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The Loss of a Pet that Changed My Life

Categories: Dog Friendship

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Published: Jan 28, 2021

Words: 766 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Works Cited

Albom, M. (1997). The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Hyperion.
Barchas, P. R., & Houston, D. M. (2001). Children's grief and pet loss: A guide for parents. Routledge.
Black, A. (2002). When a pet dies. Penguin.
Brown, J. (2009). Saying goodbye to the pet you love: A complete resource to help you heal. Hazelden Publishing.
Coren, S. (2004). How dogs think: Understanding the canine mind. Free Press.
Kowalski, G. J., & Rang, J. A. (2007). Goodbye, friend: Healing wisdom for anyone who has ever lost a pet. New World Library.
Kunhardt, D., & Kunhardt, P. (2001). Remembering lives: Conversations with the dying and the bereaved. Anchor Books.
Nelson, T. D. (2019). The psychology of death: An introduction. Routledge.
Serpell, J. A. (2017). Domestic dog cognition and behavior: The scientific study of Canis familiaris. Springer.
Wolfelt, A. D. (2003). The loss of a pet: A guide to coping with the grieving process when a pet dies. Companion Press.

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What I learned from losing my dog

October 11, 2010 by Jen deHaan (@dogthusiast) 99 Comments

Our wonderful Mikey dog passed away, way too soon from a sudden and terrible illness , on Sept. 1st, 2010. We had him in our lives for 8 months, adopting him from Peninsula Humane Society in San Mateo, California. We and the vets think he was around 7, and he was in peak physical shape when he passed. I jogged with him most evenings, and we took him on an hour walk/run on the beach every morning, and to Fort Funston most weekends – he had a strong heart. That strength gave him a fighting chance – several vets noted how strong his heart was, how they couldn’t believe he could stand and walk while so anemic. He also had a great string of emergency and specialist vets who were well versed and very experienced fighting this disease. But despite this, auto-immune hemolytic anemia (also known as IMHA or AIHA) took him from us in three short, terrible days and all the while we don’t know what caused it. We just knew he had a very bad case of it. This is the story of losing my dog, Mikey.

Those three days were unreal, both in how stressful and unexpected they were. They still feel like this surreal nightmare. My husband and I shared our 10th anniversary the day before, and were taking Mikey on a week long vacation starting the following day – but that day he became “not quite right” (and our regular vet who saw him wasn’t yet concerned – it was that subtle). But that night, we had him at the emergency vet and we learned about his disease, his prognosis, and that he was so sick that he almost died a mere 12 hours after his initial “things are not too bad, you can still go on vacation if you want” vet exam. Thank goodness we decided to postpone our departure!

Those days while he was fighting the disease were so sad, so horrible. How unbelievable traumatic. Nightmarish. At the end of those three days were many more horrific, sad, stressful days where I felt like the wind was knocked out of me. And my chest just hurt from the stress – strong, physical pain to go with the emotional pain. Not to mention we couldn’t see him during those days, and my greatest fear was him dying alone.

But from the loss comes an understanding. I realized that I had to “do something” from the loss so it wasn’t in vain. And I want to share what I learned in case it helps others – and from that, our Mikey can leave some kind of legacy to others in addition to the strong legacy he leaves us who knew him.

It’s amazing to me that we only had him in our lives for eight months. I can go on, and on, and on about all the wonderful things he brought into our lives. All the experiences we shared. And for that, I am incredibly grateful to that ‘medium-sized senior black dog’ we adopted, who was abandoned at the shelter for many weeks until we found him on December 23rd, 2009. An incredibly terrific day in my life.

And this is what losing my dog Mikey taught me:

1) Live every day to the fullest

Dogs live for the now, we need to as well. And we shouldn’t cop out on doing activities with these dogs – we’re all winners if we go on that walk, take that trip, buy them that bully stick and the ice-cream cone too. It’s the bestest thing EVER for them, and that look on their face “you got that for ME?” is a memory you’ll carry for a long, long time.

Some of the memories that I carry with me about Mikey are small ones: the way he looked at me one day, some reaction he had to some small event, some regular outing we made where he did something special. Mikey was a shy dog, and we had to work on his confidence so he could be happier in this world. So those small steps he made each day gave me the greatest joy (his first on-leash pee after two months was SUCH a great morning! and I almost cried with relief after he pottied after holding it for 36 hours that first day…), and I also knew I had to do a LOT of things with him to help him grow that confidence.

As such, we had a lot of work to do! But that work really filled those eight months with many great outings, and I can’t say “I wish we did more” because we did so many things! All I can say is I wish we had more time to do more. More months together, because I already had plans for this fall for therapy dog training, taking a canoe trip on the Russian River, and that trip to Oregon to run on super-clean beaches we were set to leave on the day he got sick. But even though we’re missing out on those things, we honestly had a packed eight months.

Every morning we woke up at about 6:30 to spend an hour going to Ocean Beach in San Francisco, so Mikey could run and see other dogs. We saw Frodo and Jasmina (and new pup Jasper that last morning), saw Lexi most mornings in passing, Billy a few times, and his most favorite schanuzer-mix nearly every morning but for some reason don’t know his name. But we were there, day in and day out. Rain, shine, fog. The only days we missed a walk was when there was a full-blown storm (and even those days we sometimes took a short 20 minute walk to the bottom of the street until we both realized how ridiculous it was). But we walked through thunder and lightening: Mikey didn’t care, so out we went anyway. He was all about going for a walk, and getting to smell those SMELLS. Life was all about getting to the next smell and then peeing on it.

Every evening we would go out again as soon as I got home from work, although we varied these walks depending on the amount of daylight and how tired I was! Sometimes it was a jog, sometimes a brisk walk, sometimes out on the avenues, sometimes around Lands End trails. But it was always relaxing, nearly an hour, and I was so happy to be with my guy. Afterwards, every night we would eat dinner together and then relax on the couch, him splayed out between my knees or right across my body – lounging. Nothing better than ending a day like that.

But the best part of the day, every day, was getting home to see my dude… hearing that thump as the recliner hit the wall as he jumped out of it to come to the door as I was opening it and calling to him “Duuuuuuude!!!!”… his tail wagging and usually a little pine from his throat.

On weekends we would take him on other outings, farther away from the city or to Fort Funston since it was his favorite place in the world due to sand dunes. He adored running up and down the dunes.

We also took him to several open areas in North Bay for off-leash hikes (such as under Mt Tam), to East Bay to hike off leash on the hills around the cows and he could roll in cow pies (not to our delight, but he was immensely happy), and to various areas down the peninsula and Santa Cruz. We took him to eat lunch multiple times at Pasta Moon in Half Moon Bay, where they’d give him a bowl of water, kids would marvel at the weird people sitting in the hallway outside the restaurant, and he would make a wide berth around the odd-sounding heater they have in the lobby. And we took him on an adventure to Utah, via Yosemite. It was our first and last vacation, but he did wonderfully in the car, hotels, and rental unit.

It was only 8 months, but every day we spent all of our free time together, growing together. Me learning to de-stress and relax, him growing in confidence. We trusted each other, and learned boatloads in the meantime.

2) Remember the small things

I seem to remember small moments more than the overall “large picture”, and I’m not sure if that’s because we had Mikey for such a short period of time comparatively speaking. But so many things between us were so striking. I remember that first moment seeing him in his dark kennel at the shelter, walking up to the gate with that look in his eyes. I remember watching him for ages, and him probably wondering about that crazy woman at the other side of the gate. I remember frantically rushing back to adopt him, hoping no one had beat us (despite him being there for nearly 2 months!) Then we had to goto Pet Food Express and Costco, picking up “dog supplies” (we had no clue what size of dog we were getting… so now that we knew, we had to go pick that stuff up). He was so scared, so we hung around the grass outside as the smells relaxed him. That car was packed to the gills, but he was totally happy to squish in between it all with me!

But above all, I remember that moment of nervousness the second that leash was handed to me at the shelter – “oh my gosh, I’m a dog parent!” That was soon remedied with this feeling of joy, as Mikey ran into our living room after the stress of Costco and Pet Food Express — and he wagged his tail for the first time. He knew he was home. Then went over to my husbands floor-cushion, and turned it into a dog bed. So long ago, but I can feel those moments like they were yesterday.

The life-changing moment came weeks later, as Mikey lay between my legs on the bed as I read a book, and gazed up at me with a look of “I trust you now, you are my person”. I couldn’t believe he didn’t have a family. At that moment I knew I had to do more for dogs like him, and that’s when I knew I had to volunteer and do something better with my life. Dogs like him die in droves – older, black, larger, shelter dogs. And dogs like him are way too life-changing-awesome to die in the numbers they do. Listening to that small moment was important, that I learned.

But there are so many small, happy moments on a day-to-day basis. The sun on their face, a happy dog smile, a hop in their step, a wag of their tail when you call their name (this especially for the rehab shy dogs, at least!). The happiest memory came from our vacation together to Utah. We took Mikey out for ice-cream on a wonderful, warm summer night. We had never given him ice cream, or human food from a table for that matter. Peter bought us a cone to share, and on a whim I passed it down to Mikey. He looked at me as in “you made a mistake, you never give me people food”, but took a lick. And then another. And then started gulping down the ice cream as fast as his tongue would allow. I passed it back to Peter, then me, and then I glanced down at Mikey… he was standing there with the biggest sloppy dog grin I had EVER seen on his face, his tail wagging like crazy “My turn!!!” We repeated passing it between the three of us until the ice cream was gone, and he was the happiest dog in Kanab that night I’m sure. Eating that ice cream was possibly the happiest I had ever seen him, and that memory is etched into my head forever.

3) Take pictures (and video!)

I only have one video of Mikey on the dunes in Fort Funston, but I am forever glad that I took it. I also have a video of what he was like when I arrived home each day (or an approximation – he was a bit shocked to see the camera in front of my face that day!) And tons of photos. But I wish I took more, in hindsight, being the sentimental sap that I am.

(I just made this one public… our house was such a mess! But my gosh did I just bawl watching this…)

I think the biggest “mistake” I made was never taking photos of the two of us, until the bitter end. Sure we had a couple at a distance, but none of the photos were of the two of us looking at the camera. So the only such photo I have like that is when we took him from the emergency vets to the specialists. And it’s sad! I know it was the last time I held him, walked him, the final car ride. But… I’m so thankful I even thought to take the camera and get that photo at all, or I wouldn’t have had any.

So I have now learned to take lots and lots of photos to capture the good times.

4) Think about what they’ve inspired you to do, or can inspire you to do

As mentioned in section 2, Mikey inspired me to volunteer with dogs and promote adopting dogs in general. Mikey also inspired me to make some changes in my life after his death, highlighting what’s important in life (family, friends, some form of real support). And also that time is important, just not to waste time. Life is very short.

I’m also amazed at the wonderful effect Mikey had on kids. It was wonderful how patient and gentle he was with kids (and also how their parents just let their kids run up to him and touch him while at off-leash parks without asking if he was OK with children – thankfully we were responsible owners and he was a gentle dog!) Mikey would stand there and just let kids pet him, he would sit down if they sort of “kid-handled” him. One toddler slapped him on the back, and he just sat down and stayed there for a good five minutes. The most he would do is lick their hands or face (I always had to warn parents “He might give kisses!!”) He was such a testament to patience, he was a born therapy dog for children. He was naturally a shy dog, not really born to be a therapy dog for the elderly (he didn’t have that “happy to greet everyone” personality), but he had this quiet, zen patience that seemed to be a magnet for children. And be perfect for children who were nervous about dogs – and he wasn’t a small dog, either! If you ever have a dog like this, consider therapy work. I’m crossing my fingers our recent adoptee may be like this. To teach children how to properly interact with dogs is one of the most important lessons you can teach, knowing the percentage of dog bites that involve children due to a lack of education.

So thinking about what he inspired during his lifetime, to volunteer and inspire future therapy work, and motivating me to spend more time with friends and family, is something that will change my life forever. Mikey’s lessons will be with me until the day I die, and I will forever thank him for that.

5) Remember what did they bring into your life, and you to theirs

Knowing the vast amount of positive change that Mikey brought into our life, in itself, made his passing not be in vain. Mikey gave me life, a life that was worth so much more than it did previous to having him. It gave me a clear sense of meaning and purpose, to look after this dog, and to help other dogs that are presently less fortunate than he is (now having a family).

We adopted Mikey because I had desperately wanted a dog for so long, and I was going through a sort of health crisis that left me feeling desperate for change. I also had a lot of work stress, and felt the urgent need for change. So we got our life in order, fixed our work-life balance, and were ready for a dog. So we searched Petfinder (after being rejected for an elderly greyound because our fence was too short), and made a shortlist of dogs to go visit.

Not long after Mikey entered our life, I found a new sense of calm and the stress just melted away. Not only did I notice, but others made random comments at the office about the change, without knowing it was because of a dog. Even my mom noticed. Yes, dogs can be miracles, and fix so much. You don’t just give them a chance at life, they give you a chance at life too.

But even when you do succumb to the stresses of life, Mikey was there to help. I remember one day that was simply horrible. I was angry for whatever reason, and just had to ‘leave’. I put Mikey on a leash, and we stormed into a grey, rainy, horrible day. We sat at the bottom of the block, him quietly at my side as I sat there steaming mad at whatever it was. It quickly lost all importance. We continued on a walk, and he slowly cheered me up. He fixed that day, just like he fixed my life.

But as much as he brought to my life, I do also accept that I brought some quality to his. Mikey was in the shelter for a long time before we adopted him – partly because he did fit a profile of a less-adoptable dog. He was shy too, and barely paid us any attention during our adoption counsel. But we took a chance, betting on him. We put some elbow grease into his rehabilitation – making him more confident, giving him a bunch of experiences. And together we all won.

(And by the way, in the above photo he is COVERED in cow pie. I think he thought he was sooooo clever to bring us that smell…)

6) Remember what they make you realize when they pass

Because Mikey got so sick, so fast, “time” was what I thought about the most, and still think about. We only had eight months together, which made every moment that much more precious. It also meant that I quickly realized how fleeting time is – how short our time can be together. And how we just can’t delay doing things.

I lost my “childhood” dog only 3 weeks before Mikey died, and I had been putting off going to see him. I meant to, but I kept delaying the trip. And then it was too late. Fate took my own dog only 3 weeks later, and very unexpectedly. I barely got to take a photo of us together, and I only had 8 months with my soul dog. Thus, time was the biggest take-away from losing both of them, and I began applying this to other areas of my life.

I also realized the importance of being close to good vets , emergency facilities, and specialists can also be very important.

Knowing your dog , and what is abnormal for them (breath rate, energy level, appetite) is incredibly important. And knowing to check their gums whenever something seems not-quite-right, and get their blood checked with immediate results, is of the utmost importance. Do not accept any compromises if you encounter lethargy (even the slightest) combined with anorexia (loss of appetite) and pale gums. Please please please get someone familiar with AIHA to check your dogs blood test results. But long story short: know your dog, and if something seems wrong, listen to your gut and have everything checked out if something seems wrong. Don’t worry that you’re overreacting.

