While in a state of grief, the concentration problem surprises almost everyone. People describe it as an inability to focus, to finish a sentence, or to read more than a paragraph before their minds drift back to the loss.

This is so common it has an informal name in the grief community: “grief brain.” Thank heavens it’s not permanent… but it is very real.

Time distortion is another one. Some days feel like they’ve been going on for a week. Some weeks disappear entirely. Your sense of “how long has it been” goes sideways.

And then there’s the blindsiding sadness — the kind that arrives without warning, triggered by a commercial. A specific smell. Someone else’s dog at the park. A song you didn’t even know reminded you of your pet.

Grief doesn’t respect your schedule. It shows up when something in the world accidentally touches the part of you that’s still aching for the companion you lost.

Another unexpected form of grief is what I’m going to call “overprotective grief.” If you have other animals, you might find yourself checking on them constantly. Watching them eat. Listening for their breathing in the night.

Know that all of this is very common among people who’ve just endured a loss. Your nervous system is reconfiguring and hasn’t necessarily figured out that the emergency is over and that you are transitioning to a new reality.

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A Note on When to Reach Out for Help

Most of this eases as time goes on. But sometimes grief needs more than community.

If you haven’t been able to eat or sleep for an extended stretch (and I don’t just mean a bad week)… and if you’re genuinely struggling to function, please reach out to a mental health professional.

Doing so is the kindest thing you can do for yourself. It’s the recognition that what you’re carrying is deep and heavy and you could use some extra support.

The Thing That Actually Moves Grief

So how do you muddle through this uncomfortable and unwelcome state of being? It’s not just about the passage of time. Time helps, but it doesn’t necessarily get you past the sadness.

What I’ve seen help — both for others and myself — is having a place to say the things out loud. Maybe that’s a person or a community or this newsletter right here.

It’s best when you can find a place where you don’t have to explain or apologize or pretend that you are past your grief. You can simply speak about it, air it, express it.

If you don’t have that yet, that’s why I’m here.

Hit reply and tell me how you’re actually doing this week in working through your pet loss, whether it just happened or it was years ago. I mean it; I’m here to listen.

You’re driving somewhere. You’re washing dishes. You’re about to fall asleep.

And the questions start to flood.

Did I wait too long?

Did I do it too soon?

Was it the right call?

Should I have gotten a second opinion?

Did he know I was there?

Did she know how much I loved her?

I’ve talked to a lot of people navigating pet loss, and this — what I call “the replay” — is almost universal among those who made the decision to euthanize.

It doesn’t seem to matter how carefully you thought it through, how much guidance you got from the vet, or how peaceful the final moment was. The question comes back anyway.

Before we dive in, I want to say this: I think those questions flood back because you loved your pet so much. That’s a major part of grief: wishing things had gone differently, even when you did everything you could.

Why This Decision Is Different From Other Types of Pet Loss

When you lose a person close to you, you’re usually a witness. You didn’t make the final call. You didn’t set a time. You weren’t handed the responsibility of deciding when enough was enough.

With pet euthanasia, you were. And that’s a weight that doesn’t have a human equivalent that I know of. Even withdrawing life support from a human is a passive step toward death, where you’re stopping life-sustaining interventions and letting an underlying disease take its natural course.

In most cases, you were either asked, or you decided on your own, to choose an act of profound love in the form of letting go. An act that says: I care more about your comfort and peace than about having more time with you.

That’s not a small act. It’s not a small thing to carry after it’s done.

And because it required a very black-and-white decision with a set moment at a precise date on a calendar, your brain can keep returning to that moment, wondering and asking and re-asking whether you got it exactly right.

Whether there was another option.

Whether you moved too fast or waited too long.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: the question isn’t really about whether you got it right. It’s about whether you loved them enough.

And the answer to that one is clear.

For Those Who Chose Too Soon and Those Who Waited Too Long

Both groups feel equally guilty. I’ve heard from both.

The guilt is the same on both sides. Which shows that the guilt isn’t actually about the timing…

It’s about how much you cared, and how impossible it is to hold that much care in the face of an unbearable decision, and how the brain keeps looking for the version of events where you could have done it perfectly.

There was never going to be a perfect, easy answer. There was only you, loving them the best way you knew how, doing the hardest thing ever.

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The Simple Shift That Helps Your Pain

I can’t tell you the replay ever stops completely. At least not for a while.

What I’ve found, both for myself and from listening to others, is that the intensity of the decisions related to your pet’s death will change when you stop fighting the question and start responding to it differently.

If you find yourself again wondering, “Did I wait too long?” or “Did I decide too soon?” — don’t try and answer it.

Don’t work to justify it.

Don’t berate yourself about it.

Instead, acknowledge it.

Try something like, “I hear you. That’s a hard question, and it’s impossible to answer. But what I do know is that I loved him so much. And I did the best I could with the knowledge I had at the time.”

This saves you from even trying to answer the question. It keeps you from arguing around it. Simply acknowledge that the question is there, and that it comes from love.

It doesn’t make the swirling questions stop. But it does make them feel less like accusations and more like grief, which is what it actually is.

What Really Matters In the End

Never forget that above all, you showed up for your sweet pet. In the end, when everything got hard, you showed up.

In the end, that’s what matters.

And it matters more than the timing ever could.

I still remember answering the door with my tear-streaked face. A man with a shy smile stood there, holding a box. His expression turned to concern when he saw me. He awkwardly held out the box and said, “Your sister asked me to bring you this.”

You see, when Koda died, my sister lived across the country. So she called my favorite local bakery and sweet-talked the manager into hand-delivering a pie to my door.

I still think about that. She was far away; she couldn’t be there to hold my hand. Yet she found a way to show up anyway. It remains one of the most thoughtful things anyone has ever done for me.

But here’s the thing: that kind of love-in-action following pet grief is far too rare.

It’s not because people don’t care. They do. But most of them don’t really know what to do when someone suffers pet loss — because a pet dying doesn’t come with a social script. There’s no standard ritual. No go-to card section at the grocery store. No one stopping by the house a week or two later to ask how you’re holding up.

What I mostly got was: “Oh, I’m so sorry.” And then the conversation moved on within thirty seconds.

I very clearly remember sitting in my grief, wondering why my world was shattered but no one else seemed too affected. Was there something wrong with me, that I got so wrecked? Had I not loved him enough for it to count?

It’s taken me years to really sift through all the emotional/cultural/social implications of pet loss. And ultimately, there was nothing wrong with me.

There’s nothing wrong with you, either, if you relate to all this.

There’s an Actual Name for What’s Happening

A grief researcher named Kenneth Doka came up with the term disenfranchised grief. Here’s how he defined it:

Disenfranchised grief is grief that persons experience when they incur a loss that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, socially sanctioned, or publicly mourned.

In other words, it’s

• Grief that society doesn’t recognize as legitimate.

• Grief that doesn’t get rituals.

• Grief that doesn’t get acknowledged at work.

• Grief that doesn’t warrant pie (or flowers, or casseroles) — unless you have the rare phenomenal person in your life like my sister.

It’s not the only kind, of course. There are loads of other types of disenfranchised grief in our culture:

• Pregnancy loss and infertility.

• Death by suicide.

• Losing a friend you were close to but not officially family with.

• Divorce.

• Estrangement from family.

• Death of a patient.

• Grief following adoption.

That’s only a bit of it; the list is actually really, really long. I’ll go into it in depth in another article.

What I really hope you take away from this is that the grief itself is real; our culture just hasn’t caught up.

The effect is real, too. And here’s what it does to you: it doesn’t just make you lonely. It makes you question yourself. You’re already in pain, and then you spend mental energy wondering whether the pain is appropriate.

Whether you’re overreacting.

Whether other people think you’re being ridiculous.

