Mourning Your Pet Like You're Grieving a Person Is Totally Normal

This article originally appeared on VICE en Español.

“It felt like a really sudden death,” said Sophia, 27. Her dog Kenzo was already quite old when he died a few years ago, yet Sophia felt like she wasn’t prepared for him to go. “I must confess I did feel some sense of relief because he had already become difficult to look after,” she says. Unlike with previous pets, Sophia had no one to share the responsibility of taking care of Kenzo with, something that made her loss harder in some ways and easier in others. “It makes me feel guilty to say that. But, in a way, I feel liberated,” Sophia adds.

It’s not uncommon for people to experience these messy feelings when a loved one dies, be it a friend or a relative. As a society, we’ve accepted that. But the truth is, our non-human companions can also become so important to us that their deaths can be extremely painful and conflicting to deal with. The grief resulting from the death of a pet is often trivialized and neglected, especially by those who’ve never known a meaningful attachment beyond our species.

In fact, according to thanatologists—people who specialize in the study of death—what we know about grief resulting from the death of a human basically applies to the death of our pets, too. For instance, people go through the same five stages to mourn grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—although everyone experiences them differently depending on their circumstances. And contrary to what murder mysteries would have you believe, people’s reactions to the passing of a loved one aren’t necessarily linked to how much they loved or cared for them.

Cesar, 28, recently had to say goodbye to the miniature schnauzer he’d grown up with, Chuck, “someone who knew me deep down,” as he describs him. Having lost other people in his life, Cesar was not new to grief. “It was very sad, but it wasn't exactly difficult,” Cesar says. “I accepted her death very quickly. I remember thinking, ‘Chuck used to be here, and now she isn't, and that's it, things change'.” 

But even though Cesar could accept Chuck’s death in and of itself, he said he cried a lot in the following months thinking about her life. He still looks at photos of her sometimes and likes to talk about what she was like. “When I talk about her, I get a small knot in my stomach,” he says. “But I also know that that knot is just a natural consequence of having loved another creature so much—a creature that was undoubtedly going to die at some point.”

People who lose a pet are often tempted to compare their grief to the loss of a human, something that’s hard to understand for those who have never felt close to an animal. Gaby Pérez Islas is a Mexico-City-based thanatologist and host of the podcast Después de la Pérdida (After the Loss). She says you simply cannot compare one type of grief to another—what hurts simply hurts. Often, non-pet lovers will suggest their friends and family simply replace their lost animal with another one, something that just isn’t helpful for someone in mourning.

She once dedicated an entire episode of her podcast to the death of pets, where she explored feelings of guilt resulting from owners having to make the choice to put their animals down, for instance, due to medical complications. This decision often carries an especially heavy moral burden because, in her professional opinion, Western culture only normalizes natural death. But, as Pérez Islas points out, there is no concrete reason why things must happen that way—if the decision is made out of love, care, and genuine compassion for the suffering animal, it’s a good decision.

Another situation that owners find difficult to cope with is when a pet dies during an accident at home, perhaps as a result of “a fall, being hit by something, or a door being left open and the little one getting lost,” Pérez Islas continues. “If that has happened to you—don’t blame yourself. But if you feel the need to ask your pet forgiveness for anything, then do so by writing them a letter,” she says.

That’s precisely what happened to Angelica, 30, who lost both of her dogs within the past two years, one in 2019 and the other in 2021. Her first dog to go, Pinky, was 15 when she died, having accompanied Angelica for over half her life. "My other dog fell on top of her and broke her foot,” Angelica says. “They had to operate on her, but she didn’t wake up after the surgery.” Even though both deaths were hard, Pinky’s was special, as Angelica, an only child, really relied on her for companionship. “I felt a lot of guilt, and I was so angry. Every time someone asked me about her, I’d burst out crying,” she recalls. “The grief was so painful right from the moment she died.”

Fortunately, the people in her life knew about their bond and took good care of her. She also decided to open up to her therapist about her grief so as to avoid relapsing into a previous depression. “We went through it exactly as if a person had died. I even wrote her a goodbye letter,” she says. “After that, I learned not to judge other people's grief. A friend of mine was really affected by the death of her tortoise, and although it's less common than when a cat or a dog dies, I understood her, and I tried to be there for her.”

Pérez Islas also encourages people not to judge while someone around them is going through this. Although there’s no right way to process these experiences, she believes it’s better to avoid some instinctive reactions. “What some people do, in the midst of their grief, is buy another little animal and give them the same name in an attempt to replace their pet,” she explains. “It’s not a good idea. It’s part of our denial phase. Every animal has its own individual personality, and that has to be respected.”

Another frequent mishap is to hide what’s happened from children, telling them elaborate stories about their pet being in a happy place instead. In fact, losing a pet is often a child’s first experience with death, so it can be a great opportunity to discuss the subject with them. 

Even though letting go of loved ones is hard, at the end of the day, it’s an inevitable part of forming a bond with someone or something. “The sadness I felt is part of the love I had for her,” Cesar says about his dog Chuck. “It reminds me that she once lived and that she was amazing during the time we had.”