Research everything . There is a lot of information online, so research what you can and take it up with your vet. Don’t necessarily be that “patient who googles”, but instead be the patient who researches so you can ask the right questions, and interpret the information your vet tells you. And if you aren’t happy with your vet, change offices or get a second opinion! Don’t settle – you pay a lot of money to visit the vet, and your companion is too valuable for settling.

Question drugs . Knowing what I do now about the horrible toxins we subject our animals to, I will never apply another dose of flea medication even if it is recommended. I gave a few doses to Mikey at the advice of a vet after he suddenly began scratching incessantly and the “most likely culprit” was flea dermatitis (even though he had no evidence of fleas). I don’t know if the Frontline killed him, but knowing how many dogs it does kill, and that it probably causes AIHA in some, my dogs will never get another dose of those horrible toxins again. It doesn’t make sense to apply medications that I am not supposed to get onto my skin – that is simply way too frightening, given there are so many safer alternatives.

The same will go for other overly prescribed medications (steroids, worming medications, and so on) and vaccinations, and we are now going with holistic vets, titers, and home-cooked meals for our animals. The thing that angers me the most is I knew this long ago with my cat, and somehow lost my way. Mikey helped us get back on track – we are (again) considering everything that goes on or into our companions.

But most of all, Mikey’s passing taught us to take the difficulties of our lives and instead of letting it get us down, to let it propel us to something positive. I am taking what he gave me, and putting it to good use: improving the way I care for myself and for my companion animals.

7) Consider adoption, including needy dogs who need an extra helping hand.

As noted earlier, Mikey was a “less adoptable” dog – and proved to be the best possible dog-friend in the world. I couldn’t imagine not adopting, being as I am in the shelters on a regular basis and meeting so many wonderful dogs I want to take home with me. But it has made me only want to adopt dogs who need an extra helping hand, either “less perfect” temperaments or discriminated breeds. I tend to gravitate towards the shy dogs, which is why our current companion caught our eye (she had the “Mikey look” in more than one photo – but is actually much shier than he ever was and failed her temp test poor thing).

I don’t think this, by any means, should be “try to adopt the least desirable dog” or someone with major issues. Definitely not – it’s terribly tragic that healthy, adoptable, friendly dogs are put to death every day, there are many dogs in terrific shape who desperately need homes. And many dogs may simply be too much to handle unless you’re a trained professional (I’m certainly not by any means!) I simply feel that Mikey inspired us to look at dogs who are terrific that still get passed over on first inspection – such as “big black dogs”, older dogs, shyer dogs, some dog who isn’t quite as “cute” as the others. These guys make terrific pets, have many quality years (typically!), and shy dogs often just need a bit of patience and proper handling to turn into soulful, wonderful, loyal, and eternally grateful companions.

8) Love them every day like it may be their last.

The one thing you learn so quickly about AIHA is that it strikes swift and hard. The symptoms are so subtle that they’re easy to miss, and it can almost be “too late” when you finally pick up on something being wrong. There’s a chance you can be too late, with this and every other sudden form of death. And from that I learned to make the most of everything that you have, every day, with your loved ones both two-legged and four-legged.

Now go kiss your dog, and give them the best walk ever .

About Jen deHaan (@dogthusiast)

Jen deHaan is graphic designer, small business owner, and dog person living in Bay Area, California. Jen enjoys learning about dog training and behavior, and has taken several courses and seminars since 2010. She also contributes articles to leading websites, such as Victoria Stilwell's Positively . It all started with a great dog called Mikey (aka "dude") , loved and lost but remembered forever.

Jen also runs a freelance business focusing on graphic, web, and UI design at FoundPixel , and a small business creating hand crafted dog products at Stylish Canine .

How to Grieve for a Very Good Dog

When my yellow Lab died last spring, I was flattened by an overwhelming sadness that’s with me still. And that’s normal, experts say, because losing a pet is often one of the hardest yet least acknowledged traumas we’ll ever face.

Heading out the door? Read this article on the Outside app available now on iOS devices for members! >","name":"in-content-cta","type":"link"}}'>Download the app .

I was walking home from getting my second vaccination shot last March when I suddenly felt like I couldn’t stand. Everything about the vaccine was fine. It was just that I had lost someone very dear to me a few days prior and I was overcome with crippling despair.

I plopped in the dirt next to the side of the road, wailing while I fumbled with my phone to find the number for Blue Cross Blue Shield’s counseling hotline. I explained my needs to an obstacle course of automated gatekeepers and finally got through to a human.

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“My partner died two days ago,” I managed to say between sobs.

“Oh, I am so sorry,” said the woman on the phone, clearly moved by my distress. She gave me phone numbers for grief counselors in my area; I headed home with tears running down my face.

What I didn’t say is that my “partner” was a dog. A beautiful yellow Lab named Sunny, who died at 15 and a half.

When Sunny was euthanized in my backyard two days earlier, I knew that adjusting to life without her would be hard. What happened instead was more like a tsunami of grief that swept me out to sea. Now that I’m pushing 60, I thought I was fully experienced in coping with the death of loved ones. But the sadness from losing Sunny was far greater than what I had previously endured after the passing of my parents, grandparents, and other dogs. I was surprised and somewhat terrified that I had the capacity to cry so much.

The author with Sunnt in Flagstaff, AZ in 2019

If I had lost a human partner, there would have been the usual funeral rituals, and being an emotional basket case would have seemed understandable. But our culture treats the death of a pet more like the loss of an automobile. When it wears out, you should just go buy another one. Well-meaning friends and family members had advised this in their attempts to help me feel better. What they didn’t get was that I had lost a soul mate—an irreplaceable relationship—not a piece of property.

During our more than 15 years together, Sunny was faithfully by my side as I went through a bitter divorce, raised my son alone, dealt with caring for my mother and her dementia, and endured the death of my parents, as well as PTSD caused by childhood trauma, empty-nest syndrome when my son went to college, stressful jobs, scary health issues, moving to a new town where I knew no one and, of course, the COVID-19 lockdown.

Sunny was like a handrail along the edge of a thousand-foot cliff. Navigating life’s challenges seemed doable because I knew I could hold on to her if needed. Now the handrail was gone. Trying to understand why I was in such pain, I sought out a few experts, who explained to me what it is about these transitions that makes them so difficult.

“Our pets are there for us when other humans may not be,” says Robert Neimeyer, the author of several books on grief and director of the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition . “Pets provide what psychologists call a ‘secure base’ for us where we can feel unconditionally loved and trusted. We often have the sense that they understand our emotions intuitively in ways that others do not cognitively.” Neimeyer points out that the emotional bond with a pet can be especially strong for people like me who are survivors of trauma. And he says one of the great ironies of pet loss is that we’re grieving the absence of the very companion who could have made such a significant loss more bearable.

As is true for many dog owners, my bond with Sunny was strongest in the outdoors. She shared my desire to wander in the wild more than anyone else in my life. And we did it daily, no matter the weather or what else was demanding my attention. I estimate that we hiked more than 15,000 miles together. On summer vacations and weekend trips, we hiked up to mountain summits and down to creek bottoms, through slickrock canyons and across snow-covered mesas bathed in moonlight. But mostly we just rambled for miles in the forest near my house, traveling cross-country on paths created over the years by our feet and paws. Sunny liked to walk about ten feet in front of me and insisted on carrying big sticks that were a minimum of five feet long. She would turn her head sideways to thread a stick through closely spaced trees and often looked back to make sure I was still there.

“Isn’t this amazing?” she would seem to say with her eyes.

“Yes!” I would respond, feeling life’s worries fall away.

We floated through the forest like synchronized swimmers, immersed in the joys of sticks and smells and towering pines bending in the wind. I needed this time with Sunny the way many people require coffee in the morning. It was hard to get through the day without it.

After Sunny’s death, my craving for our daily hikes—and for simply seeing her look back at me—was almost unbearable. I filled my house with pictures of her face and walked so many miles with her leash in my pack that I completely wore the soles off my hiking shoes. Eventually I connected with Richard Mercer, a grief therapist and facilitator of a pet-loss support group in Boulder, Colorado, who assured me I was not going crazy.

“The death of a pet is a very big deal,” he said. “I often have people tell me that they are surprised the experience is harder than losing their mom or dad. And there are many good reasons for why this is so.”

Unlike losing parents or other loved ones who don’t live with you, dogs and cats have an intimate place in our everyday lives. We miss their constant companionship, unconditional love, and presence as motivators: they’re a reason to get up and go on those daily walks. Mercer told me the death of a pet can also “activate grief over previous losses,” and I know what he means. I found myself crying about Sunny and also about my childhood dog Lucky, who was kept on a chain and was relegated to sleeping in a flea-infested doghouse—both at my parents’ insistence.

When Sunny was euthanized in my backyard two days earlier, I knew that adjusting to life without her would be hard. What happened instead was more like a tsunami of grief that swept me out to sea.

But the pain of loss also involves neurobiology. “Our field is just beginning to understand the positive benefits that dog ownership has to human health,” says Kevin Morris, director of research at the University of Denver’s Institute for Human-Animal Connection . Nothing against cats, but Morris says dogs are especially adept at being close friends. “All the dog breeds of today came from wolves that were, according to the theory, living off the garbage heaps of humans eight to ten thousand years ago. Dogs evolved to be companions to people in ways that other domesticated animals did not.”

Morris says researchers have found that a dog decreases anxiety and increases levels of oxytocin, a neurotransmitter, sometimes called “the love hormone,” that’s associated with maternal bonding. A study published in Science documented how simply gazing into each other’s eyes created a positive oxytocin feedback loop between dogs and their owners. Loving stares increased oxytocin levels in the dogs by 130 percent, and by 300 percent in the humans. Another study found that kissing dogs mutually increased oxytocin levels. Research has also shown that prolonged interaction between humans and dogs lowers harmful cortisol levels in both species.

“We are really wired to get that good stuff from our dogs,” says Mercer. “We associate the physical response of the oxytocin release to our connection with our dog and that is a lot of what we miss when they pass.”

I tell Mercer how I put pictures of Sunny all over my house and was walking around with her leash, apparently in a desperate attempt to get my oxytocin fix.

Doing whatever you can to feel better is a good idea. Mercer says that our culture’s widely accepted push to achieve closure by “moving on” after the death of a pet doesn’t really work. “The best thing to do is integrate the loss into your life by building a new relationship with a pet who is no longer physically present,” he explains. “We can give form to this relationship by honoring the memories of our pet, telling stories, journaling, and acknowledging our pain.” These memories embody not only the actions of our pets during their lives but also the events of our lives when the pet was supporting us.

Last March, when my 24-year-old son, Austin, and I decided it was time to put Sunny down, he flew from Los Angeles to my home in southwestern Colorado so we could give her a proper send-off. Sunny was being ravaged by cancer, but she still had an appetite. Our tight three-member pack, which had been the bedrock of Austin’s childhood, gorged for two and a half days on salmon, hamburgers, sausage, and some of Sunny’s unusual favorites, including Gouda cheese and lemon cake. Sunny could no longer hike in the forest, but we waded out with her into the Dolores River, where she had loved to swim. After Sunny was euthanized on her favorite patch of lawn amid swirls of fat snowflakes, Austin carried her inside and placed her on my bed. I anointed her with essential oils of ponderosa pine and blue spruce and tied a big pink ribbon around her neck as we prepared her for the crematorium.

I had always joked that pink was Sunny’s best color, even though she was incredibly strong and fearless. In the coming days I would tie pink ribbons around candles, my wrist, the box that held her ashes, and a stick in the backyard where I built an altar, all to remind me of Sunny’s life and the tender, sacred ceremony of her passing. This brought me comfort—maybe even oxytocin—as did some of the other tips offered by grief experts.

One of the best pieces of advice I received was the license to cry as much and as often as I needed to. I have cried every single day since March 25, when Sunny passed.

Plenty of people experience this. “I wailed like a little boy,” Robert Neimeyer says of a cat he had several years ago that was killed by a car. “It was the purest and strongest grief I have ever felt in my life.” Copious crying is our body’s way of achieving homeostasis by physically releasing strong emotions.

Though letting the tears flow is healthy, it’s crucial not to remain stuck in despair. My thoughts often turned to Sunny’s tough final three weeks rather than to the wonderful years we shared. Mercer encourages people to make a conscious effort to focus on the good times and burn these happy moments into their brains.

“Meditate on these memories as if they are happening in the present and remember how you experienced them through your senses,” he says. “This is very grounding and builds resilience so that we are better able to handle the tough memories.”

Following another of Mercer’s suggestions, I joined the pet-loss support group he leads for the Humane Society of Boulder Valley . “Pet loss is a disenfranchised grief and not everyone gets it,” he says. “So much of what comes out of the group is just normalizing and validating our feelings.”

The goal of the monthly meetings is to provide a safe place for grieving pet owners to share. Some participants hold a picture of a pet who died a few days prior and simply cry; others tell stories of a pet they lost years ago. I found every meeting to be like a giant hug.

One of the most surprising and hopeful things I learned was that my love for Sunny could be the bridge to bringing a new dog into my life—not as a way to replace her but to honor her.

“Some people may feel it would be too painful or disloyal to get another pet,” says Neimeyer. “But the deeper way of honoring the pet is to apply the lessons of loving and living this creature made possible for you by sharing that with another animal when you have reached the appropriate point in your grieving process. This kind of love is so robust that it survives the pet’s physical absence.”

As I stand there soaking in the beauty, Sunny’s physical absence often brings tears. But then in an instant, just as the sun drops below the horizon, all the clouds light up with fiery shades of pink and I feel her essence in every inch of sky.

In June, after speaking with Neimeyer, I decided to reach out to a Labrador retriever rescue operation near Colorado Springs, Colorado—a way to lay the groundwork for the day, maybe a year or two away, when I would be ready to adopt a new dog. I spoke with a breeder involved with the group and told her about Sunny. We agreed to touch base again in early 2022. Then she called a few weeks later.

“I know you weren’t planning to adopt anytime soon, but there is this dog who really needs you,” she said. “You would be the perfect owner.”

The dog was an 18-month-old yellow Lab named Trudy. Her owner had severe dementia and kept her confined to a cement dog run. A neighbor had contacted the rescue operation to report Trudy’s suffering. She’d been left alone in record summer heat and never walked. Nobody knew if her owner was giving her food or water.

The next day I drove eight hours to Pueblo, Colorado, to rescue Trudy. If I had not received counseling on pet loss, I probably would have declined, thinking I was too heartbroken to care for another dog. Instead, I took Trudy home and was soon watching her roll around in the grass and lie on a dog bed and play with toys—probably for the first time in her life. Trudy seemed like a gift from Sunny, or at least a karmic manifestation of Sunny’s positive influence on my life.

I bought her a bright red leash and have been slowly teaching her to walk in the wild. She is partly crippled from being confined to a cage, so there’s healing to do. We are healing together.

Trudy and I wander daily on a mesa near my house. It’s an awe-inspiring, oxytocin-generating landscape where a vast expanse of sagebrush is luminous green in the late afternoon light and the sky is a blue ocean filled with archipelagos of clouds. Some clouds are puffs of popcorn. Others are giant curtains of mist dangling over mountain peaks 50 or even 100 miles away.