That second layer — the self-doubt layer — is sometimes the worst part.

Why It Can Actually Hurt More Than Losing a Person

That may seem like a strange thing to say. But I’ve heard it from enough people now, and felt it myself, and read the actual research behind it, to know it’s a valid point. Let me explain…

When you lose a human you love, people expect you to grieve. They make space for it. They ask about it. They check in. Even if they don’t do it perfectly, there’s social scaffolding around the loss.

When you lose a pet, you mostly grieve alone. And your pet was not just an animal you owned. It was an energetic being woven into your daily existence. Maybe they were your alarm clock, or your reason to come home, or your companion through those 3 am white-night worries.

Your relationship with your pet had a texture, a realness to it that’s hard to explain to someone who’s never experienced it.

And consider this:

It demonstrates the same intensity, the same physical symptoms, the same process.

What’s different is that you don’t get the same support around it.

And that gap between the size of the loss and the size of the acknowledgment is where your pain lives.

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You Are Not Overreacting

I want to say this plainly, because maybe no one has said it to you yet.

What you’re feeling makes complete sense. The crying at random times, the not wanting to move their things, the way you still turn to look for them. You’re not being dramatic, not in any way. You’re just missing someone who was genuinely important to you.

Please know that you don’t need to shrink this grief to fit other people’s comfort level. You don’t need to be over it on a timeline that works for anyone else.

Because your love was real, the loss is real. That’s just how it works.

Why I Built This

I started this newsletter because when I was in the worst of my grief, I went looking for something to explain what I was going through. Something specific to pet loss — not just general grief advice recycled and relabeled.

But I couldn’t find it. So eventually, I built it. I knew I couldn’t be the only one.

And neither are you.

If you’re in the thick of it right now, hit reply and tell me where you are. I read everything. And I’m not going to tell you it gets easier on any particular schedule, because I don’t know your situation.

What I do know is that you don’t have to go through this alone. 💗

When you lose a pet, words don’t really fix the pain.

People help, but only so much.

What I’ve noticed (and what a lot of grieving pet parents tell me) is that being outside in some intentional way—planting something, walking somewhere your pet loved to go, putting your hands in the dirt—softens the grief when nothing else seems to.

This post is about exactly that: small, natural memorials that honor your pet and give a little back to the earth in the process.

Dirt and Sunlight as Powerful Healers

Time outside helps… a walk through a favorite park, an hour under the tree your pet used to nap beside, or even just sitting with your shoes off in the grass. These things lessen grief in a way that’s hard to explain but easy to feel.

Part of it is that nature keeps moving. Seasons turn, things grow back, and that constant evidence of change can remind you that love doesn’t disappear when a body does. It just takes a different form.

A lot of people find peace in the idea that their pet’s memory can live on in something that grows — a tree, a flower bed, a stretch of replanted woodland (even if it’s somewhere they’ll never see, in the case of a donation to reforestation groups).

Small rituals help, too. Picking up a stone on a walk. Carrying a clay pawprint in your pocket while you hike (I love that one). Watering a houseplant you bought the week your pet died.

None of it is dramatic, and that’s the point. It’s a quiet, physical, tangible way to say I still love you & I remember you with your hands.

Do This and Watch Something Extraordinary Happen to Your Grief

A tree, a shrub, or a wildflower patch planted in your pet’s honor is one of the most lasting tributes you can make. Pick somewhere meaningful — your yard, a path you walked together, maybe a hillside you both liked.

If you want, try to find a plant that suits them. Think sun-loving wildflower for a dog who lived for the outdoors. A soft fern for a quiet cat. An oak tree for a staid horse. Dancing marigolds for a pet lost all too young.

There’s no wrong way to do this. You get to choose the meaning and the message.

Another approach is to leave a small marker somewhere you’ll see it again. A painted stone, a flat slate with your pet’s name, maybe a piece of wood with a date carved into it. Over the years, the plant grows and the marker weathers, but ideally it’s a place you can always go back to.

Create a Sacred Corner

A home memorial garden can be as simple or as elaborate as you want it to be. I’ve decorated stones for mine and placed them under trees I planted.

Some people build a stone pathway with engraved markers. Some set out a bench. Some scatter their pet’s ashes directly into the soil, often using a biodegradable urn (bamboo and pressed cellulose are the most common), so the ashes become part of what feeds the next round of growth.

Lighting a lantern outside in the evening or putting fresh flowers in the garden bed each season can turn a space into something you actively visit instead of something you just look at.

If you want to add life to the space, plant things that draw it in, like bee-friendly flowers or milkweed for monarchs. Maybe a small bird feeder if you have the patience to refill it.

There’s something eternally comforting about watching the space your pet would have loved fill back up with wings and movement.

7 Outdoor Tributes That Go Beyond a Gravestone

If you don’t have space for a full garden, there are plenty of other good options.

• Walk one of your pet’s favorite trails on the anniversary of their passing and bring home a stone or a leaf.

• Volunteer for a park or beach cleanup in their name.

• Sponsor a tree through a reforestation nonprofit. Some let you dedicate the planting and send you a certificate with the location.

• Turn your pet’s water bowl into a planter. Herbs are nice for this. Tuck your pet’s tag into the soil or wrap their collar around the base.

These ideas may sound small when written out here. But actually doing something, and doing it with intention is what makes it meaningful.

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The Green Goodbye

Or, here’s a newer approach… a lot of pet parents are choosing greener alternatives to traditional cremation. Aquamation (also called alkaline hydrolysis) is the most common one.

It uses warm water and a small amount of alkaline solution instead of fire to return the body to the earth, and it produces a fraction of the emissions cremation does. The remaining liquid is nutrient-rich and safe to pour into soil if that feels right to you.

There are also urns made from recycled or upcycled materials, memorial stones poured from reclaimed concrete, and seed paper you can plant.

None of these choices are particularly momentous. But if you cared about how your pet lived, it can feel right to make their farewell match.

The Healing Power in Watching Something Grow

I think the reason living memorials work is that they’re slow. You can’t rush a tree. You water it, you weed around it, you watch it through winters where nothing happens, and one spring you realize it’s taller than you are.

Grief works similarly. It doesn’t go away on a schedule. It just changes.

Watching something grow where loss used to be is its own kind of comfort. With a tree, for instance, the bond you had never went away… it just transitioned into the soil and the roots and the shade you stand in on a hot afternoon.

And if any of this feels overwhelming, be assured that even the small gestures count, like a potted plant on the windowsill. Or maybe a stone you painted with your pet’s name and now keep on the kitchen shelf. Perhaps a few words said quietly outside.

None of it has to be impressive. It just has to come from you.

Tributes That Keep Your Pet’s Memory Alive for Generations

At the end of the day, memorializing a pet through nature isn’t only about remembering them. It’s about staying in some kind of relationship with them.

The garden you tend, the tree you watch through the seasons — all it offers you a place to store the love you have that’s still here.

I’m a big fan of planting something that will outlast you (ideally something hardy for your region). Or, do something annually, like scattering petals across a meadow once a year.

Maybe just sit on a bench and say your pet’s name out loud.

Whatever shape your tribute takes, just doing something makes it enough to count and to ease your grief.

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If you’ve ever been lucky enough to have someone truly believe in you and see the best in you, then you understand how devastating it would be to lose them.

So it is with our pets. They bring out the best in us. They see the best in us. Dig deep and you might realize you really were your best self around your pet.

But when that pet departs, it feels as though you’ve lost your identity and no longer know who you are.

If you lost your soul dog, like I lost mine, it’s absolutely like losing a part of yourself. Really, it’s like losing a part of your soul. The part that made you want to be better, that helped you feel calm or capable.

There’s no definitive way to move on after the loss of your pet and subsequent loss of identity, but there are ways to move forward.

