Why a pet’s death can hurt worse than losing a human loved one

Pets are family, and losing them can be heart-wrenching; here’s how to understand and manage your grief. Photo / 123rf

A dog or cat’s passing can stir up particularly complicated emotions. Here’s how to cope

My first real pet was an auburn tabby named Lauren with a pinched face and a puffy tail. I picked her up in September 2021, and by the time we got to my house 30 minutes later, I was completely in love.

The immediacy - and intensity - of how I felt about her was surprising and unfamiliar. And so was the emptiness that came with losing her only seven months later. (She was barely 1 year old and had developed FIP, a deadly strain of feline coronavirus that typically affects young cats.)

“When you lose anybody, pet or human, that you’re really close to, it can feel like the world is ending,” says Jennifer Golbeck, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland and researcher of human-animal bonds. “Most people think of their pets as family members. … Sometimes, they consider their relationships with their dogs closer than their relationships with most of their family members. It’s actually a really profound relationship, and when we lose them, our psychological needs are to grieve them in the same way we would grieve any relationship that is that profound.”

When we adopt pets, we know we’re entering a relationship that will, most likely, end in loss. But for many people, pet grief can nonetheless be surprisingly devastating when it happens. Research shows that grief following the loss of a pet can be comparable to losing a person and, in some cases, even more complicated. Often, this pain is amplified by guilt (“I should’ve taken him in sooner”) and feelings of being misunderstood (“It’s just an animal”), all the more reason that pet owners, researchers and counsellors are exploring ways to comfort owners through loss and keep their pets’ memories alive.

Dogs and cats are often used as therapy animals to help reduce stress and improve mental health. Photo / 123rf

Golbeck, who also runs a rescue for golden retrievers, says that compared with our human relationships, the ones we form with our animals are “purely good.” Our close relationships with other people, even the most loving, are fraught; they ask us to examine our faults and shortcomings. We misunderstand each other, we hurt each other, we give and take. With pets, there is a simplicity to what they provide us - and what we give them - that can’t be replicated with humans. This can make losing their companionship all the more complex.

“[Dogs] kind of enter your life with a pre-existing, unconditional excitement for who you are,” says David Freifeld, a Brooklyn resident who grew up with dogs. He and his wife, Elena, said goodbye to their 4-year-old bernedoodle, Ramy, earlier this year, after he was diagnosed with a dangerous neurological condition. “From the moment [Ramy] came home, he just was like, ‘What do you want to do today? I love you’.”

Ramy’s death was not Freifeld’s first experience with premature loss - when he was in college, his dad died - but he says it was uniquely painful. Before Freifeld’s father died, he had a chance to communicate with him about his death, discussing what his father wanted and making decisions as a family. Obviously, he couldn’t do the same with Ramy, a creature who looked to Freifeld with complete trust.

Interacting with pets releases oxytocin, the same hormone that helps humans bond with each other. Photo / 123rf

“It’s a special relationship or a special responsibility that we take on, as the people responsible to keep them safe and healthy and alive … to then have to make the decision for them to die, it goes against everything,” says Michelle Crossley, an associate professor of clinical mental health counselling at Rhode Island College and vice president of the Association for Pet Loss and Bereavement. “That’s super challenging for folks to wrap their heads around; people end up experiencing some guilt.”

For the Freifelds, those last five days at home before Ramy was euthanised felt like a sort of one-sided hospice. They knew what was coming, but Ramy looked at them exactly the same. Because there’s this profound sense of loyalty, I think most people almost feel like they don’t deserve it, when they have a pet. You feel so responsible for something that is so committed to you,” Freifeld says. “I didn’t want him to feel like we had abandoned him.”

For others, losing a pet means mourning the constant shadow of comfort that’s accompanied them through various phases of life. While we love our parents or friends or relatives, often it’s our pets that are physically there as we traverse milestones such as moving out, getting married or having children. For 22-year-old Jackie Llanos, her schnauzer, Nacho, stuck by her side through a move to an entirely new country. She, her mum, her three sisters and 4-year-old Nacho emigrated from Bogotá, Colombia, to Stafford, Virginia, in 2013.

“I think I really clinged to him when I was upset, experiencing all of these changes and not being able to communicate with the other kids,” she says. “He was just always a constant.”