I still carry Sunny’s pink leash in my pack. I expect I always will.

“Sunny!” I routinely shout into the sun-kissed abyss while Trudy delights in sniffing the ground. “Isn’t this amazing?”

On other days I hike alone through the forest following the favorite secret paths that Sunny and I made together. Several times I have come upon a tree or bush that takes my breath away. Tied to a twig in the middle of nowhere and for no explainable reason is a bright pink ribbon.

Relationships

My dog died in the middle of the night in my bed. The worst part of having a dog is knowing you'll outlast them.

My dog died in my bed in the middle of the night.
I woke up without knowing what to do with my dog, while also grieving.
I saw my dog everywhere in my apartment after he was gone.

"What do you do with a dead dog in your bed at 7 a.m.?"

It was a question even Siri couldn't answer . "I'm afraid I don't know," she replied. My electronics were useless, Harry — my dog — and I faced our last test together.

To say I didn't know he was dying would be untrue. The worst part of dog ownership is knowing you'll outlast them. But I didn't know he was sick. Sure, he'd aged, and his penchant for biting male suitors started to wane. Harry was nearly 13, and since birth, a biter I regularly defended against grown men with exaggerated apologies, secretly thinking, "he's 10 pounds; grow up."

He chose me

Harry and I always chose each other, although at first, he chose me.

At 22, I walked into a pet store I had no business in, considering I lived at a 450-not-dog-friendly square feet apartment. And I had no money.

Still, I proceeded to kill time by walking around tiny kennels with dogs along the long side and cats on the short. I wasn't worried about my impulsivity around the cats. But a Maltese with horrible real estate, the last dog before the cats, started going berserk. Barking, spinning, jumping. "I guess I'll play with that one," I thought.

We never stopped playing. And he became my dog.

We did everything together

Harry and I built a life spanning every job, boyfriend, man I thought was my boyfriend but wasn't, and every New York apartment I ever had.

We'd been kicked out of places — sometimes his mouth, sometimes mine.

We traveled well, despite twice returning to dogless hotel rooms, which ended with a note: "Your dog is at security." Sheepishly, I went to collect my animal, tail between my legs, knowing his imprisonment was likely warranted. We'd been too close to the elevator, ice machine, or anyone who dared to enjoy themselves audibly in the hallway.

I knew my dog . When Harry did anything, he did it all the way.

I knew he was old, but didn't know how sick he was

He yelped once when I put on his jacket. I was rushing. He developed a slight limp. I thought he'd stepped on sidewalk salt . He started moving too slowly. Where he used to outpace me, we'd traded places. "Please hurry up," I pleaded on one of our last walks together.

Soon, I could no longer ignore the probability: there was something wrong with Harry. And a possibility: there might be something really wrong with Harry.

"He's lost two pounds since his last visit…" the vet trailed while looking down. I did quick math: nearly 20% of his body weight.

As a childless, husbandless woman in her mid-30s, this dog is the only living thing I take care of.

Cancer was everywhere. His limp was not street-salt. His tiny bones were beginning to fracture. And I had the nerve to hurry him up on a walk.

Then, it all came fast. On the couch where we spent most of Harry's last week, him on my chest, it was time to tell the truth, just so that we knew it. "It is OK if you have to go," I told him, and I apologized to him.

For the first time ever, Harry listened.

He died in my bed

We woke up together in bed the next morning, only one of us warm. Every few hours, I had gotten into the habit of feeling for breath. Somewhere between 3 a.m. and 7:07 a.m. Harry was gone.

Concluding a week's worth of actual nightmare — was now a logistical one. What do you do with a dead dog in your bed?

Googling suggested putting him outside or in a freezer. I called the Vet. No dice. If I'd like to have him cremated , I could bring him after 8 a.m.

I had to plan what to do. I could wrap Harry up in my duvet and carry the giant ball of cotton, down feathers, and dead dog to the vet. Except all his fluids came out after he died, so now the duvet was ruined.

I covered him in a towel instead and tried to find a bag that would fit him. After some deliberation, the only bag I knew would work was a Louis Vuitton OnTheGo — the large book tote with no top enclosure. I had been carrying him in it to his medical visits all week. This was going to be a day of big losses.

We got to the vet, where they took the dog and returned the bag empty, but the bag had to go. All I saw was Harry. It was bad enough I could visualize him bounding around the apartment's blind corners and kept his bowls out as if to say, "A dog who was as well cared for as I could muster used to live here."

I sold the bag on TheRealReal . They listed it as "like new."

Like me. A bag and a woman, navigating a "like new" life without my beloved Harry.

Watch: How dogs are trained to attack US prisoners

Main content

When Your Dog Dies: Reflection on Losing Your Best Friend

Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; Executive Director, The MGH Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds

Today we had to put down Toby.

He was a 15-year-old Australian Shepherd and probably one of the best dogs we ever had. And we've had plenty.

It seems trite to say that losing a pet is like losing a member of the family. The fact is, though, it's actually a gross understatement. Pets are unique and hold a special place in our hearts.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying that dogs are more important or more valuable than other people in our lives. But they do trump humans in many ways.

For one thing, they love us unconditionally. And that's more than I can say about many human companions.

It doesn't take much to make them happy. Even the smallest gesture evokes unequivocal joy -- throwing a toy, asking if they want to go for a ride in the car, handing them a treat. How many of us show such appreciation and adoration for such simple pleasures?

Their loyalty is only matched by the way they care for us -- perhaps even more so than we could ever care for them. Dogs can sense how we're feeling. It doesn't matter whether we're happy, angry, or sad, they just inherently know what to do. So many times I've come home exhausted, frustrated, upset, but no words or explanations were ever necessary to convey my emotions. Toby got it.

Today I accompanied my 99-year-old mother to a checkup with her internist. When I mentioned to her the loss of our dog, she wisely noted, "In some ways, it's harder than with people. At least with humans we can talk with each other, say goodbye. With animals, there's no way to have that kind of interaction. And somehow, maybe that's what makes us feel it more."

Dogs are immediately emotionally accessible. No barriers. That's more than I can say about most people. Maybe we can say goodbye, but far too often we cloak our feelings with words.

So, we humans are stuck nursing our feelings when it comes to our relationships with pets. Dogs are pretty straightforward. And, for the most part, they don't complain.

Toby skirted death a number of times in recent years. He survived surgery for liver cancer. When his vocal cord was later tied back and he lost his ability to bark, he tried all his might regardless -- even though the sound coming out sounded more like an old frog with laryngitis. Still, he went along without complaint.

Progressively he became deaf with a syndrome that also weakened his hind legs. We could only call him by clapping our hands. That became his call to "come." And, so he came when we clapped. Every time he skirted out the side door there was applause. Toby seemed just fine with the new way of communicating.

His sidekick, Bear, a cockapoo, also learned to come from clapping. The pals adjusted well.

More recently, Toby developed a urinary tract infection along with pain in his hind legs. When he lost his appetite and could hardly stand at his food bowl, I thought we were facing the end. But I brought him to the vet, and thanks to a combination of antibiotics and anti-inflammatory medications, he did pretty well. I started using doggy diapers that must have been terribly uncomfortable. Still, there was never a whimper, and he soon learned when he came in from relieving himself outdoors to wait patiently while we affixed his diaper.

He also developed a mass on his head, probably some kind of tumor. No complaints.

I certainly complain. I can't imagine not complaining through such ordeals.

What made all of this more unbearable was that through it all, Toby continued to stare you right in the eye and smile. If his legs were weak, if he couldn't walk down the stairs, if he tried to bark and nothing came out, he just received a pat on the head and panted happily. It might have been easier for me if he could just whine or moan in some way.

This morning he had a seizure. That was the final blow. The immediate family texted, and we decided there was nothing more we could do. We didn't want his latest condition to progress and cause further suffering as a result. And, the vet was not optimistic about treating seizures. The decision was made.

On the way to the vet, my wife took him to a very nice hamburger joint. She took videos of him happily scarfing down a couple of burgers. His last supper.

You might think seeing him smile all the way to his grave would bring me some kind of relief.

But it was nearly impossible for me to watch the clips without feeling a deep sadness and emptiness. I should have been happy to see him so pleased just before his death. I have no idea how my wife was able to tolerate it. Toby, like many herders, had one master -- my wife. She took on the responsibility of letting him go. It was her dog.

Maybe I'm just weak.

Why did I react this way?

I think it's because dogs and some folks, like my wife, are generally accepting -- accepting of life, hardship, even death. That's resilience.

I wonder if my being trained as a doctor reinforced the Faustian wish to know all, love all, and heal all. Or maybe I'm just too attached to these loving, playful, and forgiving creatures.

It's hard at times like this to have real perspective. But one thing is clear: We humans have a lot to learn from our canine friends.

For guidance on helping your child through the death of a pet, we invite you to check out our related blog here .

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How to Deal with the Tragic Death of Your Dog

A death that is tragic often involves a life that ends shortly or horrifically..

Posted March 30, 2021 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

Healing from tragedy involves multiple coping strategies, such as social support, distraction, and meaningful work.
Social support is one of the strongest predictors of improved mood and increased hopefulness following psychological trauma.
Self-medicating in unhealthy ways, such as with alcohol or drugs, can increase one's sense of hopelessness.

Wisdom can be found in all sorts of places. Having recently watched a YouTube video that included an interview with the late author Maya Angelou, I listened as Oprah Winfrey recounted a story in which she called her friend, the author, devastated about a personal life event. Winfrey recalled Angelou’s response to her sobbing, which included the admonishment, “Stop it.” Angelou’s admonishment continued: “Say ‘Thank you.’"

Recalling the conversation, Winfrey described how she felt stunned at the suggestion, asking “Why?” The legendary author explained to Winfrey that she must first arrest herself and be grateful for the moment she was alive enough to have that experience to begin with.

The lesson Angelou imparted is one that drives the work of many spiritual teachers as they seek to teach the public that there is wisdom and greater peace of mind in living life in the present moment and understanding one's place in the world overall. No lesson is perhaps more urgent or valuable when it comes to dealing with a major emotional crisis or tragedy.

As a psychologist who has practiced for over 20 years and has heard more emotional pain than someone with a different career may imagine, I’m constantly reminded of the extent to which crisis and tragedy embody a core characteristic of the human experience. In times of crisis and tragedy, people turn to coping behaviors in different ways, universally knowing that both negative and positive coping mechanisms are available to them. Most individuals would agree that it is part of the challenge of life to gain a more accurate understanding of which coping strategies are most effective in helping individuals rebound emotionally.

When you think of the crises or tragedies you’ve experienced in your life, which behaviors did you turn to in order to get through the experience? In addition to your own experience with tragedy, you've undoubtedly watched others navigate their own. You may have watched some turn to friends or family members for support, while others turned to drugs or alcohol ; perhaps some took weeks or months off from work, while others threw themselves into it to avoid the pain.

How People Process Tragedy

Anecdotally, I can share from my years of clinical experience that one behavior is common among individuals in the wake of a major crisis or tragedy: asking themselves how the tragedy makes sense. They question how the event happened to them and often get lost in a swirl of existential questions. They also start making attributions, relying on blame (as support for a cause-and-effect explanation) or subscribing to a victim identity (as support for the argument that they were actually entitled to a different outcome). In trying to make sense of how horrible things happen, people typically rely on a religious, scientific or emotionally-driven explanation.

The most valuable question to assess about coping with tragic loss may be this one: Which explanation helps someone emotionally survive a tragedy most effectively?

In my own life recently, I experienced what was a personal tragedy for me. I watched as my nearly 2-year-old dog was killed by a car as my family members screamed at the sight and sound of her body being hit with extreme force. Within the larger context, I am but one among millions who are pet lovers and experience every day the unique and precious bond a human can have with an animal. It’s widely acknowledged that relationships with animals and dogs, perhaps especially, are so unique and painful to lose because they provide the rare opportunity for emotional intimacy without the complexity of the emotional challenges that come with human relationships.

As I’ve coped with my loss, I tried to make sense of the tragedy in different ways. I lamented how my little Ellie (pictured) had her whole life ahead of her, then later found myself thinking about far greater tragedies, like parents whose children were victims of mass violence. As I coped, I relied on the usual behaviors one would expect in dealing with a loss: I called family and friends for comfort (increasing my sense of social support); I distracted myself from my thoughts and feelings by engaging in concrete tasks; and I returned to work, reminding myself that being helpful to others will reinforce my sense of purpose. In short, I made myself useful.

Yet by the end of the emotionally painful week, I found myself watching hours of videos by spiritual teachers who offered lessons about how to manage life most effectively. I watched videos with author, physician and medical intuitive Caroline Myss; I turned to video interviews by Oprah Winfrey with experts in various humanistic fields; I listened to podcasts from psychologist and Buddhist teacher Tara Brach.

As I was able to return to work after a few days, I asked myself which coping behavior I practiced might have helped me the most to feel functional again. Based on my own self-study, I determined that it was probably the mix of many different behaviors I used. The truth is, I have no objective way of really knowing which one was most helpful.

The Importance of Multiple Coping Mechanisms

As I prepared to write this article, I reviewed extensive bereavement research, and research overwhelmingly shows what I experienced myself: It is the mix of practicing a menu of positive coping mechanisms – not just one magical ingredient – that helps a person cope with grief.

According to a recent publication by the National Institute of Mental Health (2020), the following strategies are highlighted as being most effective: spending time with supportive loved ones and trusted friends (because having social support is positively correlated with recovery from psychological trauma); avoiding alcohol and other drugs (which could otherwise add to feelings of depression and hopelessness); and maintaining normal routines for meals, exercise, and sleep (activities which are necessary for daily healthy physiological functioning).

I can confirm from anecdotal experience with thousands of patients over the years that the impact of social support is among the most powerful healers. If you are someone who is coping with the traumatic loss of your dog or another pet, take the suggestions listed in this article and make a conscious effort to connect with people or even other pets who care for you. Part of what makes the loss of a relationship so painful is the sense that you are rendered more alone than you were before, so seek out interactions that remind you how connected you truly are.

Finally, remember that you are not the only person who has experienced a painful loss. Educate and support yourself by reading articles like this and others about coping with grief, and review videos that are focused on recovery from sadness and loss. Taking action will provide proof to you that you aren't simply waiting to feel better; you actually have a plan to make that happen.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Mental Health. (2020). Coping with Traumatic Events. Retrieved from https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/coping-with-traumatic-events/ind… .

Seth Meyers, Psy.D. , is a licensed clinical psychologist, TV guest expert, author, and relationship expert.

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What Losing My Childhood Dog Taught Me About Grief and Companionship

Chloe shaw tries to answer one question: “what is a dog”.

What is a dog? In the cosmic burnout of my bright, briny beginning, I didn’t yet know the answer to that question, same as I didn’t know the answer to: What is grief? What is a hummingbird? What is love? As I imagine it, eventually my mother or father must have pointed to our old Afghan hound, Easy, and said, “Dog.” Okay, I must have thought. I see the dog, but what is it? I see its eyes, its nose, its tail trailing hair like tentacles. But what is a tentacle? What is a dog?