Making Space… Eventually

One way to transition into your new identity without your pet is to make space for things that are now possible.

For example, let’s say you held off on traveling because you didn’t want to leave your pet alone or with someone else. Now, that option is a possibility. So maybe you take a few nights to explore a nearby town. Or maybe you go abroad for two weeks.

It doesn’t even have to be such a large-scale change.

Let’s say your pet was an older dog who needed ramps and large orthotic beds and rugs across your tile so he wouldn’t slip. All of these items are testaments to your love… but also, cleaning up and donating those items frees up space for new possibilities… maybe even new pets.

Discovering New Parts

In terms of identity, it’s also possible that you put forward certain parts of yourself for your pet, or because of your pet, and no longer have that desire, or that option.

Maybe it was as simple as taking a morning walk with your dog or trotting through the neighborhood on your horse.

You made it a routine out of love. But now, you realize you can use that time to join an exercise class or sleep in or start your workday sooner.

Maybe it was your commitment to an evening of reading or Netflix so your cat could curl up on your lap and purr to his heart’s content. But there’s no longer the pull to sit in your favorite chair and not move for an hour or two each night.

It’s okay to shed that part of you that was created for or to accommodate your pet. It’s okay to make room for new parts and explore other areas of your personality.

Lingering Forward Progress

But while we’re on the subject of cleaning out… it’s also important not to rush it.

Something as simple as a water bowl or a cat bed, once gone, can feel devastating just by its absence.

If it breaks your heart to clean up the symbols and belongings of your pet, then don’t. Wait a while. Make peace with the slowness of getting used to the idea that your life has shifted.

Consider removing one item at a time, spaced out by days or weeks.

Give yourself space to think about what might be worth keeping because it makes you feel connected to your pet. It might be something you’d want to put in a pet memory box if you choose to make one.

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Lifequakes and the Education of the Soul

In the book Life is in the Transitions, author Bruce Feiler writes that, “Lifequakes may be voluntary or involuntary, but navigating the transitions that flow from them can only be voluntary.”

You’re best off meeting them head-on, naming them, addressing them, sharing them, and when you’re ready, converting them into soul education.

In the crazy flurry that took place last week across American stores stockpiled with colorful bouquets and rows of pastel cards and even glitter balloons…

There was something missing.

Don’t get me wrong; I love Mother’s Day. I am a mother. I have a mother. It’s one of my favorite days of the year because, thanks to my amazing family, it’s the one day I do absolutely nothing.

But all the hubbub and celebration is dedicated to a very specific kind of woman: the one who carried a human child. The one who packs lunches and schedules orthodontist appointments and claps at recitals.

That woman deserves every glittery, embossed word of gratitude and whatever flowers, brunch, and sweet jeweled gift that might accompany them—on any day, not just Mother’s Day. Because Mothering is hard.

But there are lots of mothers the cards forgot...

• Like the woman who sets her alarm for 2 AM to syringe-feed a kitten that fits in the palm of her hand.

• Or the woman who wakes up twice throughout the night to take her aging dog outside because he’s lost control of his bladder.

• Or the woman who googles, at midnight with tears running down her face, whether her gecko’s color change means stress or shedding.

Maybe this woman was never pregnant. Maybe she’s never been called “Mom” by anything that can speak.

But by every meaningful measure of the word, she is absolutely and completely a mother.

The 3 AM Test

My working definition of motherhood is this:

When something fragile cries out in the dark, do you get up?

Do you assess?

Do you offer love even when you’re tired or hungry or stressed with your own life?

You don’t do it because anyone will praise you. You’re not fascinated by the cry or drawn to intellectually problem-solve.

You do it, you drag yourself out of that bed, because there is a small, fragile life on the other end of that sound. Somewhere deep inside, you know that you are meant to care for it and help it through its troubles.

Because that life is in your hands.

When you look at it that way, it’s really no different from the woman pacing the living room with a colicky newborn. The woman pacing the living room with an anxious rescue dog is doing the exact same precious work.

And even though that human baby will probably grow up to write her own appreciation for her mom, initially with rainbows and later with jagged poems and eventually with store-bought greeting cards...

The dog never will.

But the love that comes from both is identical in appreciation and emotion.

Love Isn’t Stratified

I bring all this up because I’ve observed a subtle snobbery in our world about what kind of love “counts.” Love from children, of course. Spouses, perhaps. Parents, naturally.

But pets? Is it the same?

Should we classify it or put that love in hierarchical order?

Are those mothers less than? Are they just different?

No. None of that. They are mothers. Mothers are mothers. Love is love.

Caring for another living being is not a static definition. It’s not a black and white image that has to fit into a certain box.

It doesn’t matter if the creature has hooves or scales or paws or big blue eyes and golden hair.

It doesn’t matter if that love comes from a hamster mom buying a bigger habitat because she read that standard cages are too cramped and cause stress.

Or the bird mom who spent hours on YouTube learning to clip wings safely so her cockatiel could flap around her apartment.

Or the reptile mom who runs a humidifier nightly in her bedroom because that’s what her ball python needs to thrive.

These women are not playing a game. They don’t do it just for fun. It’s actual, often unglamorous, usually expensive, invisible labor that keeps a vulnerable life going.

That is mothering.

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What You Give Without Thinking

If you’re a pet mom, you maybe never sat down to tally up all you’ve given, because you do it all without hesitation.

But if you were to list everything out, it’s staggering. Think about it...

• You’ve rearranged trips around feeding schedules.

• You skipped nights out because someone at home was scared of thunderstorms.

• You’ve spent grocery money on prescription food.

• You held your pet still while a vet worked and pretended to be calm so your pet would be calm.

• You’ve grieved losses that other people crushingly brushed off with, “It was just a pet.”

• You’ve been the steady presence in a life that depended entirely on you for everything.

And you did it all without any of the cultural scaffolding that human mothers benefit from (though I want to add there’s plenty to be improved in the human world in terms of honoring stepmothers and foster mothers and mothers who have no actual connection to kids but parent them all the same).

Back to the pet mother, there’s no baby shower. No parental leave. No school pickups where other moms nod knowingly or offer you a spot in the carpool.

It’s just you and a leash or a litter box or a tank or a saddle and your own daily, un-witnessed choice to show up.

And you’re doing it.

On Being Needed

Also, please never forget that there’s beauty in doing what you do. There’s a particular dignity that comes from being needed and answering the call from something that can’t fend for itself.

Plus, it’s a way to sidestep some of the limits around having children. You don’t need a uterus to be a devoted pet mom. You don’t need a marriage license or a partner.

You’re simply making the choice to, over and over again, put another creature’s needs alongside your own and treat them with respect.

This kind of devotion to guiding a creature through its life shapes you into a different person. Softer in some ways, fiercer in others. Maybe more patient. Probably more tired. Likely more tender.

All of this is what motherhood does to a human. It happens whether the dependent has fingers, feathers, or fur.

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A Nod From The Rest Of Us

So in honor of the United States’ recent Mother’s Day celebration, I’d like to give a nod to every woman who has ever

• woken up early to walk a dog in the rain

• talked baby talk to a parrot,,

• driven across town to find the particular brand of food her cat will tolerate,

• held a dying rabbit and whispered to it that it was loved,

• or made room in her life for the care of another…

Know that the world sees you. Or at least, right over here in this corner of it, we see you. I see you.

You may not have brought another human into this world, but you don’t need one in order to be celebrated for this particular honor.

What you did, what you’re doing, is noble and beautiful on its own: you took something small and breathing and you said, “I’ve got you. I am here for you.” You kept your word. That’s motherhood. That has always been the essence of motherhood.

Happy Mother’s Day yesterday, today, and all the days of the year. Thank you for what you do.💓

Think back to a time your life was punctured by grief…

How did you get through?

