The Pie and the Pain
What a surprise pie delivered by a stranger taught me about the silence that follows pet loss — and why that silence makes everything harder.
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.
There’s no question that pet loss is disenfranchised grief.
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:
Researchers have actually found that the grief from pet loss is neurologically identical to the grief from losing a human.
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.
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. 💗