My parents were newlyweds when they got her from a breeder, who, in addition to selling Egyptian puppies, was an organizer in the activist group Students for a Democratic Society in New Haven, Connecticut, where my parents lived while my dad attended architecture school. They’d been given a black cocker spaniel puppy named Clyde as a wedding gift, and they thought Clyde needed a friend—though eventually, Clyde would go to live in Texas with my dad’s aunt, who was lonely and grieving after her own dog had died. My mom had had Afghans on the brain ever since seeing them all over the Upper East Side when she was a student at Barnard.

Easy was officially named Ysé, a name my mom, the French major, found in French literature. That is where she also found the name Chloe, the Greek goddess of fertility, though I was nearly named Electra since my maiden name, Bland, seemed to beg for something a little electric. (I spent more than a few hours in my thirty-three years as Chloe Bland wondering who Electra Bland would have been—and from time to time I even tried to channel her, believing Electra capable of all the things Chloe wasn’t.)

Easy’s ancestral Egyptian name was Abaicor. But, in a rational nod toward our non-French, non-Egyptian heritage, she became good old American Easy. And good old American Easy followed my parents from New Haven, to Brooklyn, to Miami (where I was born), then back to Brooklyn for good.

Easy was my parents’ first baby—even in the way she first greeted me, their second baby, when they brought me home to Coconut Grove. My dad loves to describe how they presented her with this warm, swaddled-up, black-haired thing that was me. She took one sniff, lowered her head, and, like a demoted Disney dog, slinked back to her spot on the floor.

I wonder if she ever got over that feeling or if it just became part of her along with everything else to which wolves who’ve gone dog must adjust: stairs, crowded apartments, fire trucks. I was quite young and so don’t remember life with Easy particularly well, though somehow her sheer size suggests to me that I should.

I do, however, remember bits and pieces—her silky yellow hair, for one. I remember how she used to jump up on my babysitter, Birk, like a giant praying mantis wearing a blond wig. “Easy, Easy,” he loved to say. I remember our cat, Pearl—who’d quickly and understandably developed a distaste for me when I’d tried to get a doll dress over her head—sitting on the back of the gray couch, waiting to bat Easy’s tail whenever she walked by. I remember her shape, that sinewy silhouette, as it caught itself darkly before the sliding glass door to the green light of the garden at the back of our first Brooklyn apartment on Willow Street.

Like a proper sibling, I blamed her for things. When, at age four, I’d taken my unfulfilled desire for bangs into my own hands and hidden the chunk of hair I’d clipped from the not-so-center of my head under my bedroom chair, I declared the hair “Easy’s hair” after it was discovered by my mom while she was vacuuming. I declared this, of course, as she stared like a cat, unblinking, at the mini-Mohawk sticking up like a unicorn horn from my head.

I was four and a half when Easy suddenly collapsed in the kitchen. For years, I heard the sound of her nails trying to catch the floor—her last great act of life. My mother took her to the animal hospital in midtown Manhattan, and I never saw her again. Cancer is a word they used. But how can a word so invisibly wickedly fill a dog up?

Did Easy remember my mother’s miscarriage? I don’t. I don’t remember a lot of things that must remember me. My clenched, chubby baby fists and sopping, teething mouth inevitably filled with Easy’s hair. I don’t remember walks with her or touching her, hugging her, feeling her against me, the resident human baby. I don’t remember her smell. I don’t remember having a particular bond, more that we shared the same dashing parents and tidy, tasteful living room. This is pretty well illustrated in the numerous, now dilapidated, red photo albums still kept in my parents’ bookcase on the lowest shelf under all the architecture books. There are some photos of Easy and, once I came along, a million of me, but only a couple, I recall, of us together. Easy possessed the same enigmatic, well-groomed nature as my parents and left me in my clunky do-it-yourself-bang mess. I don’t remember her making me feel better about anything—or worse. She was an animal, and I remember her as such—snout, nails, hair. But what I remember best is what it felt like to be without her when she was gone.

A dog is nothing then. A dog is a dream I once had. A disappearance. A dog-shaped hole in an empty house.

On April 1, 1980, one week after Easy died, my family moved from our rental apartment on Willow Street around the corner to our purchased brownstone apartment on Pierrepont Street, where we lived in the top two floors. We shifted from life in the low, dark garden up into the big bright rectangle of sky. My parents bought the building with their friends the Vases: Meg, a concert pianist; George (who also played the piano), a Hungarian neurologist; and their musically gifted kids, Steven (cello) and Becky (piano), four and six years older than I was. It was unusual for the sound of their concert grand not to be skittering up through the floorboards, taking hold of teacups, ankle bones, and houseplants with the tiniest vibrations. Over the years, my parents and I developed the game of guessing which Vas was playing based on the music we heard. My mom always seemed to know best.

The building was sectioned into four separate units, one on each floor, so we essentially moved into a construction zone, living in the house while whole walls were struck down and before all the rooms as we’d know them were made. We walked on thick, dirty paper and greeted each other through plastic walls like Elliott’s family in E.T. We slept as a threesome all over the place, camping out wherever was cleanest and safest. My parents still talk about how awful that period was, living amid the mess, but, as the kid, I remember it as exciting, and probably only a quarter as long as it actually was. What I don’t remember is the sadness that they must have felt after losing Easy, their first baby, and the pregnancy, what would have been their third baby. Though maybe that all quietly fits under the “awful” umbrella of which my parents speak.

For reasons I believe were seeded long before they were born, the tendency in my family and my family’s families has been to swallow hard around hard things, to will big emotions back down. From my earliest memories, I gauged how good or bad things were by how quiet it got, how absent the bodies were around me, how fast they moved, as if motion could literally propel the bad stuff away. When things were good, bodies calmed so that I could see them. We could all go back to trying to look each other in the eyes.

Maybe it was easier that we’d moved so quickly away from that house where the dog-shaped hole still lay—the baby-shaped hole, too. Everyone got busy building a new home, a space that never knew the dog or the womb or the pain that losing both must have left. Our new life on Pierrepont Street moved forward as if there’d never been a dog or the hope for any other children but me. Easy never set foot in our Pierrepont Street home, and so there was nothing to divine from her absence there. No haunting traces. Only paint chips and sawdust to pick up. And what about their third? He or she, too, had scurried off with Easy now into the driving quiet. What didn’t I miss about the miscarriage I’d missed? Where in a body does grief you dare not speak of go? Was it grief that grew a mass on my cousin Morley’s spine, years after her sister Anne died sleepwalking out a fourth-story window? Was it grief that turned the ladybug on the dead body of a dear friend’s mother into her mother? Grief holds the body itself hostage sometimes. Why not a house, too?

__________________________________

Excerpted From What Is A Dog?: A Memoir . Copyright © 2021 by Chloe Shaw. Excerpted by Permission of Flatiron Books, A Division of Macmillan Publishers. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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On Top of Everything Else, My Dog Died

Mourning a pet when so many humans are dying might feel unseemly, but loss is loss, and it’s okay to feel it.

Our dog died on tax day. Or, rather, he died on what would have been tax day, had we not been living through a pandemic. With all due respect to Ben Franklin, in this world––where the tax deadline has been pushed back until July, and we’re all under siege from an invisible enemy––nothing can be said to be certain, except death.

Five days earlier, I had stood outside the Williamsburg Veterinary Clinic, discussing the details of Lucas’s euthanasia with the vet over the phone. Humans and their novel viruses are not allowed into the vet’s office these days. So in an ironic twist of fate, during the final days of my dog’s life, he got to hang out inside a building while I shivered on the sidewalk.

“Can I at least come in and hold him when you put him down?” I asked.

“No,” said the vet. I had no idea which vet. She was just a voice on the phone. They couldn’t risk infecting their staff, she told me, and offered to let me watch it over videochat. “When you make an appointment, just let the receptionist know you want a Zoom link too.”

A Zoom link? For my dog’s death? “I’m not sure I want that.”

What about his ashes? she asked me. Did I want those? If I did, they would cost $100 more. I live in an apartment in Brooklyn, New York. It’s not as if I can bury Lucas in my backyard. I don’t have a backyard. And I don’t know what the rules are about sprinkling ashes in the East River or under a public-park tree. I say no to the ashes.

Lucas had been in decline for more than a year, losing his sight, his teeth, his will, his energy. The vet and I had spoken in person in late December, when health authorities in China were still trying to figure out why so many of its citizens were coming down with fatal pneumonia. I told her he’d become incontinent, waking up in puddles of his own urine. What’s more, things had recently taken a turn for the worse: My normally sweet dog had started growling and chomping down on our hands, hard enough to break skin, whenever my partner or I would try to take him out for a walk. A walk! Dogs love walks. Lucas loved walks for nearly 13 years until he didn’t.

We knew his time was limited, but I didn’t want him to die until my 23-year-old daughter, the unrelenting engine behind getting a family dog in the first place, could make it home. But she was sheltering in place with her boyfriend’s family in Illinois, after being evacuated from the Peace Corps. “Mom, it’s okay,” she told me over the phone. “I’d rather he not suffer.” If none of us could hold him while he was dying anyway, what was the point in waiting?

She was 10 when we brought his tiny puppy energy into our lives. Lucas was her first dog, and mine too. All of this was new to me—the training, the chewed sneakers, the unadulterated canine love, which sometimes feels like empathy. My father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a few months after we brought Lucas home, and he died four months later. When I’d cry about this, Lucas would lick my tears.

I made an appointment to put Lucas down. I know that’s the proper way to say it––to “put down” a dog––but I couldn’t help feeling as if I were calling a hit man to plot a murder. On the day before his death, I let him sniff around Transmitter Park without a leash, and then I fed him cheddar cheese for lunch and beef stroganoff for dinner, straight from my plate. We’d trained him so well not to beg for scraps, plus people food always gave him diarrhea, but what did it matter now?

My youngest, 13, came with me to take Lucas to his final vet appointment. Life with Lucas is all he’s ever known. We sat on the concrete floor in the vestibule between the sidewalk and the vet’s office. I called the receptionist. “We’re here to put down our dog,” I said, and I immediately broke into quiet sobs.

Read: Dear Therapist's guide to staying sane during a pandemic

The young couple waiting six feet away for their dog to be returned after his checkup quietly slipped out, onto the sidewalk, to give us some privacy. We held Lucas in our laps on the floor and told him how much we loved him. Pull yourself together , I chided myself. More than 10,000 humans had died of COVID-19 in New York City alone, and untold more had been infected, including my family and me . Weeping over a dog felt unseemly.

Except loss is loss. It takes many forms. The loss of normalcy and schedules. The loss of hugs and dinner parties, maskless smiles and busy sidewalks. The loss of sitting with strangers in a pizza joint, enjoying a slice. The loss of salaries. The loss of health care. The loss of sleep. The loss of weddings and funerals, bar mitzvahs and christenings, graduations and family vacations. My son and I, at that very moment, were supposed to have been on a mother-son trip in London for his spring break, visiting Harry Potter World. I’d scrimped and saved, with the fruits of four jobs, to buy those plane tickets, and now both my money and my special time with my son were lost.

Even before putting down our dog, I had cried, during the course of these past five and a half weeks, over losses great and small. I cried over the death of a friend and over the deaths of so many parents of friends that I’ve lost count. I cried one night at 2 a.m., when all three of us in my household were sick with COVID-19, and I couldn’t breathe, and I wasn’t sure I’d make it until morning. I’ve cried watching Governor Andrew Cuomo’s briefings. I’ve cried reading the news. I cried over my daughter’s evacuation from East Cameroon, a year and a half before the end of her service, just as she had cried when she told me she was being forced to leave her tiny village, her health-care projects, and the friends she’d made. “They won’t survive the coronavirus, Mom. They just won’t.” The three beds in her village’s health clinic had no sheets, let alone masks or respirators.

I’ve cried over the disappearance of my eldest son’s job. I’ve cried over missing my younger son’s upcoming graduation from eighth grade. I’d once mocked New York City public schools for holding eighth-grade graduations––come on, seriously?––but now I could really go for the simple pleasure of a communal ritual. I’ve cried over my ex-husband having to ride out his quarantine alone , without his son. I’ve cried over my new partner being separated from his son. I’ve cried over missing my friends and seeing the streets of New York emptied and the residual, ongoing damage to my lungs from COVID-19.

Read: My whole household has COVID-19

And now I was crying over a dog too. Our dog who, as a puppy, had licked my tears as my father lay dying and, in so doing, made me laugh.

“You ready?” The receptionist stepped into the vestibule wearing gloves, goggles, a protective robe, and a mask.

“I guess,” I said, hugging Lucas one last time and letting him go with a primal wail. My son hunched over his knees, weeping into his arms. At that exact moment, the young couple waiting for their dog walked back in and, with perfect comic timing, quickly turned on their heels to walk back out when they heard our sobs.

“He won’t be needing his leash anymore,” the receptionist said.

“Oh, right.” I took off his leash.

“Or his collar.”

I removed his collar. Seeing his name on the little silver name tag made me cry anew. My daughter had named him Lucas, much to my consternation. Before her father, I’d loved a French photographer named Luc, and I didn’t want the daily reminder. But soon enough after bringing the puppy into our home, Lucas the dog had nothing to do with Luc the photographer. I was able to compartmentalize my grief over the loss of Luc’s love and keep it separate from my burgeoning love for our dog.

Read: How are parents supposed to deal with joint custody right now?

Soon enough, I knew, as my son and I walked back home in the cold April wind, clutching the empty collar and leash and each other for comfort, I would be able to compartmentalize the loss of Lucas as well. To forgive myself for not holding him as he took his last breath. To absolve myself of the guilt I felt for mourning the loss of a dog during a human pandemic.

To be alive means to lose: love, time, others, opportunities, then finally ourselves. The minute we’re born, we have one foot in the grave. Each of us knows this as we putter through life, searching for food, shelter, and meaning before the great cliff drop. And yet still we march on into the wind, tears streaming down our cheeks, clutching mementos of those we loved, however large, small, or furry.

Coping With Grief

How to Deal With Grief After Your Dog Dies: 11 Tips

Updated 05/2/2022

Published 12/2/2020

Dr. Alejandra Vasquez, JD, CT

Certified Grief Counselor

Learn how to deal with the death of your dog, including tips for coping and remembering your pet.

Cake values integrity and transparency. We follow a strict editorial process to provide you with the best content possible. We also may earn commission from purchases made through affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. Learn more in our affiliate disclosure .

Suffering the death of your beloved dog and faithful companion can be heart-wrenching. This type of blow can leave you suffering great pain, sadness, and confusion over days, weeks, and months. Losses such as the death of a dog can often go unrecognized by friends and family who may not understand when you tell them, “I’m devastated that my dog died.”

Jump ahead to these sections:

What you can do to help your grief immediately after your dog died, what you can do when you’re missing your dog after it died.

What You Can Do When You’re Overcome WIth Tears After Your Dog Died

What You Can Do to Remember or Memorialize Your Dog After It Died

Some people are unable to comprehend the significance of a pet companion’s death. However, it is important to remember that experiencing grief over the loss of your dog is real and immeasurable. There are days when you’ll feel the effects of your loss more than others.

Dealing with your grief after your dog dies may prove challenging at first, but in time, you’ll learn how to survive through your loss little by little with each passing day.