Maybe it’s hard to remember. Maybe you don’t feel like you’ve really gotten through it.

I hear you, and I relate.

I can share though, that the anthropology-lover in me has often found comfort in the first groundbreaking book about death: On Death and Dying, by Dr. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross.

Her book breaks down what she defines as the five stages of grief: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

But every time I looked at it, I read her book wrong. I’d look at the stages and think, “Okay, I can check that one off… clearly now I’m on this one.”

The thing is, it doesn’t really work like that.

Some say it’s because Dr. Kübler-Ross missed a few stages and there should be seven (add initial shock and rebuilding).

Some say it’s non-linear and you might bounce around within the stages. (That’s been my experience.)

And while I think it’s very important to understand your feelings and grief in particular, and to use that as a framework for what you may be going through after pet loss…

I believe there’s just a lot more to grief. We’re only beginning to understand the layers. So here’s a new way to look at it…

Our Fledgling Grief Vocabulary

First, think of each stage of grief as a box. Within each box is a myriad of emotions.

A lot of us are well-versed in the obvious feelings: Mad, glad, sad, and so forth.

But there’s a crowd of deeper, nuanced emotions to dig into, and it helps to have the emotional vocabulary to understand what else you might be feeling. (Side note: It’s wonderful that “feeling words” are more commonly taught in schools these days. But if you’re over the age of 20, you’ve probably had to pick it up on your own.)

There are many more, but this gives you an idea of just how much deeper you can go in expressing grief related to pet loss.

They Jump Up and Surprise You

Matching a word to your grief is only the first step in understanding what you’re going through or have been through. Because if you’re anything like Impatient Me, you want to know when they’ll hit and for how long.

Frustratingly, that’s pretty much out of our control. Emotions aren’t simply line items to check off. What works instead, for me anyway, is to picture a merry-go-round — the kind you find in amusement parks with bobbing horses and stationary seals and benches throughout.

As the merry-go-round circles, some of those animals rise to the top and then come down.

Others are omnipresent, repeating, and always in your line of vision.

There are some you don’t notice until the ride has made three or four rotations. You think how did I never see that bobbing dolphin?

Your emotions around the grief of pet loss are like the rides on the merry-go-round. A handful are colorful and ostentatious. Others are drab and stationary. Some are constantly rising and falling. A few are your ever-present companions.

The ride does eventually stop… but it also might start up again, thanks to triggers and anniversaries.

Gradually though, the ride gets worn down and retired, removed from the foreground and trucked off to a warehouse.

Your pet-loss grief acts much the same way. Maybe it’s front and center right now, but eventually the ride will be retired — though it will always be in storage for you to revisit.

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The Tip of the Grief-Heavy Iceberg

Please note this is all meant to build on Dr. Kübler-Ross’s five stages. I think she gave us a brilliant launchpad for understanding some of the deeper layers of our human emotions. I’m grateful for that.

And there’s more yet to discover.

In a way, it’s frustrating. When I’ve been mired in grief, I’ve often wished I simply felt those first five, clear-cut stages. I’d like to plow through each of them in a linear, determined way and be done with it all.

But that’s simply not how we humans work. And when it comes to the complicated feelings around pet loss… well, it really is a merry-go-round.

One of the best parts about having a pet is the unconditional love they give us. Whether we’re moody, exhausted, cheeky, or checked out… our pets love us regardless.

Over time, this unconditional love becomes a profound sense of comfort. It’s unwavering. Unbreakable. The purest type of emotional safety imaginable.

Which is exactly why losing that pet and that emotional sustenance feels so intense and isolating.

If you’re working your way through pet loss, understanding this unique bond and how it affects your grief can help normalize the emotions you’re feeling.

It also paves the way for self-compassion throughout the mourning process.

The Unwavering Nature of Pet Love

The thing about pet relationships is that, unlike most human relationships, your bond with your pet isn’t burdened by judgment, expectations, or emotional complexity.

Pets love us consistently, purely, and without condition. They give us total acceptance in moments when we feel unworthy or vulnerable.

Our pets are our confidantes, emotional anchors, and reliable companions.

But it’s also this steady companionship that leads to a highly secure attachment. Our pets’ routines become woven into our days—the wagging tail at the door, the gentle purr in bed, the comfortable presence that requires no words.

So when this unconditional presence disappears, the heartache can be magnified by the sudden loss of emotional stability and daily security.

The Brain Impact of Losing Unconditional Love

Research has shown that the intensity of pet loss grief is directly connected to the depth of attachment we felt toward our pets before they passed.

Given that pets often serve as a primary source of spiritual and emotional support, their absence is a serious disruption to our sense of well-being.

Studies point to “deliberate rumination,” a process where bereaved pet owners find themselves replaying memories and moments with their departed companions, searching for meaning and reliving the comfort that’s gone missing.

These repetitive thoughts are a totally natural response to the trauma of loss. But also, they can lead to secondary emotions, such as guilt, self-doubt, and helplessness.

Neuroscience research has shown that grieving a pet activates the same brain pathways as grieving a human loved one.

From an emotional standpoint, this means pet loss can trigger profound sadness, anxiety, swings between anger and despair, and even physical symptoms like exhaustion or sleep disruption.

On top of all that, when you consider the lack of complicated dynamics in the pet-human relationship, it makes the void even harder to fill. This only intensifies our loneliness and exacerbates our grief.

Societal Challenges: Disenfranchised Grief

There’s another complicating factor. Because while pet grief is deeply rooted and real, many people feel misunderstood or minimized by others.

This phenomenon is known as “disenfranchised grief”—the sense that one’s loss is invalid or unworthy of sympathy. (We talk about this often here in this newsletter.)

This is why we hear (and cringe at) remarks like, “It was just a pet.” Even if the person saying this was well-intentioned (though ill-informed), those words can compound the pain, sometimes making people feel ashamed of the intensity of their emotions.

This lack of social validation just drives pet owners deeper into isolation. It creates additional barriers to healing. It leaves us stuck and hurting.

That’s why normalizing the heartbreak—acknowledging that the loss of unconditional love can be devastating—is a compassionate step toward feeling understood and supported.

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Coping Strategies and Pathways to Healing

What can you do about it? First and most importantly, creating space for grief, honoring memories, and embracing rituals can help transform your sorrow into gratitude for the bond that you had with your pet.

Tribute actions like planting a tree, framing cherished photos, writing journals, or participating in memorial services can give you tangible outlets for your emotional pain.

A lot of people also find comfort in memorializing specific qualities of their pet’s love, such as loyalty, playfulness, or unwavering presence.

Connecting with others who have experienced pet loss—whether through support groups, online communities, or counseling—can validate the depth of attachment and uncover the shared nature of grief.

And then taking part in self-care practices, like mindfulness or physical activity, can improve your mood and build your resilience, gradually shifting the focus from pain toward slow but steady healing.

The Lasting Impact of Unconditional Love

Even after loss, the continued bond with your beloved pet can shape your eventual personal growth, resilience, and empathy.

It stands to follow that focusing on your happy memories and the love you shared can help you really appreciate and reflect on the unique love your companion brought into your life. This leads you closer to acceptance and self-kindness.

Then over time, while the intensity of your grief may soften, the legacy of that unconditional love remains. Think of it as a quiet reassurance that your relationship with your pet mattered deeply.

And it’s completely normal for your pain to match the depth of that connection.

The Love Perspective

There’s no question that grieving a pet is an emotionally complex experience. So when you consider how your pet’s unconditional love for you amplifies your heartbreak, it helps you understand the magnitude of the loss.

It’s also evidence of just how meaningful these types of bonds are.

