I knew losing Jasper would be devastating. I knew the house would feel different, and that there would be grief in all the obvious places: his bed, his bowls, the silence, and the parts of my day that had been built around him for 15 years.

What I didn’t expect was how much grief would show up in the most mundane places afterward. A cancellation call. A prescription reminder. An insurance email. A marketing message asking if I wanted to reorder food for a dog who was no longer here.

No one really prepares you for that part.

Before Jasper passed, I was so focused on what was right in front of me. I was trying to ask the right questions, make the right decisions, understand what mattered, and not miss something I would regret later. Even when you know something is coming, there is no real checklist for it. There’s no perfect guide that tells you what you’ll want later, what you should ask for, what you should save, or what you should do while you still have time.

I got a clay print of his paw, and I am so grateful I have it. But I wish I had gotten an ink print too. It sounds small, but that’s kind of the point. In those moments, you are not calmly thinking through what future you might want. You are trying to be present and to love them through something unbearable.

And then they’re gone, and somehow the world expects you to know what to do next.

Coming home

After Jasper passed, I was lucky. I took some time away and ignored a lot of my responsibilities for a few weeks. I stayed with family, saw friends, and got out of the house because being home without him felt impossible. I know how privileged that is, because so many people do not get that kind of space. So many people lose a pet and are expected to be back at work the next morning, on calls, answering emails, acting normal when their entire life feels unrecognizable.

But eventually I had to come home, and everything was still there.

His bed was still there. His bowls were still there. His medications were still there. The reminders were unrelenting. The house was still arranged for a life that no longer existed, and I don’t think I had fully understood how strange and painful that would feel until I was standing there wondering what to do with all his things.

Jasper’s life was all about routine. Food, medication, supplements, insurance, prescriptions, appointments, his dog walker, recurring orders, and all the little things that became part of keeping him safe and comfortable. When he was alive, those things felt like care. They were proof of how much my life was shaped around loving him.

After he died, they became reminders of who I had to contact to explain that he was gone, closing another door to the life we had together.

The calls

Calling friends and family was awful, obviously. Telling people who loved him, or loved me, that Jasper was gone was heartbreaking. Letting my dog walker know was painful too, but at least that felt human. She knew him. She understood this was not just a schedule change. It was Jasper.

The harder part, in a different way, was calling the companies. The brands that had been part of his care. The ones I had trusted because, in my mind, they were pet people. I think I assumed they would get it, or at least have some kind of protocol for this.

That was not always the case.

I remember calling to cancel his food subscription and feeling like the person on the other end had no idea what that call meant on my side. It was bland, maybe even cold. There was no real sympathy, no moment of recognition, nothing that made me feel even a little bit seen. It felt like a normal cancellation, when what I was saying was that my dog died, and “I don’t need this anymore because he’s gone.”

I don’t expect every customer support interaction to be perfect. I do not expect the stranger on the phone to grieve with me. I know people are doing their jobs, and I know support teams are often working inside systems they did not design. But there is a difference between someone not knowing exactly what to say and a company giving them nothing to say at all.

His pet insurance was worse. In hindsight, it was one of the most painful administrative pieces after he passed, not only because there was no real empathy, but because the back and forth over coverage made an already awful time feel even more exhausting. Things that had previously been covered were suddenly being questioned because of a note somewhere deep in his records about maybe looking into a Cushing’s test down the road. Mind you, they had covered his tests before.

I understand insurance is a business. I understand there are policies and paperwork and processes. But I also think there should be a way to handle those processes without making someone already grieving feel like they are fighting to have their pet’s care validated.

And then there were the reminders. The pharmacy texts. The supplement emails. The messages telling me it was time to reorder something for someone who was gone.

Those were especially brutal because they pulled me back into the routine for half a second. I would see a message about reordering medication or supplements and instinctively understand what it meant, because that had been my life for so long. I knew the cadence. I knew what needed refilling. I knew what it meant to keep track of all of it. And then I would have to catch up to the reality that there was nothing to reorder anymore.

That’s the part I don’t think people understand unless they’ve lived it. You’re not just missing them in the big, obvious ways. You’re missing them through the routines that, when they’re gone, move ahead as if they’re still alive.

The admin of losing a pet

You know you are going to miss them. You know the house is going to feel strange. You know you’ll look for them in the places they used to be. What I didn’t know was how painful it would be to deal with the logistics of their absence.

Cancel the food. Cancel the insurance. Cancel the medication. Cancel the walker. Cancel the appointments. Figure out what to do with the supplies. Decide what you can donate, what you want to keep, what you cannot look at yet, and what feels impossible to touch.