After suffering this type of loss, you may not know what to do when your dog dies . There are so many thoughts and emotions racing through your head that you may be unprepared for the grief reaction that follows.

Grieving the death of your dog is normal and expected. You may need some time to start feeling back to your old self after their death. You can do some things immediately after their death to help you cope with your grief to lessen the effects of your sorrow and pain.

1. Hold your dog

Coping with a pet loss is one of the most challenging things to go through, especially if it was just the two of you providing love, companionship, and support to the other. Losing a pet can feel as emotionally devastating as losing a loved one. Sometimes it can feel worse, depending on how close the two of you were.

To help ease the emotional pain of losing your pet, it helps to hold them one final time. Don’t be afraid to hug your dog close to you immediately after they die. Holding your dog, hugging, and kissing them will help give closure to your relationship. Talk to your vet about proper disposal, cremation, or burial of your dog’s body after you’ve had time to say your final goodbyes.

2. Say your goodbyes

Take the opportunity to say your final goodbyes to your dog immediately after it dies. Talking to your dog and saying the things you needed to say one last time will ease some of the pain of losing them.

You can tell your pet how much you loved them and what they meant to you. Let your dog know that it’ll be challenging to move forward without them there to greet you as before, but that you’ll slowly try to find new meaning in your life now that they’re gone.

3. Talk to someone

Call someone you trust immediately after your dog dies so that they can come over and console you during this difficult time. Going through this experience alone can be especially challenging. Having someone to share your grief with will make it easier for you to cope with your loss.

When choosing who to call, keep in mind that not everyone is sympathetic to the loss of a pet. Some people simply cannot understand how a dog can mean so much to you. You may hear insensitive responses to your loss, such as, “It was just a dog,” or “you can always get another one.” Try and avoid calling someone with this particular outlook on pets, so they don’t make you feel worse than you already do.

You can expect that you’ll go through good days and suffer some bad days after your dog dies. Emotional ups and downs are a normal part of the grieving process and should be expected to occur for several weeks after your cherished pet’s death.

To help you while you’re mourning the death of your dog, consider engaging in activities that’ll help lift your spirits whenever you’re missing them the most.

4. Go through their things

Don’t get rid of all of your dog’s toys, blankets, and things immediately after they die. Consider placing their favorite things in a bin and storing them for later use when you feel the need to be close to them.

During those days, when you’re missing your dog, pull out the bin and go through all the mementos that you’ve stored. You may find yourself bursting into a fit of tears, but this release of emotions is good for you as you begin to heal from your grief.

5. Look at old photographs

Going through old pictures of you and your dog more than likely will make you laugh and cry all at the same time. You may find yourself missing them at that moment more than ever.

Expect that the photographs will cause you to remember things that you may have forgotten about your pet. Don’t allow feelings of guilt or shame to surface for having forgotten certain things about your dog or for continuing to mourn their death.

6. Talk to others about your dog

Sharing stories and memories of your pet with others will help you deal with your grief. The more you talk about your pet, the more you’re able to release any emotions you may have unwittingly been suppressing.

Some people may not understand why the death of your dog has affected you so much. You may want to skip talking about your pet and your grief to them and consider talking to someone else who understands the significance of your loss.

What You Can Do When You’re Overcome With Tears After Your Dog Died

The death of your beloved pet can be traumatic and a devastating loss to have to shoulder. There will be times when your emotions will get the better of you, and you might find it difficult to control your sadness and sorrow.

7. Take a few deep breaths

There’s nothing wrong with expressing your feelings and emotions. It’s okay to cry whenever you feel an overwhelming need to do so. Consider taking a step away from a public area and finding a quiet space where you can be alone with your grief.

Allow the tears to flow and take a few deep breaths to help calm yourself. Pay close attention to each breath that goes in, hold it for a second or two, and slowly release it to the count of five. In a few minutes, you’ll find that your grief has somewhat subsided, and you’re ready to resume whatever you were doing.

8. Go for a walk

Walks can be very therapeutic when you’re grieving a loss. Whenever you find yourself overcome with grief, take a few minutes to go out for a walk. Don’t let the weather detract you from going out to enjoy nature.

Sometimes a little bit of fresh rain or brisk air can do wonders for the soul. Bundle up if you need to, but do find the time to take a walk to help calm your emotions.

9. Cuddle your other pets

Sometimes when a pet dies, you might find yourself neglecting any others you might have. If you have more than one pet, set some time aside to love and cuddle your other pets.

You’ll not only feel better, but they’ll also feel better as well. Pets grieve their losses in much the same way that you do. They feel and understand the loss of other pets in the household and can sense your pain.

Experiencing the loss of your dog can trigger some intense pain and emotional responses. Your grief reaction to their loss will depend on how long you had your pet, the bond you shared, and their death circumstances.

To further help you cope with your grief, it might help you read books about losing a pet . These books offer tips and advice on dealing with your pet’s loss and how to move forward and heal your pain.

10. Have a memorial plaque made

One way to commemorate your pet’s life and death is to have a memorial plaque made with their picture and dates of birth and death etched in. This is a beautiful way to create a lasting pet memorial to help you get through some of the more challenging days ahead.

11. Plant a garden

A pet memorial garden is another way to remember your furry loved one after it has died. The grieving process after a pet loss can last anywhere from several weeks to several months. In some instances, you’ll grieve the death of your pet for many years after they’ve died.

Planting a memorial garden in their honor will help alleviate some of the pain associated with their loss. If you don’t have an outdoor space dedicated to their memory, consider installing an indoor rock or zen garden.

12. Donate a park bench

You can create a legacy in your dog’s honor whenever you donate a park bench engraved with their name on it. To help you cope with your loss, consider installing a bench in some of your favorite places that you’d take your dog to. The local dog park or town square is a good place to seek permission to sponsor or donate a bench.

To find out if you’re able to have a memorial bench installed, contact your local city offices or parks and recreation department. They will know who to direct you to determine the availability and costs associated with donating and installing a memorial bench.

Coping After Death of Dog

Dealing with the loss of a pet can deplete your energy and overall well-being. It’s essential to continue to take care of yourself as you learn to live without your beloved and cherished pet. Take the time necessary to grieve your loss, and don’t be ashamed of missing your dog and grieving over their death. In time, you’ll start to feel better slowly.

After you’ve healed, this might be an excellent time to consider adopting another pet if you think you’re ready to do so.

How to Cope When Your Dog is Dying: 19 Tips

Your Dog Died: What Should You Do Now?

12 Special Things to Do On Your Dog’s Last Day

27 Valuable Tips for Coping With a Pet Loss

My dog died while I was in isolation. The loss has been profound

A woman in a grey jumper hugs a black dog to her chin

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Pink banner with white text: Perspective

Every afternoon, after dinner, my dog Bo would play a game.

Once he'd finished eating, he would clip contentedly into the kitchen from the yard, turn around so he could stare out the back door, and wait.

He heard them coming before he could see them: a family of magpies who lived in a nearby gumtree, cooing and warbling in the fading light.

They'd hop down and across the adjoining fence and flit carefully onto the pavement, angling for any leftover food in Bo's blue bowl.

A black dog with brown eyes sits in the grass looking at the camera

He would watch them from the kitchen in strategic silence. They'd start from the back of the courtyard and slowly creep forward, their sharp eyes sweeping for signs of danger.

Then, when they got close enough to their bounty, Bo would race out into the yard — his tail and ears flapping in delight — to chase them away.

He'd do this again and again before eventually giving up, rewarding the magpies for their perseverance.

This game became part of Bo's routine, just as watching it became part of mine.

During Sydney's rolling lockdowns, it was one of the many small things that created a rhythm to our days, these brief moments of joy punctuating a time that felt blurry and endless.

We were creatures of habit. Every morning, he'd pad into my bedroom and snuffle me awake with his wet nose. He'd sit patiently at my feet while I made lunch, gratefully accepting slices of chicken or handfuls of cheese. We'd run shapes around the local park every afternoon and curl up in front of the TV at night (he'd always fall asleep early, barking softly as he dreamed).

We were deeply woven into each other's lives.

A black dog runs along some sand in the sunset

A pet owner's worst nightmare

That's why his sudden death was so devastating.

A few weeks ago, after returning home from a holiday, I realised something wasn't right. It was close to midnight, and Bo was pacing up and down the hallway, unable to sit or lay down. He needed an emergency vet.

The trouble was I couldn't take him myself — I'd tested positive for COVID and was in isolation.

A generous friend came and collected him for me, staying in emergency until 2am while they waited for scans.

A black dog stands on some grass next to the ocean

The next day, my phone rang. The vet had found a lump near Bo's prostate, which was blocking some critical organs.

"The colour and where it is in his body suggest it's ... probably cancer," the nurse said sadly.

Time stopped. I was still laying in bed, flattened by illness. My head was foggy, my bones ached, my muscles throbbed. But that one word sliced through it all like a cold knife. Cancer .

"What do I do?" I finally breathed, posing the question more to myself than to the nurse.

She took a long pause, trying to find the words.

"We usually don't operate on it when it's this bad …"

I already knew what cancer looked like; I'd watched my dad wither away from it when I was young.

"How long …?"

She paused again.

"We can bring him home to you for a few hours today."

My last day with Bo

Someone told me once that grief is love with nowhere to go. My last day with Bo was spent the same way we'd spent the past five years — together, doing the things we loved.

I fed him cold chicken and cheese from the bag and spoonfuls of peanut butter that got stuck in his teeth.

I talked to him about my day and how fun our recent trip was and the people he'd never get to say goodbye to.

We sat in the yard and listened to the magpies sing to each other somewhere beyond the trees.

I laid by his side and gently combed my fingers through his fur as he drifted to sleep in his own bed, one last time.

A close-up photo of a black dog with brown eyes

My friend came and collected him that afternoon. He hopped excitedly into her car (he loved car rides), thinking he was going somewhere else.

I watched the silhouette of his floppy ears wave to me through the rear window as they disappeared down the road.

Walking back through my house was like walking through a museum. I moved quietly past the artefacts of his old life, and of mine; the sticks he'd carried home from the park, half-chewed toys scattered down the hall, his blue lead curled up near the door, his round bed in the middle of the living room, still slightly warm to the touch.

It's been a few weeks now and I haven't moved them yet. I'm afraid that if I do, it will be the start of the process of forgetting — even if that will make his loss, and my guilt at not being there in his final moments, easier to bare.

Like most pets, Bo was more than just a dog to me. He was family, anchoring me in my life at a time when the chaos of the world threatened to tear me out of it.

The loss of a pet is rarely just that — it is the loss of patterns and routines, the companionship offered and sought, the spaces taken up in cupboards and on floors, the life brought to an otherwise empty room.

I sat in the yard yesterday and waited for the magpies again.

They flitted down from the trees and kept their distance at first, as they always did.

After a few minutes, sensing no danger, they crept a little closer and leaned over to inspect Bo's bowl, which is now just filled with rain.

There are no games anymore, no morning wake-up calls, no runs together in the afternoon.

All I have is this loss, this quiet house, and this love that now has nowhere to go.

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Our pandemic puppy died suddenly. Here's how we (and our kids) learned to grieve

Our dog's swift death sent shockwaves through our family.

It’s appropriate I was on a baseball field when I got the call because it came out of left field.

“I think Wags just died,” my wife said.

I immediately left my younger son’s baseball practice and raced home where our dog Wags lay motionless on our couch after my wife had moved him there following a brief seizure in our yard.

Wags was a trooper after he had to wear a cone following each of his surgeries.

Our 14-month-old Terrier mix, whom we had rescued only 11 months earlier, had died without any warning. One minute, Wags — so named because his tail oscillated back and forth with unadulterated joy and fervor — was on the front lawn with my wife, our older son and his friends. He was enjoying the spring sunshine and getting belly rubs from the kids when he had a seizure in front of our neighbors who were walking by our house. The next minute, he was inexplicably gone, quicker than a passing spring rainstorm.

Wags shown here in a a moment of relaxation that we can only guess may have been full of pain.

Wags was our pandemic puppy. We joined the legion of people adopting pets during quarantine , a strategic move since we already have two other elderly dogs and thought a puppy would be good to soften the blow for our sons, then aged 7 and 10, when the older animals start showing their age.

“This will be the dog of their youth,” I once told my wife.

For a while, things went as planned: He was full of love and pep and our oldest dog lost weight by playing with him.

About three months after we got Wags, though, he stopped running around in our backyard and began howling in agony, even when no one was around him. Advised by specialists that his knees were the source of his troubles, we elected to have him undergo a pair of surgeries on each knee to help him walk without pain, but the howling continued and a neurologist suggested a costly MRI, which he cautioned might not pinpoint the problem. Money had become an issue and we worked with a veterinarian to mitigate his pain, using a cocktail of medications that seemed to have had a positive impact. We knew he was ill but had no idea just how sick he was.

As a young puppy, Wags had darker hair and had yet to display any symptoms that would later cause concern.

“Those sudden losses are very traumatic,” Susan Anschuetz, a Denver-based marriage and family therapist who specializes in pet loss, told me. "And there's a common denominator of feeling helpless. And it makes the grieving initially very difficult because you just can't believe it happened.”

My wife and I hope Wags knows how much we loved him. We feel awful knowing he didn’t have the life he could’ve had. He was a good boy; his days revolved around lunchtime feedings — that tail starting its inevitable back-and-forth shortly before noon each day as we laid out his bowl of food since we were working from home. It’s part of the multistep process of coping with the death of a young pet.

Wags was always a little nervous when he would go to the veterinarian.

“I would definitely encourage your whole family to process together and maybe memorialize together, talk about the loss and what it was like for each of them, if they're willing or wanting to talk about it,” Anschuetz advised. “Because sharing that loss is probably the most important coping strategy there is.”

Anschuetz also recommends making a photo album or a board with pictures and creating a personal memorial site.

That’s worked for us. We have spoken with our children about Wags about how we will remember him. Our younger son drew a picture of him, and we keep Wags' ashes in our house.

A picture our younger son, then 7, made after Wags died.

Anschuetz said it’s important to respect children’s boundaries.

Wags sported a scar after one of his surgeries.

“Avoid prejudging what your kids are feeling because they may not feel anything like you do,” she said.

“And sometimes they surprise us. So try to be sure to elicit from them what they're feeling and what they need — and what's bothering them the most.”

Anschuetz says it’s vital to be on the lookout when the sorrow doesn’t end.

“I think the sign of grief that's problematic is when it stays intense and unchanging for months and months and years. And that that is a sign of someone's feeling being kind of stuck in the initial parts of loss,” she said.

Wags’ death has weighed heavily on us in no small part because we tried to take care of him. But, to some degree, we feel like we failed. There’s a sense of guilt that Anschuetz says is normal.

“And because our animals are so dependent on us, we feel completely responsible for everything that happens,” she said.

Children can be vulnerable to feelings of guilt as well.

“You just want to make sure to not miss anything that they might be feeling,” Anschuetz said.

As a family, we’ve already discussed getting another dog. But we want to make sure we do it right: This new dog shouldn’t be a replacement, an animal we constantly compare to Wags or lives in his shadow.