Honoring the emotional support your pet gave you and then creating space for that mourning is a beautiful way to acknowledge, and show appreciation for, your pet’s unconditional love

So if you’re mired in deep grief over the loss of your pet, remember: your grief is both valid and a testament to this one-of-a-kind, extraordinary, and completely unconditional love.

Grief after pet loss is weighty and huge. It might manifest as a feeling that sits heavy on your chest.

Or it might loom large in your life, like an omnipresent, uninvited guest that just won’t go away.

It could even feel like a boulder that blocks your view of anything in the future.

Or, as I like to put it, like a fat cow in the middle of the road that won’t let you pass.

When I was mired in pet grief, I’d wonder, “What do I do with all this grief?” Basically, how do I get rid of the great, big, roadblock cow?

And while it’s true that time heals helps everything, I’m not a big fan of waiting around in pain.

So it was a gift to discover that tapping into my own creativity was a powerful way to move through, push through, and re-channel that grief. It also became a path to creating beautiful memorials as a way to hang on to those precious memories.

Here are some ways you might embrace your own creativity as a compassionate tool to help honor your sweet pet and keep their memory vibrant in your heart.

A Bond, Repackaged

Freudian thinking on loss emphasizes detaching from the people who’ve departed from your life. It’s supposed to be the way to move on.

I find this silly. Because the last thing any of us want to do when we’ve lost someone dear is forget them and leave those memories behind.

Present-day research actually supports the opposite of Freud’s thinking, where you instead find ways to maintain that bond. And creating art that then becomes a memorial to your pet is a beautiful way to do that.

According to Dr. Shelley Carson, a lecturer at Harvard University and author of Your Creative Brain, Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life, there are two types of creativity: innovative creativity and expressive creativity.

Innovative creativity, says Dr. Carson, is ideal for challenges and problem-solving.

Expressive creativity, on the other hand, is about taking negative energy and channeling it into creative work. Doing this, she says, can help with processing loss or trauma. And there are many creative paths you can take, from writing to visual arts or music. All of these offer release and reflection beyond just words.

But even though creativity can help to heal and redirect grief, you may not feel super motivated to tap your creative side in the midst of your pain.

That’s where memorials come in. Because your creativity is channeled in a very specific direction, it can serve as a compassionate, grief-mitigating tool to both honor your pet and keep their memory vibrant.

Memorializing through Creativity

When you channel your sorrow and affection into a tangible commemoration for your lost pet, it creates a powerful path to healing. Your art then becomes a visual statement of love.

Here are some ways you can use creativity to channel your grief into a memorial:

#1: Tribute Writing:

Journaling is a well-known as a powerful way to release emotions. The best type of journaling, especially nowadays, is taking a real pen to paper as opposed to typing your feelings on a screen or tapping them out on a phone. In a study by Van der Weel and Van der Meer (2024), writing by hand was found to increase brain connectivity.

And because research shows that sadness effectively deactivates the left prefrontal areas of your brain (this is where positive emotions like joy and hope are processed), it wouldn’t be a bad thing to try and restimulate them.

Think of journaling your pet grief as writing a love letter to your pet. It then becomes something you can keep as a memorial; a testament to that beautiful bond you shared.

Just know that you don’t have to be able to put together beautiful, eulogy-worthy sentences to count as a memorial.

Write from your heart.

Write simply.

Write the words you feel.

Write about the memories that stand out.

An authentic letter, written from the heart, will always be a hundred times more powerful than something constructed to sound smart.

#2: Creating Art

Any kind of artistic medium that appeals to you can go a long way in helping to express your grief and become a tribute.

Painting, sketching, and sculpting are all potent approaches to physically articulate your emotions and capture your memories.

Scrapbooking or photo collages are a touching way to preserve those memories you don’t want to let go of.

The product of your art experience then becomes the keepsake. Frame it, hang it, or put it on a shelf where you’ll see it daily and be reminded of the beautiful connection you had with your pet.

#3: Making Music

Musical expression is another cathartic way to release grief through creative means. Because music affects our minds and bodies in a powerful way, it offers another outlet for grief. Similarly, music can be calming in a time where feelings of frustration, anxiety, and sadness often take over.

It doesn’t matter whether you create or participate in the music or simply listen to what others have created. Either way, it’s an outlet for feelings and sad memories.

Consider writing a song or creating a playlist that captures the way you felt about your pet and the connection you had to them.

Or, pick just a single song or two that brings back the happy memories. Play it whenever you feel yourself missing your pet, or when you want to embrace those good times.

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#4: Crafting Keepsakes

Any kind of keepsake that resonates with you can serve as a beautiful memorial to your pet.

While there are several pet keepsakes available through different online stores, the act of making your own beautiful keepsake is another way to work through grief and recapture those lovely times you had with your pet.

Photo albums, scrapbooks, memory boxes with your pet’s things, painted rocks, paw-print creations, or even blown-glass stones are all media for creating art that becomes a memorial.

It doesn’t have to be prescriptive, either. A keepsake is whatever you want it to be. Maybe that’s a framed picture of your pet with your written love letter tucked into the back. Maybe it’s a mug you paint at the local ceramic shop with drawings of favorite places you used to take your pet.

Maybe it’s even a rock you take from your garden and paint, as a testament to the many hours you spent there with your beloved pet.

And If You Aren’t An Artist?

You don’t actually have to be an artist by trade or even personal identification for any of this to work. We are creative beings by nature, and expressing that creativity in whatever way feels best to you is your right and your gift.

Besides, expressing grief for pet loss through any creative outlet is something you do for yourself, and perhaps also for close family. It’s not art to be rated or judged. It’s simply an expression of the love you felt for your pet, and that in itself is beautiful enough.

When there’s no denying your sweet pet is in decline, it’s a rotten-hard place to be.

In a sense, your heart begins its own private mourning long before the actual goodbye comes.

This uninvited emotional state is called anticipatory grief. It’s a natural, albeit painful, response to an impending loss.

It may also be a confusing time where you sway between moments of sadness, guilt, tenderness, relief, and—unexpectedly—even peace.

When you understand and work through these emotions, the waiting period can be transformed from a time of great pain to one of great meaning. It can even become a final, love-filled chapter full of intentional bonding with your pet.

A Deeper Dive Into the Unwelcome World of Anticipatory Grief

Anticipatory grief is as unsettling as it sounds. It means that before your loss has even occurred, grief is already starting to settle in.

This particular brand of grief emerges when your pet has been diagnosed with a terminal illness or shows rapid signs of aging or decline.

But unlike the grief that happens after death, anticipatory grief is a confusing cocktail of mourning and care, love and dread. You might still be attending to your pet’s physical needs in real life, but you’re mentally preparing for the inevitable (or at least, trying to accept that it’s coming).

This dual focus is emotionally draining. But it’s also deeply human.

The guilt is usually the worst of it. Many pet parents feel guilty about grieving “too soon” while their companions are still alive.

But early grief, before a passing, serves a unique purpose: it allows you to begin processing what’s happening and to make choices that match up with your love and compassion for your pet, as opposed to avoidance.

So when you recognize and accept anticipatory grief for what it is, you’re better able to honor your emotions without shame.

The Rainbow of “Before” Emotions

Even though anticipatory grief moves you gradually toward accepting the inevitable, it still brings a wide spectrum of emotions. Some of your days may feel peaceful… others might be filled with fear, dread, or anger.

This brew of feelings could also include

• sadness or dread as you watch your pet’s health decline,

• anger at the situation or the unfairness of it all,

• anxiety about “the right time” to say goodbye,

• guilt for moments when you wish the suffering were over,

• relief after small signs of comfort or a pain-free day,

• and finally, gratitude for the closeness you have with your pet.

It’s a strange reality that these emotions can coexist, changing hour by hour.

