The Merry-Go-Round of Pet Loss Grief

Learning to recognize the many emotions beyond the five “known” stages of grief is a practice that helps you through the worst of it. Here’s how to spot what we’re only beginning to understand.

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.

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.

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