Pets & Animals What veterinarians wished you knew before euthanizing your pet

We want a dog we love simply for being ours and being part of our family. Is there a blueprint for getting another pet?

“There is not, but I'll tell you that, in general, I would say most times, people are going to want to have another pet after they've grieved for the one they lost,” Anschuetz said. “And that means you've come to a place where you accept the loss.”

Let it happen

You can’t force someone to get over the sudden loss of a pet. As a result, you can’t move on to getting a new one. Everything has to organically flow and people should embrace that.

“They let themselves grieve first and then they begin to think about another pet. It comes about quite naturally,” Anschuetz said.

“It’s very important that we respect the process and allow it and not fight it. We need to let ourselves grieve,” she added.

It’s been nearly two months since Wags died. Life has resumed its normal cadence for us, but we still think about him. We talk about him sometimes when we put our kids to bed. I sometimes smile in sadness when thinking about him while I brush my teeth; like his howling, there’s no pattern as to when he crosses my mind.

We all miss him. But we’re also anxious to get another pet. And, in some ways, I’d like to think that his horrible fate will have created the timing for us to get the puppy that will bring us years of many wonderful memories as the dog of our kids’ youth.

Drew Weisholtz is a reporter for TODAY Digital, focusing on pop culture, nostalgia and trending stories. He has seen every episode of “Saved by the Bell” at least 50 times, longs to perfect the crane kick from “The Karate Kid” and performs stand-up comedy, while also cheering on the New York Yankees and New York Giants. A graduate of Rutgers University, he is the married father of two kids who believe he is ridiculous.

How to cope with losing a dog

For many of us, losing our dog can be absolutely devastating. They showered us with affection and love, were constantly by our side (as well as under our feet or on our laps) and were a much-loved family member, so it’s natural for you to feel that their death has left an empty hole in your life. Grieving for your dog is tough, but it’s important that you take the time to understand how you feel and find ways to cope with these difficult emotions.

Absolutely. It’s perfectly natural to be overcome by grief and sadness when you lose a dog. Your dog loved you and you loved them back. Their big personality was an enormous part of your life and your routine, so of course you’re going to mourn them.

Many of us are often surprised by just how much we’re affected by the death of our dog. Sadly, as a society, our mourning process for a pet is often seen quite differently from when we lose a human friend or family member. Many of the support mechanisms that usually help us to cope with the passing of a loved one just aren’t there when we lose our dog. We tend not to take time off work to grieve, our feelings may be unintentionally belittled (“It was only a dog” or “Are you going to get a new one”?) and we might even feel embarrassed or ashamed about how much we’re hurting. But the relationship you had with your dog was a big part of your life, and may even have been a big part of your identity. Losing that relationship and routine is bound to hurt. No matter what others may think, it’s ok to feel the way you do.

The relationship you had with your dog is unique to you, so how you feel is a testament to the special bond that you both shared. The connection we have with our dogs is often simpler than the ones we have with other people. Dogs are always there for us, are usually the first to greet us at the door, often with a frantic wag of the tail, and many of us spend more time with our dog than we do with our other family members. Because of this bond, many people find the death of their dog to be a difficult time; but it can be a confusing time too. Coping with losing a best friend and a member of the family is hard, but sometimes losing a dog is more than that.

Having a dog can create a sense of purpose and can give your day structure. Fixed feeding times, regularly taking your dog out for a walk and being woken up early all become part of your daily routine. After a dog dies, many people find this abrupt change to their life is difficult to cope with and many feel lost without it. Losing a dog is not just losing a dear friend or family member, but it can also be a loss of a way of life too.

Everyone grieves in different ways and each person that deals with loss needs something different to support them. How you grieve for your dog is unique to you; there is no right or wrong way to feel. Some people may find their grief changes and flows through different stages, while others may find that their feelings come in waves or cycles. Feeling sad, shocked, numb, angry, empty, guilty or lonely are all normal reactions to losing your dog. Feeling upset by the passing of your dog isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s a completely normal reaction to loss.

If you feel like you’re really struggling with your mental health , share how you feel with your family, friends or GP, or speak to someone on a mental health or depression helpline . You’re not alone in how you feel and there are lots of people who can help you cope with these feelings.

Sadly, there isn’t a timetable for when things will begin to feel easier. It would be nice to know how long you’re going to feel like this, but grief is a gradual process and it’s important to try to be patient with how you feel. Grief isn’t always straightforward. Some days will be easier than others, but, in general, your feelings should become less intense as time goes on. Some people feel better in weeks, while for others it may be months or even longer.

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The death of a dog can be painful and upsetting, but it’s a natural response to death and loss. There is no right or wrong way to process how you feel, but there are a few things you can do that may help you understand and cope with your grief:

Take time to grieve - Your pet may have been part of your life for a long time, which means that getting used to not having them around might take some time too. How we grieve can’t be hurried along or forced, but it’s a process that we go through at our own pace. Try not to compare yourself to how others are feeling. We all cope with loss in our own way. You feel what you feel and you shouldn’t feel guilty or ashamed of that
Be good to yourself - Dealing with your feelings after losing your dog can be emotionally and physically draining. Make sure you take care of yourself so that you can process your loss. Try to keep up with your everyday essentials, like eating well, getting enough sleep, socialising and exercising. If you’re able to, and need to, try taking some time off work. Carry on with your normal hobbies or maybe start a new one to help keep you busy
Talking - Talking about how you feel and what you’re going through can be a helpful way to process your loss. It may be difficult for some people to appreciate the connection you had with your dog and to understand how you feel. If your usual circle of friends or family doesn’t understand what you’re going through, try talking to other pet owners who do. There’s nothing quite like talking to someone face-to-face, but chatting to people on social media or on online message boards can help too. There are also several pet bereavement helplines that your veterinary practice may be able to point you towards, e.g. The Blue Cross also offers a free pet bereavement service for anyone who has lost a pet
Put your feelings on paper - Some people find that writing down memories or expressing how they feel can help them manage their grief. Some people may paint or draw, or create a journal with photos of things they experienced with their dog. Others find it helpful to write a letter to their dog telling them how they feel and what they will miss
Find new routines - Having a dog can give you a sense of purpose and a routine. If these are suddenly taken away from you, it can feel quite disorientating and may make you feel a little lost. Taking your dog out for a walk was great for them, but also gave you exercise and a chance to say “hi” to other owners. It’s important that you still exercise and get out. You could carry on with your daily walks, or you could find other hobbies that get you out and about and socialising again
Remove items at your own pace - Some people prefer to tidy their dog’s things away quickly, while others take comfort from them and prefer to clear them out gradually while they process their loss. Make sure you do things at your own pace and sort out your dog’s things when you feel you’re ready to deal with them
Have a memorial - Holding your own ceremony to scattering your dog’s ashes, or bury them in your garden, can help you process your loss. This can give you and your family a chance to express how they feel or share their favourite memories. Having a grave marker or something to remember your dog can help you feel close to them and give you a place to go when you miss them. Other ways to help remember your dog are by planting a tree, putting up photos or creating a memory box that holds some of the things that remind you of your dog
Dealing with signs of depression - The shock and emotional devastation of losing a dog can trigger mental health problems. Negative feelings are natural while your grieving, but if you feel that these emotions are out of control, or if you’re concerned that you may be depressed, then talk to your family, friends and your GP

Making the decision to have your dog put to sleep is one of the hardest choices any owner has to make. It’s normal and common for owners to feel guilty about having their dog put to sleep and many owners ask themselves if they made the right choice. If you blame yourself, remember that you made an impossible decision out of love and because they weren’t going to get better. Choosing to say goodbye to your dog is never easy, but remember that it was the best decision for your dog and it was a tough choice that you made because you cared for them.

Losing a dog can be a confusing and distressing time for any child. Whether this is their first experience of death, or something they’ve been through before, it’s an opportunity to help them understand and cope with their feelings of loss. How you help your child really depends on their age, but it’s important to be honest with them and explain what’s happened in a sensitive and age-appropriate way.

Children learn how to behave by watching those around them, so how you react while you’re grieving can influence how they cope with the death of their dog. It’s important for you to talk to them about your emotions and how you feel and reassure them that it’s ok to feel sad. Your child will be grieving too and may feel a range of emotions that might be confusing to them. If they choose to talk about their feelings, make sure that they feel listened to by empathising with what they say. You may not feel as sad as your child, but you should ensure they have time to grieve and let them talk openly about how they feel.

As well as feeling sad, some children may feel angry, guilty or might blame others for the passing of their dog. For some children, it may make them scared that they’re going to lose other people or things that they love. Death can raise a lot of questions in a child’s mind, so it’s important to try to answer their questions to help them understand more about what’s happened and what it means to die. These questions can be incredibly tough and upsetting to answer, especially if you’re grieving too, but try to be as honest and sensitive as possible. You could try going to your local library to find books for children on coping with loss.

To help them manage their grief, let your child find a creative way to remember their pet. This could be decorating a framed photo that they put by their bed, a memory box, a drawing, a painting or they could write a letter to their dog. Holding a memorial service for your dog may also help them come to terms with their loss and might help them to talk about how they feel.

It’s important that your child is given time to grieve and process what their loss means to them. Getting another dog, or a replacement pet, could make them feel disloyal to the dog they have just lost. Buying a dog too quickly could also give them the wrong message and imply that their dog wasn’t important and can easily be replaced. It’s better to wait until the whole family has come to terms with the death of their dog and decide together when you’re all ready for another pet.

Coping with the loss of a pet can be especially difficult for some older people, particularly if they live by themselves. Having the sole companionship of a dog gives their owner a routine, regular exercise and a great excuse to chat to people. After losing a dog, it’s very easy for their house to feel empty, quiet and lonely, and may bring back familiar feelings of loss that they’ve experienced throughout their life. Getting another dog may be a complicated decision to make, especially if there’s a chance that the new dog could outlive their owner. If you live by yourself, try to keep busy and active. It’s very easy to stay at home, especially when grieving, but joining a new club, taking a new class or regularly meeting friends or neighbours might help you work through your grief.

When a dog dies, other dogs or pets may be confused as to where they are and may grieve as well. Your pets may whimper, go off their food , seem down or may come to you for reassurance. Make sure you give them plenty of positive attention and try to stick to their normal routine. Try playing games with them or taking them for more walks to help distract them. Focusing on your other pets can help make them feel better, but can help you deal with the death of your dog too.

Sadly, it’s fairly common for breeders to lose puppies, either during pregnancy or whelping . Animals with a larger litter size sometimes have a puppy that is stillborn, or fades quickly. Although it’s a natural part of breeding, it doesn’t make it any easier to see. Breeders can take every step to make sure that the mother and father are a suitable match, with great health results and low inbreeding coefficients, and still lose puppies. Sometimes, a large number of puppies or an entire litter can be lost, and it can be devastating for a breeder. Their grief is often mixed with confusion over what happened and questions about if they did anything wrong. Unfortunately, these things sometimes happen and are usually completely unpredictable. Make sure you give yourself time to grieve and process these complicated feelings, and talk to your vet to help you try to understand what happened.

After your dog has died, many owners are tempted to rush into getting a new pet to replace them, but this may not be a good idea. There are lots of reasons why having a dog in your life is wonderful, but charging into a big decision like this, especially while you’re still grieving could be a mistake. Having time to grieve and deal with your loss can help you build stronger and healthier relationships with any future dogs you may get. Getting another dog too soon might not be fair to the new dog, as you may have unrealistic expectations that they can replace the dog you recently lost. Each dog is different and a new dog may have a completely different personality to the dog you lost, even if they’re the same breed or from the same family.

Knowing when to get another dog is a very personal choice to make. You’ll know when the time is right for you, but always make sure that you get a new dog for the right reasons. Whenever you’re thinking of getting a new dog, always think about it carefully and ask yourself whether it’s the right thing to do, how it might affect you and your life and whether it would be right for the new dog too.

Everyone copes with grief in different ways. How a person feels after their dog has died will depend on the relationship they had with their dog. Don’t be afraid to ask them how they are. For many people, the loss of a dog is painful and devastating, but talking about how they feel can help them process their grief. Losing a dog is not just about losing their best friend, or even a family member, but it’s a loss to their normal routine as well. Taking a dog out for a walk several times a day can be stress relieving and a great way to exercise and meet other dog walkers. No longer having those routines can often make people feel lost and unsettled.

If someone you know has lost a dog, make sure to check in on them. Ask if there is anything that you can do, offer to keep them company or ask if they want to go for a walk. Always try to empathise with the way they feel and let them grieve in their own time.

Essay on My Pet Dog for Students and Children

500+ Words Essay on My Pet Dog

Pets are a great blessing in anyone’s life. They are the only ones who love us unconditionally. Pets always offer us everything they have without asking for anything in return. The main aim of any pet’s life is to make their owner happy. Nowadays, even the term ‘owner’ is changing. People prefer their pets as kids and to themselves as parents. This is how the relationship between pets is evolving. People treat them no less than humans. For instance, they celebrate their birthdays; get those matching outfits and more.

In my opinion, I feel the pets rightly deserve it. The most common pet you can find at anyone’s place is dogs. A man’s best friend and the most faithful animal, a dog. I also have a pet dog that I love to bits. We got him when he was a little baby and have watched him grow into a beautiful dog. All my family members love him with all their heart. We love his silly antics and cannot imagine our lives without him. We named him Sasha.

Sasha – My Pet Dog

My father adopted Sasha when he was a little baby. His friend had given birth to puppies and they decided to put the puppies up for adoption. We convinced our father to get one for us. Considering they knew our family well, they immediately agreed. Little did we know that our lives would change forever after his entrance.

Sasha came in like a blessing for our family. He belongs to the breed of Labrador. Sasha was black in colour, pure coal black. He came in as a puppy with his cute little paws and eyes. We couldn’t stop gushing over this beauty. My siblings used to fight with each other as to who will get the maximum time to play with Sasha.

Read 500 Words Essay on Dog here

As and when Sasha grew up, he learned various tricks. We trained him to follow our instructions and he even learned a few tricks. We loved showing him off to our colony friends and relatives. I always took Sasha out with me as he loved taking a walk on the road.

Furthermore, my siblings and I took on the responsibility of keeping Sasha clean. Every week, we took turns to bathe him and brush him nicely. I remember I even got a bow for him from my pocket money. Sasha loved it and wagged his tail in excitement. Sasha has been with us through thick and thin and we will forever be indebted to him for his loyalty.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

A Changed Life

Before having a pet dog, we didn’t know what all we would experience. After Sasha came into our lives, he changed it forever. Sasha changed the meaning of loyalty for us. We learned how this faithful animal always worked for our happiness and safety.

Certainly, Sasha made us better human beings. We are now more compassionate towards animals. There was one instance where the stray dogs were going to harm a kitten, and to our surprise, Sasha saved that little kitten and got her home.

In other words, we have learned a lot of things from Sasha. He protected us when we slept at night. He tried to cheer us up whenever anyone of us was sad. Sasha’s obedience inspired me a lot to be kind to my parents. Therefore, all the credit for changing our lives goes to Sasha.

Q.1 What are some common pet animals?

A.1 Some of the most common pet animals are dogs, cats, parrots, hamsters, rabbits, turtles and more.