But rather than viewing them as contradictions, try shifting your focus to think of them all as expressions of deep love and awareness of the impending separation.

Because, painful as it is to experience anticipatory grief, sudden grief and the unexpected death of a pet are really no better.

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Climbing Through Emotional Upheaval

But while a different outlook of what you’re going through is helpful, what can you actually do to navigate the day-to-day challenge of knowing the end is coming?

One approach is to look for balance. This means being mindful of your own well-being even while taking care of your pet each day. Granted, that’s sometimes hard, because in your pet’s waning days, the last thing you might want to focus on is yourself.

But staying present and maintaining your own inner happiness is something your pet can feel. Chances are it’ll bring them comfort and stability in those final days—because if anything, you’ll save them from picking up on your own stress.

Here are some ways to stay present and find balance during this stage:

1. Let those feelings bubble up. The thing about grief is that, much like a hungry infant, it needs to be heard. It demands attention. Crying is one outlet. Journaling is another. Talking with an empathetic friend is an option.
   

   All of these channels help you release tension and prevent emotional numbness.

   Addressing your grief is important in the long run, too, since suppressed emotions can make later stages of grief even heavier.
   

2. Lean on mindfulness and presence. Simple mindfulness exercises help, too. Try pausing to take a deep breath while stroking your pet’s fur or focusing on the rhythm of their breath.
   

   Consider setting a timer for even just five minutes a day to sit quietly with them. Tell your pet how much you love them and how much they mean to you.

   
   Each of these approaches can quiet fear and bring a sense of connection to the present moment. Staying grounded helps you appreciate the things happening in the here and now rather than rehearsing the pain you’ll feel in the future.
   

3. Reach for compassionate conversation. Sometimes, just having one other person affirm that your grief is valid can be healing in itself. Trusted friends, veterinarians, grief counselors, and pet loss support groups are all places to normalize what you’re going through.
   

4. Remember self-care. The combination of caregiving and emotional turmoil is a rough experience for your physical body. That stress and worry alone can wear you down, making you feel tired and less likely to eat well.
   

   But if you care for yourself and your physical state, you’re better able to show up for your pet. Rest, hydration, movement, sunshine on your face, nutritious meals, and uplifting music are all ways to nurture your physical self so you stay healthy and more present for your pet.

What Can You Do To Make This Time Special for Your Pet?

Time becomes very precious when you know goodbye is just around the corner. But instead of focusing on the loss, experiment with tiny acts of love that honor your pet’s life.

In these waning days, think about what would be most meaningful to you and your pet. Maybe snapping photos or recording short videos… or making a paw print memorial… or throwing your pet a party with special treats.

Though the thought might seem overwhelming when you’re first given a diagnosis for your pet or have that initial realization that your pet will soon pass, you have the power to make this time meaningful.

Not only will doing so help you wade through the coming grief, it’ll likely bring your pet great amounts of joy as well.

It’s a surprise to many—as it certainly was to me—just how disorienting pet loss grief can feel. With your daily routines thrown off and that steady love and companionship gone…

Sadness becomes the new norm. Getting to the other side of it feels impossible.

But in these worst-of-times stretches, a memorial ritual might help you bridge the gap from aching to functional, while guiding your heart through the loss and into healing.

Today, we dive into what a ritual is and why something so seemingly simple can make a world of difference, along with five rituals to incorporate into your grief journey.

Why Rituals Bring Comfort During Grief

Rituals are a defining feature of humanity. Many of them are complex, symbolic, and deeply ingrained in most cultures. They offer comfort, structure, and a sense of connection. Baby showers, weddings, and wakes are just a few examples of how rituals help us transition into a new season of life.

And so when you’ve just lost a beloved pet, rituals can help you transition to life without your pet, regardless of how unwanted that new phase may be.

The real power of rituals lies in their constancy; they offer a familiar rhythm during the chaos that is grief.

The goal is to move through a simple, repeatable action that gives shape and intention to the pain and sorrow you’re feeling. Doing this helps you honor the fact that your bond with your pet still persists, even if it looks different.

The most powerful part of a ritual is that it’s a way to claim agency while mourning. Each gesture, each time you engage in your ritual, is a way of saying, “I remember you, and I choose to remember the best of times, and to remember it all with love.”

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Personal Rituals to Honor a Pet’s Life

There’s no single answer for what your memorial ritual should look like. It can be long or short, solitary or shared with others, daily or weekly.

Personal ceremonies can be deeply healing if you tailor them to your own spiritual or emotional language. Each time you express yourself through ritual is a way to convey your love for your pet in a tangible manner, long after they’re gone.

And when you feel like the bottom has dropped out of your life, it’s the tangible, clear, concrete actions that help you feel grounded.

If you’d like to create a memorial ritual for your pet that you can do on your own, consider these ideas:

1. Light a candle: Create a quiet moment at a designated time of day to light a candle for your pet. Let the flame symbolize the light your beloved pet brought into your life and the warmth that you feel when you think of them.

2. Write letters or pour your words into a journal: Composing a letter to your pet can release any feelings you have of guilt, longing, or gratitude. Writing out your thoughts also allows you to continue “speaking” to your pet, in a sense, and often brings emotional clarity.

3. Reflect quietly in a favorite spot: Visit a park path, window seat, or spot in the sun that your pet loved. Sitting there in stillness for just a few minutes a day can transform your sadness into peaceful remembrance.

4. Create a small memorial space: Designate a gentle corner to house photos, a collar, or your pet’s favorite toy. This sacred space becomes a visual anchor for your ongoing connection to your pet’s memory.

5. Plant a tribute and tend it daily: Whether it’s indoors or out, choose a plant that needs regular attention. Then every time you water or tend it, think of your care for that plant as a ritualistic adaptation of how you cared for your pet.

Your ritual doesn’t need to be dramatic or lengthy; it only needs to reflect authenticity and the unique relationship you shared with your pet. So anything specific to what you and your pet did for fun, enjoyed during downtime, or anything that simply reminds you of them can be part of or inspiration for the ritual.

Finding Meaning Amidst the Storm

Know that any kind of memorial ritual you create to honor your pet’s life is more than an emotional exercise — it’s an act of sacred continuity.

Each candle, word, or gathering knits memory together with meaning. Doing this helps safeguard your relationship with your pet and can bring steady comfort and healing during the sometimes-lengthy pain of pet loss.

And then over time, these rituals remind you that while your sweet companion is no longer physically beside you, their love has become part of who you are going forward. More importantly, you can still cherish the memory of the time you had together.

Perhaps you’ve been there… driving down the road, humming a peppy tune, feeling pretty good, when all of a sudden…

BAM.

A wave of grief for your lost pet hits from out of the blue. It hits without warning. It hits without a trigger.

And it hits hard.

These are the muddling moments that feel like they’ll derail you. There’s no way to sugarcoat or prepare for them.

And these moments are very different from when you know you’ll be reminded of your grief, like when your pet’s regular feeding time rolls around, or when you’re sitting in a favorite chair where they always kept you company.

But when you least expect it? Those can be some of the hardest moments to navigate.

Yet there is an explanation for this kind of “surprise grief,” along with strategies to not let it completely unsettle you.

Why Grief Hits Out of the Blue

When you’re in the brutal-pain stage of grief, the natural reaction is to desperately want it to stop. That’s when the pain is so raw, you feel it all over, down to the tips of your trembling fingers.

Or you might feel it so keenly in your chest, you assume a knife stabbing would be more bearable.

So it makes sense that it’s unnatural to welcome that grief and pain as a good thing. Or to see it as your body trying to protect you.

But one of the reasons grief is felt so keenly on a physical level is that you don’t just process it as an emotion, but rather as a threat to your attachment and safety. In turn, your brain and body can react as if something essential has been ripped away.

