WHEN WE LOSE someone we love, no one really teaches us how to grieve. Grief doesn’t always require public expression; more often, it is an intensely private sorrow felt by the bereaved.
Everyone grieves differently, and the intensity and duration of grief depend on many factors: personality, age, health, spirituality, the closeness of the relationship and whether the loss was sudden or gradual, and how traumatic it was.[1]
Most research around grief is related to human death; however, the death of a pet can trigger the same depth of grief. For many families, a pet’s passing feels no less heartbreaking than losing another human who is close to them. Yet, those who mourn a pet feel an unspoken shame, as though they should not feel that sad. They may hear dismissive remarks like, “Just bury it. It was only a dog.”