Q.2 Why should one own a pet dog?

A.2 We can learn a great deal from our pet dogs. They teach us loyalty, compassion, courage, and obedience.

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The day my pet dog died was the most unforgettable day in my life!

kurouske55 1 / 2 Nov 9, 2013 #1 The most unforgettable moment in my life is the day when my pet dog died. Being just a young innocent boy, I really never understood the meaning of death or the purpose of it. All I could understand is that it comes uninvited unexpectedly and it is inevitable, for all life will come to an end one day. The tragic moment happened when I took my pet dog out for a walk. It was when we reached an intersection and was crossing a pedestrian line when a car turning left immediately rushed to turn after I passed him and all of sudden a loud cry came from my dog. As I look behind me, I saw my dog got run over by the car which did not stopped at all and just drove off. I was there standing, looking and waited for my dog to get up and run around just like he always does, even though blood are gushing out of his mouth and eyes. Tears started to pour out like a waterfall as I carried him to the side of the road. The smell was nauseating and the sticky feeling of the blood on my hand, yet I could not stop holding him as he takes his last remaining breath with agony. I don't know if it's because of my tears or the smell of the blood that makes everything around me seems so dull and dark with his emotionless and motionless body in my tiny arms as I rushed home. To know that just a few hours ago he was whining and giving me the puppy eyes so I could take him to walk but now all of that is over as my dad and I buried him in our yard. I thought of all the good time we had together. He was adorable, playful, energetic and above all he was my best friend. Although it took quite some time for me to get over it as I would always find myself expecting my dog to greet me whenever I come home or getting ready to feed him, only to remember that he is gone. I have learned to accept the up and down of life and the inevitability of death itself. That moment is something I don't want to forget as it taught me something important about life.

OP kurouske55 1 / 2 Nov 10, 2013 #3 uhmm... So what could i had said to fix it?

OP kurouske55 1 / 2 Nov 10, 2013 #4 I just want someone to proofread it to see if there is something that doesn't make sense and what i could had put to fix it and if there is any grammar error

My dying wife hoped to inspire people with her essay. They ended up inspiring her.

Not everyone has moments of clarity when they find out they are dying. My wife did.

The letters began arriving months ago at our house and in our inboxes. By my count there are more than 500 of them, and that’s just from strangers.

People were writing to my wife, Amy Ettinger, who died last month at age 49. You might know Amy from her words in these pages about the end of her life .

Her aggressive cancer had winnowed her body, and her strength was so limited that she dictated the essay to me in a sunlit glass-lined reading room at the University of California at Santa Cruz rather than typing it out herself.

As we overlooked a redwood forest, Amy had no way of predicting that the lines she composed on the spot would be calls to action for readers from all over the United States, as well as Canada, Poland, France and Greece.

She was flooded with responses to her essay, which essentially asked: What would your life look like if you cared much less about what other people think of you?

Could life be “a series of moments,” and not the endless pursuit of stability over bliss, or working for some long-delayed dream of post-retirement fulfillment?

Amy had a history of embracing creative risk and adventure, and wrote how putting friends and family first allowed her to face her terminal cancer diagnosis with a deep gratitude for the life she loved.

“Lasting love is about finding someone who will show up for you,” Amy wrote.

And also: “I’ve always tried to say ‘yes’ to the voice that tells me I should go out and do something now, even when that decision seems wildly impractical.”

Her essay touched people near and very far, and for reasons that surprised us, strangers wanted to connect with her before she died. They wanted to share their own stories and gratitude with her.

It offered her a comfort she did not know she needed.

Here are some of the ones that moved her the most.

“I live in a small town in Idaho that is full of hate, and after reading your story, I need to sell and move!” one message read.

Another reader wrote that he felt trapped on a corporate career ladder and was feeling anxious, which was stressing his mental health and close relationships.

“I have 10 chapters of a weird and wonderful novel and haven’t done anything with that in months even though it would probably only take a few solid weeks to finish writing it,” he wrote. “I will carry a tiny piece of your intrepid creative spirit with me as I rearrange my priorities in honor of remembering what’s truly important in life (which … isn’t corporate America).”

For one Los Angeles-based reader, Amy’s column was the tipping point that made him go ahead and book an endlessly postponed trip and reunion with loved ones.

“You helped me to realize I have said NO to too many life-affirming memories, even as our family has experienced a lot of loss over the years,” the reader said. “I am going to let my wife, daughter and son know that I will take that trip to Kastoria, Greece, home of their paternal ancestors, most of whom were taken to the camps during World War II. We will spend wonderful family time in a beautiful place and thank our family who came before us for their sacrifices. And I will think of you and say a prayer and send my eternal gratitude.”

Other readers spoke of lives crammed with tedious complications, from high-maintenance people to useless possessions.

One such reader thanked Amy for “really driving home [the] message to stop faffing around with crap that doesn’t matter and make the most of whatever time I have left. During the past few years of loss, dislocation, and general global craziness, I’ve forgotten this and come pretty close to giving up—on writing, yes, but more than that, on living. Sure, I drag through the motions for the sake of the people I love, but in a way that thumbs a nose at the monumental gift that life truly is. Your story and, again, your utmost humanity in sharing it have flipped a switch in me, and for that, I sincerely and ardently thank you.”

Some readers said the essay helped them realize that moments of joy and repose can lead to resilience in the midst of suffering. If Amy was dealing with Stage 4 cancer and could find so much light in her life, what was their excuse, anyway?

“Oh, how I cried and cried,” one reader said about reading Amy’s essay. “I then printed it out and placed it in my Bible. It’ll stay there so when I’m ready to give up on life again, I’ll read it and keep going.”

But the message that touched Amy beyond the others came from someone she knew, journalist Dania Akkad , who remembered an intervention Amy made on her behalf while working as a reporter for a California newspaper in the early 2000s. Akkad was an intern at the paper .

“We had a writing coach visit that summer,” Akkad recalled. “Long story short, you overheard me in the bathroom saying he’d made a pass at me when I had a meeting to discuss my reporting career (well at least that’s what I thought it was!). You came out of the bathroom stall and you said if I didn’t report this to management, you would.”

“It all felt so embarrassing and awkward and, well, my fault!” Akkad wrote. “Anyway, I did go to management largely because you put the pressure on. However many years later, I am so glad to have done that - and so grateful you interceded in that moment. It’s a fork-in-the-road event that has informed how I respond to this kind of crap. A real teaching moment. So thank you so very much. And thank you too for writing so lucidly about your experience now.”

Not all the notes were that lovely. Inevitably, a few were unwelcome, including missives from ultrareligious people wanting my proudly Jewish wife to get saved to spare herself from hellfire. And she smiled at the messages promoting quack remedies.

The many grateful responses prove that even now, in this era of online trolls and fake feedback generated by bots, engaged and thoughtful people really can make a difference by reaching out, human to human.

She carried this with her in her final weeks as she’d sit with me watching a great blue heron circling the sky over Santa Cruz Harbor. Or pulling up her favorite chair and watching the skateboarders, dog walkers and street basketball players on the other side of her picture window.

In this way, she embodied the spirit of her words. “I have never had a bucket list,” she wrote. “Instead, I said ‘yes’ to life.”

Dan White is the author of “ Under The Stars: How America Fell In Love With Camping ” and “ The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind And Almost Found Myself On The Pacific Crest Trail .” His website is www.danwhitebooks.com .

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GORY DETAILS

Would your dog eat you if you died? Get the facts.

You might not look at your fur baby the same way after reading this.

A big black Newfoundland dog yawns in front of the camera.

In 1997, a forensic examiner in Berlin reported one of his more unusual cases in the journal Forensic Science International . A 31-year-old man had retired for the evening to the converted garden shed behind his mother’s house, where he lived with his German shepherd. Around 8:15 p.m., neighbors heard a gunshot.

Forty-five minutes later, the man’s mother and neighbors found him dead of a gunshot wound to the mouth, a Walther pistol under his hands, and a farewell note on a table. Then police made an even more gruesome discovery: bite marks on his face and neck.

That mystery was cleared up quickly, when the man’s German shepherd vomited human tissue including skin with still-recognizable beard hair. This wasn’t a case of a starving dog resorting to eating its owner to survive; a half-full bowl of dog food was still sitting on the floor when police arrived. The disturbing implication: Maybe man’s best friend isn’t so loyal after all.

( “Puppy dog eyes” evolved so dogs could communicate with us .)

No one formally tracks how often pets scavenge their deceased owners, as forensic researchers noted in a 2023 article in Forensic Science, Medicine and Pathology . That lack of information creates a problem for death investigations, the scientists say. Medical examiners need to be familiar with signs of scavenging, which can obscure the cause of death or when someone died.

However, there are dozens of individual reports of pet scavenging described in forensic science journals, and they’re the best window we have into a situation that most pet owners don’t like to contemplate: Would our pets eat us? Are we really just a source of food to them, one way or another?

Studies of pets’ scavenging behaviors can give us some answers, and also reveal just how wrong we can be in interpreting animals’ behavior when we fail to see things from their perspective. Here’s what the available forensic evidence reveals.

It must have been the cat

Some people think cats have no compunctions about eating their owners. But as it turns out, relatively few published accounts support that theory. In fact in one report, published in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine in 2010, a woman died of an aneurysm and was found the next morning. Forensic testing revealed that her dog had consumed much of her face, while her two cats hadn’t touched her.

When it does happen, cats generally don’t cause as much damage as dogs do. They tend to go for the face, especially soft parts such as the nose and lips, says forensic anthropologist Carolyn Rando of University College London.

“It doesn’t surprise me, as a cat owner,” she says. “If you’re sleeping, they tend to swat your face to wake you up.” So a cat might start out trying to “wake up” a dead owner, and then begin to bite when that doesn’t work.

( Why dogs will eat almost anything—and cats, not so much .)

Instead, most documented scavenging of human remains involves dogs. As a 2016 study in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior observed , “canine scavenging in indoor settings is rarely reported, but is regularly observed in forensic practice.” Medical examiners confirm this. Joseph Prahlow, a medical examiner in Michigan, sees evidence of pet predation during an autopsy “at least a couple times a year,” he said, and usually dogs—not cats—are the culprits.

That makes sense when we look at the feeding behaviors of dogs versus cats. Generally, dogs are the more opportunistic eaters. They’re more likely to scavenge dead animals, as anyone whose dog has eagerly nosed around in a dead squirrel can attest. And although neither dogs nor cats are above pawing through garbage, dogs tend to be less picky about eating whatever they come across.

Hunger hypothesis

“Dogs are descended from wolves,” says Stanley Coren, a psychologist who has written books and hosted television shows about dogs. “If we have a situation where the owner dies and there’s no source of food, what are they going to do? They’re going to take whatever flesh is around.”

In some cases, it’s clear that the animals were scavenging to survive. In one 2007 report, a chow and a Labrador mix survived for about a month after consuming their dead owner’s body, leaving only the top of the skull and an assortment of bone shards.

Yet in the 1997 suicide case, the German shepherd began eating parts of its owner soon after his death, says Markus Rothschild, the forensic examiner in that case. While many people assume that a dog would only eat its owner if it were starving, Rothschild writes, “forensic experience shows that this is clearly wrong.”

( If you’re chronically stressed, your dog could be too .)

In a 2015 review of 63 cases of dogs scavenging their owners, less than a day had passed before the partially eaten body was found in about a quarter of cases. What’s more, some of the dogs had access to food they hadn’t eaten.

If you think about it, if dogs only ate their owners because they were hungry, you might expect them to feed in the same ways that canines do in the wild. But they don’t.

Dog DNA tests are on the rise—but are they reliable?

Why your dog helps you relax more than your friends do

What’s the real difference between a mutt and a designer dog?

Canines scavenging outdoors (both coyotes and domestic dogs) have a well-documented pattern, opening the chest and abdomen to eat the nutrient-rich organs early on, followed by the limbs. Only 10 percent of those cases involve wounds to the head.

By contrast, when pet dogs scavenged dead owners indoors, 73 percent of cases involved bites to the face, and just 15 percent had bites to the abdomen. This suggests that pet dogs are interacting with their owners’ faces, rather than treating the bodies merely as food.

What’s their motivation?

It’s tempting to think that if you’re close to your dog and have treated it well, you’re off the hook if you die.

But dog behavior isn’t quite so clean-cut. None of the case studies I saw indicated any prior history of animal abuse. On the contrary, several reports noted that the owners had very good relationships with their dogs, according to friends and neighbors.

( Do anxious owners make for anxious dogs? )

Instead, consider a pet’s psychological state: “One possible explanation for such behavior is that a pet will try to help an unconscious owner first by licking or nudging,” Rothschild writes in his report, “but when this fails to produce any results, the behavior of the animal can become more frantic and in a state of panic, can lead to biting.”

From biting, it’s an easy jump to eating, Rando says. “So it’s not necessarily that the dog wants to eat, but eating gets stimulated when they taste blood.”

A matter of breeding

Different dog breeds have different temperaments, Rando adds, which could play a role in how they respond to an owner’s death. Published cases involve a mix of mutts as well as several hunting or working dog breeds. But many kinds of dogs turn up in forensic reports of scavenging, including lovable labs and golden retrievers.

Overall, most of the dogs were medium to large, with a beagle being the smallest breed to engage in scavenging. However, larger, more powerful dogs can do more damage, so those cases might be more likely to rise to the level of note.

( Dog DNA tests are on the rise—but are they reliable? )

For instance, in three separate cases, dead owners were decapitated, and they all involved German shepherds. Still, for all we know, a Pomeranian or Chihuahua would tear a head off if it could.

Rando suspects that an individual dog’s temperament might matter more. An insecure, fearful dog that regularly shows signs of separation anxiety may be more likely to become frantic and end up biting and eating its owner.

So what to do?

There’s no way to guarantee that your pet won’t eat you, apart from not having any pets. Even hamsters and birds have been known to scavenge on occasion.

The best way to reduce the odds, Rando says, is to make sure you have people who will stop by if they don’t hear from you. And if you have neighbors who are elderly, sick, or vulnerable, check on them regularly.

“It’s a good reason to make sure you have people around you,” she says. “Social activity later in life is good for everybody.”

Then again, not everyone is worried. Social media posts responding to an earlier version of this article prompted some pet owners to say they’d prefer for their pets to eat them than to starve.

Even if you’re not so sanguine, you might consider giving dogs (and cats) a pass here. Pets’ distressed attempts to rouse their deceased owners suggest that losing a human companion is a traumatic experience. And in the face of trauma, we can’t expect pets to behave like humans in mourning. In a sense, we’ve bred them to love us—to death.

Meet Wicked—the very good girl who was just named America's best working dog

Dogs will eat almost anything—cats, not so much. Here’s why.

Do pets really make people happier and healthier?

17 gifts for dog moms—and the pups they love

Could Fido be our best hope to reverse aging in humans?

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Buddy, the famous Yukon fox once thought to be a dog, has died

Yukon wildlife preserve fox experienced identity confusion, world fame and a long healthy life.

Social Sharing

Almost 10 years after a case of mistaken identity that made international headlines, the Yukon Wildlife Preserve has laid to rest the red fox affectionately known as Buddy.