When that bond is gone, it’s as if you’ve lost your own stabilizer. That’s when grief moves in and can masquerade as trauma, panic, or any kind of drop in regulation.

Pet grief hits your nervous system especially hard because our pets often gift us daily co-regulation. That comes from the daily routines you build with them, the frequent companionship, or the steady touch of your pet when they’re sleeping on your lap or by your feet.

For some people, there might even be a sense of safety they get from their pet, just from having them there and not feeling so alone.

These different aspects of your bond with your pet are stored in your body as habits, body memory, and attachment systems. They’re not just stored in conscious thought.

Which means that any kind of random sound, quiet moment, routine task, or even no obvious cue at all can bring the pain of the loss right back to the surface, even though your conscious mind never saw it coming.

Grief (Irritatingly) Isn’t a Single Event

Another major reason people feel bowled over when grief pays a visit is that it hits after you think you’ve made it through. But that’s exactly the root of the problem—that you think you’ve made it through.

Yet conquering grief isn’t the goal. It isn’t really possible, either. Grief is not a hurdle to pass. It’s not a corner to turn.

It’s not an event that you defeat and move on from. (Though comments like “get over it” perpetuate this finish-line idea.)

The thing about grief is that it comes in waves. You get a little break as the waves recede… and then you’re underwater again. As you sit with the grief and time passes, the waves aren’t as big and they’re more spread apart.

But they are there.

And that’s why sometimes, those waves are triggered by things too subtle to notice consciously.

Or, it could be your nervous system carrying the loss in the background, and when your defenses drop even for a moment, the grief breaks through all at once.

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How to Move With the Waves

It’s not the easy answer or the preferred answer in our fix-it-and-move-forward culture, but really, grief is an ongoing part of your life. It’s a companion that fades in and out, depending on your current circumstances.

And when it comes to pet loss, grief can be a more frequent visitor than may be true of other types of losses.

This might happen if you’re grieving multiple pets at the same time, even though those losses spread across years. Or you could be grieving the loss of your daily routine, your identity, your steady emotional support, or even the connection your pet gave you to other people in your life.

Make no mistake: pet loss grief is significant and has a greater impact than many people realize.

But it’s not a sign of weakness or failure, especially when these grief bursts hit unexpectedly and without obvious reason.

If you can learn to recognize them, understand what they’re made of, and acknowledge them, you can shorten the amount of time you’re taken out by the pain.

Meet those waves with compassion rather than fear. “Oh. It’s you again, Sadness. I recognize you. I honor you. And I move forward with you.”

When you can do this, that loss becomes part of you. Part of your history, and what makes you who you are.

And eventually, it becomes a way to stay connected with that pet and that beautiful time you had them in your life.

“My dog understands me like no one else.”

“My dog is my person.”

“My dog is my very best friend.”

It’s super sweet and not uncommon at all if you feel this way.

People who say this about their pets, dog or otherwise, usually feel that the animal was more than a pet.

For a lot of folks, that connection is their safest relationship. Which means the loss of that relationship can feel as devastating as losing a close family member.

So I just want to share what a “normal” response is to this level of grief, especially for those in the world who don’t have a best-friend-pet and can’t really understand.

(I say “normal” because everyone’s response to loss is unique to them… but what I hope you take away from this is that deep grief and extended sadness for this kind of pet loss is the norm, not the exception.)

The Surprising Ways This Loss Extends Beyond Your Pet

Initial sadness from losing your dog or pet goes without saying. The tears. The hollow devastation. Intense waves of emptiness.

Also common in pet loss is guilt and self-blame. Did I do enough? Did I miss something? Should I have chosen differently?

But after the departure of a particularly close pet bond, a few other things shift. You might feel the loss of

• Your routine: Without daily walks and feeding rituals, your regular habits get thrown off. It’s not uncommon to feel unmoored with this consistency gone from your day.

• Your identity: Who are you without your pet? Who are you when there’s no reason to stop at the dog park, or pick up cat treats on the way home? Who are you when you don’t check in at the groomer’s every other month? When you no longer see the neighbors on your daily walk?

• Your ability to connect: With an empty house and shifting purpose, you might feel unmoored from the world you knew. Lonely. Disconnected. This is where you risk feeling wholly cut off from the world.

• Your mental health and anxiety level: You find yourself wondering how to get through the days without the structure and meaning you had when your pet was still alive.

• Your sense of self: It’s not uncommon to feel like you’ve lost a piece of yourself. Like a fundamental part of who you are and how you show up in the world has gone missing.

Please know that here in this community, we see you. We acknowledge that bottomless pit of pain. Many of us have been right where you are. Many of us are still there. 💗

Here’s What You Do, When You Can…

Our world is packed full of stereotypes about what a pet should and shouldn’t be to people, which can make it loads harder to grieve in the way that’s right for you.

So this might feel like a big ask, but I want to invite you to grieve. Grieve hard. Cry loudly. Sob. Curl up in a ball on the floor. Yell. Dissolve into your pain.

Why? Because all these painful acts are incredibly cleansing and cathartic. (I’ve done every one of them when in grief, and I always feel better on the other side.)

You can do it in private. You can cry with a friend or with someone else touched by the loss of your pet. You can cry out and express your grief in our online community. Bottom line:

Do what feels necessary in the moment, and know that there are other supporters of this newsletter who’ve been in similar situations, who cried their eyes out, and moved through the pain. You can survive this.

The Fundamental Power of Expression

As you work through the deep grief of losing a pet who felt like your best friend, try reaching for some form of expression as a way to process your feelings.

Maybe that means journaling or writing a letter to your pet. Maybe it’s about creating a tribute through a framed picture or artwork.

Maybe you plant a tree or a flowering bush in your pet’s honor.

Physically expressing your love for your pet through any of these acts is another way to help move the grief through and out of you. Just as the crying and raging suggested above can move you through incapacitating grief, acts of creative expression continue that work by helping to push the sadness up and out of you.

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And What Then?

None of this is meant to suggest you’ll be over and through your grief quickly and seamlessly. The immeasurable pain of losing your best friend is something that may be part of you forever.

But the goal isn’t to forget what you shared with your beloved pet. The only goal is to transition the pain of loss from excruciating and all-consuming to something you can live and function with.

From there, who knows? Maybe you’ll go on to adopt another pet. Maybe you won’t. The answer will become clear over time.

And maybe that new pet will be a new best friend. Maybe you’ll find a best human friend in the interim. Or, maybe not.

Recognize that it doesn’t serve you to wonder about the future, at least not when pet loss pain is still omnipresent.

If you do the work to sit with, process, and express the grief of losing your best friend… then on the other side, at some point, you’ll know the right next step for you. 💗🐾💗

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If you’ve ever scrolled through TikTok or Instagram or binged reality TV, you’ve probably heard it.

“Feel your feelings.”

“Embrace the suck.”

“Sit in the sadness.”

What does that even mean?

Because it feels like social media drivel. Armchair psychology tripe. Like when kids echo phrases without actually knowing the meaning behind their words.

Yet there is something to those statements. Taken seriously, “sitting in the sadness” can even help you move through your pet loss grief to a place where it hurts less and life starts to open back up.

Here are the first steps.

“Good Grief” Takes Practice

Grief shows up in all kinds of different ways. For me, it’s an ache that starts below my eyes. Then my chest begins to clench. My limbs feel limp.

And my whole body aches with exhaustion.

That’s been my physical experience of grief. But it changes…

Sometimes there’s the slow and steady drip of tears that leave staggered wet spots on the floor. Sometimes it all comes out in agonized moans.

More than once, I’ve curled up in a ball on the rug. More than once, I’ve sobbed under tables, no doubt reaching back to some primitive instinct to find shelter in the face of pain.

When Koda, my soul dog, died, I often curled up in his bed to weep.