Llanos is now a reporter in Florida, which means her mother has become Nacho’s primary caretaker in recent years. She called Llanos this past May to let her know that Nacho wasn’t eating and that it was probably time to say goodbye. A few hours before the vet appointment that Llanos scheduled for him, the 15-year-old dog passed away at home.

“It feels like the end of childhood in a way,” she says. “It just feels like one less connection back to my childhood in Colombia.”

Losing a beloved pet can also feel especially lonely. Not only is the home literally emptier, but other (non-pet-owning) humans might have difficulty empathising.

“People will grieve in isolation because they don’t want to be invalidated in how distraught they are,” Crossley says. “One of the comments people will say is just, ‘It’s a pet; get another one’.”

Golbeck began researching pet loss while in a master’s psychology course; the class was studying “disenfranchised grief,” or the concept that some deaths are not societally legitimised or publicly mourned. Though they were focused on examples such as Aids deaths in the 1980s and deaths by suicide and overdose, she realised that pet loss may fall into this category, too.

“The tools that we would normally use for grief, and the kind of support that we get for grief and the loss of people, we don’t get that with [pets],” Golbeck says.

After the death of her cat Rupert, Virginia resident Page Shewey says some people didn’t understand why she was having such a hard time. As a result, she began to question whether the intensity of her grief meant something was wrong with her, or if it somehow meant she hadn’t properly grieved the human loved ones she’d lost.

Pets, especially dogs, can sense human emotions and often try to comfort their owners. Photo / 123rf

“You don’t know what to feel,” Shewey says. “You’re like, ‘Should I not be this upset? Is there something wrong with me for feeling this upset after the loss of a pet?’”

Golbeck says a way to legitimise your grief is to find people who will take it seriously - even if that requires venturing beyond your usual circle. Demand for spots in pet grief support groups has ballooned, especially since the pandemic, and online forums exist for various kinds of pet loss. At the Association for Pet Loss and Bereavement, Crossley opens old-school chatrooms daily for folks to talk through what they’re experiencing.

When Lauren passed, I spent hours online, trawling Q&A forums about pet loss and Facebook groups for owners whose cats were diagnosed with FIP. In the months after she died, just reading the comment section of a TikTok about losing a cat could make me feel a little less perplexed by my emotional response.

Even if it’s not recognised by anyone but you, Crossley says, creating some type of memorial or ritual to honour your pet can help with processing the loss, whether that’s creating a planter with their food bowl or saving their collar. If it’s painful to encounter constant reminders of your pet - and you can’t bring yourself to pack up their things on your own - you may want to enlist a friend or family member to remove and donate the items. (The Freifelds donated Ramy’s bed and got teary when the new owner sent a picture of their dog sniffing the fabric, presumably detecting Ramy’s scent.)

Cats have an exceptional sense of hearing and can hear frequencies up to two octaves higher than humans. Photo / 123rf

Crossley has also encouraged people struggling with guilt to write a letter to their pet, expressing everything they wished their pet could know. Then, write a response from the pet’s point of view, focusing on the ways in which the person created happy, healthy memories for them both. The “what could I have done differently” feelings won’t dissipate immediately, but Crossley says forgiving yourself is key to getting better.

“We used to call it closure, but then closure feels so permanent as if I will never think about this ever again,” she says. Instead, she recommends people view “resolution” as a goal in the grieving process. “With resolution, the thing that I ask folks to respond to is: When was your pet happiest? Was it when you were mad and angry and crying, or were they happy when you were happy? To honour our pets, we can remember them in these happy moments and to not be in so much pain.”

After Lauren died, I left her things as they were for a few days; her food bowl next to my bedroom door, the syringe I’d been using to force-feed her water on my dresser, toys strewn around the floor. In bed, I’d cautiously adjust my legs, scanning my comforter for the dark lump that was supposed to be at my feet. But eventually, it got easier. By the following week, I gathered her belongings and moved them to the attic, “just in case” I got another cat.

Less than a year later, I met Mouse, a tabby kitten that I’ve grown to love as much as Lauren - just differently. I know losing him will be equally devastating. But as Golbeck says: “In exchange for a lifetime of love and good memories, the price that we pay is one of the worst days of our lives.”

It’s worth it.