Discovered when it was days old, the tiny creature was initially thought it to be a puppy — and briefly nursed by a Chihuahua — before becoming a crowd favourite at the preserve, and beyond.

The fox was found abandoned at Marsh Lake in 2014 by Yukoner Ralph Shopland.

Figuring it was a puppy, Shopland and his family took to Facebook to find a wet nurse.

Whitehorse resident Diana White took on that task, because her Chihuahua named Baby-Girl had just given birth.

"I kept looking at him. I'm going, 'This isn't a dog'.... Like I just knew it wasn't a dog," she said.

"I was like, 'I can try my dog and see what she does', because she had just given puppies a couple days before. She just laid there and let him suckle."

As the days passed, the little creature developed an "obvious" smell, and a little white tip on his tail.

Theories emerged it was a bear cub, an otter, a marten or a wolverine, White said.

Eventually, Yukon Wildlife Preserve staff concluded it was a fox kit, and offered to take the critter into their care.

Lindsay Caskenette was one of those staff.

"It was less than two weeks old when it came into our care. So it all happened in the pretty immediate days of this animal's life. When it opened its eyes it was to humans," she said.

In the fox's first few months, Caskenette said the preserve's staff were focused on giving it the best chance of survival in the wild.

"We were trying, at that point, to ensure that staff were not spending too much time with it — only meeting its basic needs. But one of the basic needs of a small animal is nurture ... so it was a difficult balance," she said.

"Then you add in that this adorable, fluffy, very charismatic little creature and it's really hard not to get attached."

Eventually, staff determined it was unlikely that the fox would be able to be released back into the wild.

That meant he needed a long-term habitat, said Caskenette, who is now the preserve's manager of visitor services.

The Yukon Wildlife Preserve needed to fundraise $10,000 to build it, and the fox's new global fan base was ready to help.

"Somehow his story just kind of caught all the media. People magazine caught it.... Just the reach of it was crazy," Caskenette recalled.

As the fox grew, Caskenette said he developed a distinct playfulness and personality.

He became known as Buddy to some of the preserve's visitors.

"Partly because he was raised by a Chihuahua and partly raised by humans, he was not far off the mark of a dog.... It just goes to show how important in any animal, including ourselves, those first days and weeks, the initial exposure to life is. Because his was humans and not his own kind, that really set a different course for that animal."

Sometimes, she said, the fox would roll over, or cry or whine.

"He was so ridiculous in some of his mannerisms: the crying and the wagging of the tail and and being so dog-like really just captivated people," Caskenette said.

"To also see people's reactions to that — that was really special."

Caskenette also endearingly recalled people's reactions to his abrasive smell.

"I just remember him being so bloody smelly. Just so smelly. What's really funny is we don't have skunks here in the territory. And people would come visit the facility and they'd breathe in like, 'Nature's so lovely.' But they'd [say] that at the red fox habitat. And it smelt very skunky."

Fox lived a "really long health life"

The Yukon Wildlife Preserve announced late last month that they'd made the difficult decision to put their beloved fox to rest.

After a long, gradual decline in health he died just shy of 10 years old.

He'd enjoyed a "really long, healthy life," Caskenette said.

"Generally, the length of the life of a fox in the wild is a small fraction of that. So we were lucky to see so much more of that individual's personality and life in our facility."

The announcement of his passing prompted an outpouring of photos and memories on the preserve's Facebook page.

"I'm happy that everything worked out for him, and everybody enjoyed him," White said. "And that we had a little part in his life."

Caskenette said her team were working on a way to make sure his story isn't forgotten.

"It's more than just a viewing experience for people to see these animals or see some of this behaviour, but to learn their stories and hopefully encourage us to do something differently."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Katie Todd is a reporter at CBC Yukon in Whitehorse. You can reach her at [email protected].

Florida man who unknowingly trained 9/11 terrorists dies of heart failure

VENICE, Fla. (WWSB) - A former Florida resident, who unknowingly taught two of the September 11th attackers how to fly planes, has died.

Rudi Dekkers, who was born in the Netherlands, died of heart failure last week in the Phillipines.

Dekkers was 67.

9/11 terrorists Mohammed Atta and Marwin Al Shehhi trained at the flight school Dekkers owned in Venice.

A Walmart location is replacing self-checkout lanes with staffed checkout aisles

Suspect in 2023 Tropicana plant shooting, kidnapping in custody

FWC: 2 people found dead in Manatee County lake

Family dog dies in Venice house fire

A pair of vultures believed to be dying were actually just drunk.

Rescuers believed pair of vultures were dying but they turned out to just be drunk

Cooler along the coast with some 90s inland

A.I. coming to Sarasota County Schools

Operation Green Light happening this week in Sarasota

Ohio-based church asking for donations for father, son killed in Manatee County lake

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Peter Higgs, Nobelist Who Predicted the ‘God Particle,’ Dies at 94

The Higgs boson was named for him. It was a key element of the Standard Model, which encapsulated all human knowledge so far about elementary particles.

Dr. Higgs was photographed standing in front of an image, projected on a wall, of a particle accelerator. He was balding, with gray hair, and wore eyeglasses and a dark jacket over a blue shirt and necktie.

By Dennis Overbye

Peter Higgs, who predicted the existence of a new particle that came to be named after him (as well as God) and sparked a half-century, worldwide, billion-dollar search for it culminating in champagne in 2012 and a Nobel Prize a year later, died on Monday at home in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was 94.

The cause was a blood disorder, said Alan Walker, his close friend and fellow physicist at the University of Edinburgh, where Dr. Higgs was an emeritus professor.

Dr. Higgs was a 35-year-old assistant professor at the university in 1964 when he suggested the existence of a new particle that would explain how other particles acquire mass. The Higgs boson, also known as “the God particle,” would become the keystone of a suite of theories known as the Standard Model, which encapsulated all human knowledge so far about elementary particles and the forces by which they shaped nature and the universe.

Dr. Higgs was a modest man who eschewed the trappings of fame and preferred the outdoors. He didn’t own a television or use email or a cellphone. For years he relied on Dr. Walker to act as his “digital seeing-eye dog,” in the words of a former student.

A half-century later, on July 4, 2012, he received a standing ovation as he walked into a lecture hall at the European Organization for Nuclear Research , or CERN, in Geneva and heard that his particle had finally been found. On a webcast from the laboratory, the whole world watched him pull out a handkerchief and wipe away a tear.

“It’s really an incredible thing that it’s happened in my lifetime,” he said on the webcast.

Declining to stick around for the after-parties, Dr. Higgs flew right back home, celebrating on the plane with a can of London Pride beer. CERN, which has shelves of empty Champagne bottles commemorating great moments lining its control room, asked if it could have the can, but Dr. Higgs had already thrown it away.

Peter Ware Higgs was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, in May 29, 1929, the son of a BBC sound engineer, Thomas Ware Higgs, and Gertrude Maude (Coghill) Higgs, who managed the household. He grew up in Bristol.

His interest in physics was tweaked when he was attending the same school, Cotham Grammar School, as had Paul Dirac , the great British theorist who was one of the fathers (there were no mothers) of quantum mechanics. That theory, which describes the forces of nature as a game of catch between force-carrying bits of energy called bosons, would be the same field in which Dr. Higgs would rise to fame.

At the age of 17, Peter moved to City of London School , where he studied mathematics. A year later, he entered King’s College London, graduating in 1947 with a bachelor’s degree in physics. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in 1954 for research on molecules and heat.

After temporary research posts at the University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London and University College London, he took a permanent job as a lecturer at Edinburgh in 1960. Dr. Higgs had come to love the city during his college days when he used to escape on hitchhiking trips to the Scottish Highlands.

During those years he also became active politically in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Greenpeace. But he dropped out of both when they grew too radical for his taste.

It was in the disarmament movement that he met and fell in love with a fellow activist, Jody Williamson. They married in 1963. She died in 2008. Dr. Higgs is survived by their two sons, Christopher, a computer scientist, and Jonathan, a musician, and two grandchildren.

At Edinburgh, Dr. Higgs redirected his research from chemistry and molecules to his first love, elementary particles.

Edinburgh was the birthplace of James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), who had accomplished the first great unification of physics, showing that electricity and magnetism were different manifestations of the same force, electromagnetism, which constitutes light. It would be Dr. Higgs’s fate to push physics to the next step, toward a theory that could be written on a T-shirt, by helping to show that Maxwell’s electromagnetism and the so-called weak force that governs radioactivity are different faces of the same thing.

As is often the case in the zigzag progress of science, however, that was not what Dr. Higgs thought he was doing.

“At the time,” he recalled in an interview in Edinburgh in 2014, “the thought was to solve the strong force.”

The strong force holds atomic nuclei together. According to theory, the particles that carry that force — bosons — should be massless, like the photon that transmits light. But while light crosses the universe, the strong force barely reaches across an atomic nucleus, which, by quantum rules, meant that the particle carrying it should be almost as massive as a whole proton.

So how did the carriers of the strong force become so massive?

Adapting an idea that Philip W. Anderson of Princeton had used to help explain superconductivity, Dr. Higgs suggested that space was filled with an invisible field of energy, a cosmic molasses. The field would act on some particles trying to move through it like an entourage attaching itself to a celebrity trying to make it to the bar, imbuing them with what we perceive as mass. Call it spooky action everywhere.

In some situations, he noted, a bit of this field could flake off and appear as a new particle.

His first paper on the subject was rejected, however, so he rewrote it, “spicing it up,” as he put it, with a new paragraph at the end emphasizing the prediction of the new particle, which would come to be called the Higgs boson.

It turned out that François Englert and Robert Brout , of the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, had beaten him into print by seven weeks with a similar idea. Shortly thereafter three more physicists — Tom Kibble , of Imperial College London; Carl Hagen, of the University of Rochester; and Gerald Guralnik , of Brown University — chimed in.

“They were first, but I didn’t know until Nambu told me,” Dr. Higgs said in an interview, referring to Yoichiro Nambu , a University of Chicago physicist and also a Nobel laureate, who edited the journal. There was no internet then, he said, his voice trailing off, implying that if he had seen their paper he would probably never have written his own.

“At the beginning I wasn’t sure it would be important,” Dr. Higgs went on. Neither did anybody else.

In fact, theories of the strong force, which Dr. Higgs had set out to study, subsequently went another way. But his paper and his particle would be decisive for the so-called weak force.

Unknown to Dr. Higgs, the American physicist Sheldon Glashow had proposed a theory in 1961 that unified the weak force and electromagnetic forces, but it had the same problem of how to explain why the carriers of the weak part of the “electroweak force” weren’t massless.

Dr. Higgs’s magic field would have been just the ticket, but he and Dr. Glashow didn’t know each other’s work, although they had just missed each other.

One of Dr. Higgs’s duties as a beginning professor at Edinburgh in 1960 was to supply daily refreshments for a Scottish summer conference held there. Dr. Glashow, who was attending, and his friends would stash wine bottles provided by Dr. Higgs in a grandfather clock and then come back and stay up all night draining them and talking about the electroweak unification.

Dr. Higgs, meanwhile, was in bed. “I didn’t know they were stealing my wine,” he said in the interview.

The boson became a big deal in 1967 when Steven Weinberg , of the University of Texas in Austin, made it the linchpin in unifying the weak and electromagnetic forces. It became an even bigger deal in 1971, when the Dutch theorist Gerardus ’t Hooft proved that the whole scheme made mathematical sense.

Dr. Higgs said Benjamin Lee , a Fermilab physicist who later died in a car crash , christened it the Higgs boson during a conference in about 1972, perhaps because Dr. Higgs’s paper was cited first in Dr. Weinberg’s paper.

The name stuck, not just to the particle, but to the molasses field that produced it and the mechanism by which that field gave mass to other particles — somewhat to the embarrassment of Dr. Higgs and the annoyance of the other theorists.

“For a while,” Dr. Higgs recalled, laughing, “I was calling it the “A.B.E.G.H.H.K.H mechanism,” reeling off the names of all the theorists who had contributed to the theory (Anderson, Brout, Englert, Guralnik, Hagen, Higgs, Kibble and ’t Hooft).

Interest in the boson came and went in waves. Dr. Higgs’s first round of interviews came in 1988, when CERN started up a new accelerator named LEP, for Large Electron Positron collider. One of its main goals was to find the Higgs boson. There was another round when LEP was closing down in 2000 despite claims by some scientists that they had seen traces of the Higgs boson.

Dr. Higgs was skeptical. “They were pushing the machine beyond its limit,” he recalled.

By then he had given up doing research, concluding that high-energy particle physics had simply moved beyond him.

He was trying to work on a fashionable new theory called supersymmetry, which would further advance the unification of forces, but “I kept making silly mistakes,” he said. Indeed, he told the BBC later that his lack of productivity would probably have gotten him fired long ago were it not known that he had been nominated for a Nobel Prize.

In recent years, Dr. Higgs lived in a fifth-floor apartment in the historic New Town neighborhood of central Edinburgh, around the corner from the birthplace of Maxwell, the great Scottish theorist, who grew up in the neighborhood.

Even before the Nobel sealed his place in history, he had become one of the tourist attractions of the city, a sort of walking monument to science, recipient of the 2011 Edinburgh Award for his “outstanding contribution to the city.”

Dr. Higgs continued to teach until he retired in 1996, but his lack of research kept him out of the fray and the fury that has resulted from the discovery of his boson. In 1999, he turned down an offer of knighthood, but in 2012 he was named a Companion of Honor by Queen Elizabeth II.

The next year he joined his idols Dirac and Maxwell in immortality by way of the Nobel Prize in Physics , which he shared with Professor Englert. But being in the fray was never his thing. On the day the physics prize was supposed to be announced , he decided that it would be a good time to leave town.

Unfortunately, his car wasn’t working. Stuck in town, he decided to go to lunch. But on the way a neighbor intercepted him and told him he had won the prize.

“What prize?” he joked.

Alex Traub contributed reporting.

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the nationality of the physicist Gerardus ’t Hooft. He is Dutch, not Belgian. It also misspelled the given name of a Nobel laureate in physics at the University of Chicago. He is Yoichiro Nambu, not Nachiro.

How we handle corrections

Dennis Overbye is the cosmic affairs correspondent for The Times, covering physics and astronomy. More about Dennis Overbye

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The Yukon Wildlife Preserve announced late last month that they'd made the difficult decision to put their beloved fox to rest. After a long, gradual decline in health he died just shy of 10 years ...
Florida man who unknowingly trained 9/11 terrorists dies of heart failure
Rudi Dekkers, who was born in the Netherlands, died of heart failure last week in the Phillipines. Dekkers was 67. 9/11 terrorists Mohammed Atta and Marwin Al Shehhi trained at the flight school ...
How Israel and allied defenses intercepted more than 300 Iranian ...
Most of the more than 300 Iranian munitions, the majority of which are believed to have been launched from inside of Iran's territory during a five-hour attack, were intercepted before they got ...
Peter Higgs, Physicist Who Discovered the 'God Particle,' Dies at 94
Peter Higgs, Nobelist Who Predicted the 'God Particle,' Dies at 94. The Higgs boson was named for him. It was a key element of the Standard Model, which encapsulated all human knowledge so far ...