Usually, though, once I’ve journaled and cried, relief washes over me and gets me through the day until the next time grief pays a visit.

It wasn’t always like this. It’s taken years of practice — and unfortunately, many different types of grief — to get me to a place where I could give my feelings their day in the sun.

I didn’t get there till I’d had a large assortment of therapy and grief coaching sessions.

But I learned that trying to stamp out my grief as if it were fire on clothing wasn’t serving me. I’d previously been master of the stiff upper lip. After all, I wasn’t weak. I didn’t snivel. I couldn’t devolve into a puddle and still keep my life running…

Right?

The Risk of Avoiding Grief Work

Wrong. There’s a problem with unaddressed grief, and it generally always manifests as something worse. More than a catchphrase, there is a psychological reason to address your feelings and “feel the feels.”

It’s because if you don’t do this deep (and hard) work, you risk being pulled into a darker place. It might be something as inoffensive as a stomachache or as terrifying as suicidal thoughts.

It looks different for everyone, but those darker places include depression, anxiety, volatility, or turning to numbing devices like drugs and alcohol and other compulsions.

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How to Meet Your Pet Loss Grief Head On

For me, the easiest way to feel my grief over the loss of pets and through other tragedies, is to journal. (I mean actual pen-to-paper journaling, which taps the brain in a different way than typing onto a screen.)

I recommend a body scan as you feel the sadness come on. Then, try writing about what you feel. “I sense a knot in my stomach… I need to lie down… it’s as if tears are stuck behind my eyes… I want to scream.” Write down what you feel and where you feel it in your body.

You don’t even have to use a journal. It could be you just speak the feelings out loud. Or share them with a caring friend.

Key here is that when you observe those feelings, you don’t judge them. Silence the critic that wants to say, “This is stupid. I’m stronger than this. These feelings don’t make sense.”

From there, dig a little deeper. See if you can name the emotions. Maybe the knot in your stomach feels like abandonment. The stuck tears feel like a loss of control. The scream that’s desperate to come out is raw, unfiltered anger.

When you do this, you’re allowing your grief the space to exist. You’re allowing yourself to be vulnerable (which is probably one of the most powerful skills in our human arsenal that most of us don’t know how to tap).

Most importantly, you’re permitting yourself to be human. And it’s these deep, intense human emotions that allowed for the beautiful connection you had with your pet in the first place. Acknowledging the other side of that deep love—the sadness and pain—is a way to honor that initial love.

After all, when it comes to dog loss or cat loss or any kind of pet loss, it wouldn’t hurt so much if you hadn’t loved so intensely.

I was never a reptile person until my kids began to adopt their own pets.

One became the happy owner of a leopard gecko—“Nova,” gifted by a friend and already seven years old.

And another brought a corn snake into our home, a skinny orange baby who was christened “Creamsicle.”

Just being around these little creatures helped me, over time, go from squeamish and standoffish to happy to pet and hold them. (Seeing my kids find so much joy in them helped, too.)

It’s opened up a whole new aspect of the pet grief world that’s even less understood than general pet grief: Reptile loss and the human-reptile bond.

What I’ve learned has changed the entire way I look at this class of creatures, and I’m eager to share it with you.

A Bond That Others Don’t See

Caring for a new reptile isn’t loud and obvious, not like taking a rambunctious puppy to obedience school or playing with a kitten that bats at all things interesting.

The human-reptile bond is built mostly through quiet, daily acts of care that go unwitnessed: calibrating basking temperatures, monitoring UVB exposure, and preparing species-specific diets.

It’s also about learning to read those oh-so-subtle behavioral cues, from the tilted head of a bearded dragon to the way a ball python curls up differently when relaxed.

There’s also joy in watching quick-fire motions—like our gecko hunting with laser focus.

These small but notable acts become the “language” of the relationship between a human and a reptile. That lays the foundation for recognizing genuine personalities in these animals, with preferences and habits of their own, rather than seeing them as cold or emotionless organisms.

The Research is Surprising

Any committed reptile owner would likely argue you don’t need research to confirm reptile attachment, but this study fascinated me:

Using the Lexington Attachment to Pets Scale (LAPS), roughly 2,000 reptile guardians were surveyed. Results showed that the mean attachment score for reptiles fell within the normal range for all companion animals. And it was actually higher than the average score for dogs kept outdoors.

Respondents were most attached to lizards, then snakes, then tortoises. The researchers concluded that most guardians do not view their reptiles as “disposable.” (I take this to mean that a reptile owner wouldn’t be cool with switching their creature out for a new one if the old one died… which isn’t something I assumed, it’s just something I never thought about.)

But there’s more…

A mixed-methods study of 220 Portuguese reptile owners found that 64% considered their reptile a family member, 54% cited “like” or “love” as their primary motivation for keeping the animal, and 22 participants volunteered “companionship” as a key benefit.

The researchers concluded that human-reptile bonds are “driven by the same feelings as those previously reported for mammalian pets, although they are more diverse and nuanced by a sense of admiration and fascination.”

The Phobias Behind Reptile Grief Disenfranchisement

Reptile keepers deal with the same “just a” problem all pet owners face: “It’s just a lizard.” “It’s only a snake.” “You can get another one.”

But those disenfranchising comments go even further with painful “pet comparison” statements: “At least it wasn’t your dog.”

As I’ve written about before, these kinds of comments distance a pet owner from their own painful feelings, making them feel stupid or wrong for having so much grief. They end up minimizing their own pain with statements like, “I know it’s silly to be this sad, but...”

In fact, as I dug through blogs and posts about reptile pet loss, one of the most striking recurring themes was: “I’m scared you’re going to laugh at me, but I’m in so much pain after losing my snake and no-one seems to understand.”

A major reason for reptile grief disenfranchisement also lies in the fact that a lot of reptiles are the subject of phobias. People who are afraid of snakes (or anything with scales) have a hard time seeing them as objects of love.

Reptiles also lack the behavioral cues most people associate with a loving pet. They’re in cages, so they don’t seek you out. They don’t protest when you leave. There’s little sign of visible affection.

This all gels together to make it harder for outsiders to understand grief from reptile loss.

Which is why it’s important, I believe, not to bother comparing. The interactions between owners and their reptiles are significantly different from the way owners interact with mammals.

The grief patterns are different, too.

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What Reptile-Specific Grief Looks Like

Following a loss, reptile owners describe particular pain at the sight of an empty terrarium, a vacant basking rock, or branches that no longer support a coiled tail.

And because the animal’s movements were both subtle and rhythmic (not loud and demonstrative like many mammalian pets), the absence is felt more keenly when daily micro-routines come to an end—like checking a thermometer, misting an enclosure, or preparing live food.

The guilt spiral is similar, though, to what I’ve written about in other types of pet loss. Keepers often report battling self-blame, wondering whether they missed a cue and should have taken their reptiles to the vet sooner, whether the temperature was off, or something else within their control that they (feel they) failed at.

And So the Coping Advice Is…

In the end, reptile grief is raw and painful, no different than all the other types of grief we’ve explored.

So if you ever come across someone who’s lost a reptile, or if you’ve lost a reptile, acknowledging that the pain is real and crushing is the first step.

Talking about the reptile is helpful during the grief transition… and making photo tributes is a loving way to remember the pet.

Two additional sweet coping strategies specific to reptiles include transforming the enclosure into a tribute either by placing a plant or photo inside, or keeping one of the objects from the cage as a keepsake.

And of course, finding community provides critical validation, especially if you’re a reptile owner without an in-person network of fellow reptile lovers. Communities can mourn with you when the pain is fresh and raw, and they’ll be there for you again should you ever be ready to open your heart to another sweet creature.

Have you ever lost a reptile? What did your grief look like?

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