It sounds like admin work, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like a reminder that the life you were living is over.

And the thing is, this is happening to millions of people inside an industry that already knows exactly how much we love our pets.

APPA⁠ reports that 95 million U.S. households own a pet and projects the U.S. pet industry will reach $165 billion in sales in 2026. According to Pew Research Center⁠, nearly all U.S. pet owners consider their pets part of the family, and about half say their pets are as much a part of the family as a human member. And when they die, emerging research in PLOS One⁠ found that many pet owners experience intense grief and that feelings of shame, embarrassment, and isolation were common as a result of expressing their grief for their deceased pet.

This is not a niche. It is not unserious. And it is not “just a pet.”

That’s the contradiction I could not stop seeing after Jasper died. The industry understood my love when I was buying things to care for him. It understood that he was family when I was spending money on food and medicine and insurance and supplements and appointments. But when he was gone, so many of those same systems suddenly felt cold, awkward, or completely unprepared.

I don’t think brands are trying to get this wrong

I want to be clear about this because I really do believe it: I think most pet brands want to handle these moments with kindness. I think most people working in pet care do care about pet parents. I think many of them are pet people too.

But being a pet person and having grief-awareness are two different things.

A customer support agent can care and still have no training, no language, no process, and no resource to offer someone who is calling because the animal they built their life around has died. A company can have a great product and still have a cancellation flow that treats death like churn. A brand can talk beautifully about the human-animal bond in marketing and still have no idea what to do when that bond becomes grief.

That is where so much of the pain comes from. Not always from one bad person or one negative interaction, but from systems that were not built for this part of the pet parent experience: the early grief, the processing, the memorializing, the living with it, and maybe someday, for some people, the complicated possibility of loving another animal again.

Grief is not outside the pet industry. It is part of the pet parent lifecycle, whether the industry acknowledges it or not.

What I’ve learned

This experience is a large part of why Jasper became bigger in my mind than a support group.

Grieving pet parents need somewhere to go. They need community, structure, language, and people who understand that this kind of grief is real. But the brands, vets, insurers, rescues, pharmacies, memorial companies, and pet care teams around them also need a better way to show up. They are already part of our pets’ lives. They are already woven into years of care. So it makes sense to me that they should have a way to offer support when that care turns into grief.

Some of the most hopeful conversations I am having now are with brands that understand this. A pet tech company thinking seriously about what cancellation should feel like when the reason is loss. A pet insurance team asking how support can be part of the member experience, not something that comes after the worst has already happened. Animal welfare leaders making space for community, remembrance, and the grief that comes with loving animals deeply. Vets and memorial partners looking for something meaningful to offer families when there is nothing left to fix.

I cannot share details just yet, but I can say this: there is something wonderful about watching brands begin to ask what it would look like to care for someone through the very worst part of pet ownership.

That question changes the whole interaction.

It changes the email, the phone call, and the reminder. It changes whether a support team has to improvise in real time or actually has the language and resources to help. It changes whether a grieving pet parent feels abandoned by the brands they relied on or whether they feel supported as loyal customers experiencing loss.

Customers remember that.

They remember who was kind when they were grieving. Those who made something easier, removed the reminders, sent a thoughtful note, offered support, or simply did not make them explain the same painful thing five different times.

They also remember the brands that made them feel like their grief was inconvenient. And those are the ones I hope will read this:

I do not know that anything could have made losing Jasper any easier. I don’t think there is a version of losing someone you love that does not hurt.

But I know there were things that made it harder than it needed to be. The cold calls stayed with me. The reminders stayed with me. The feeling of having to keep proving he was gone stayed with me.

I wish there had been kinder emails. A process that did not make me reopen the wound over and over. A person who knew what to say. A brand that understood I was not simply ending a subscription. I was saying goodbye to a life.

That is what I keep coming back to.

After a pet dies, there is already so much to carry. Their absence is in the house, in the routine, in your body, and in the plans you made with them in mind. The rest of the world cannot take that grief away, and I would never pretend it can.

But it can decide not to make the burden of loss any heavier.

And for an industry built on the idea that pets are family, that feels like the very least they could do.

The first was Jasper. My soul dog, my rock, my little sidekick for fifteen years. I got him, a platinum-blonde Morkie, the year I graduated college when I was twenty-one. He jumped up at me from the litter of puppies and decided, before I did, that we belonged to each other. He had the biggest personality of any small dog I have ever known, and I don’t think he ever once realized he was small. From our first day forward, he pretty much never left my side: Tampa, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, New York, and eventually Connecticut. Wherever we landed, home was wherever he was.

This was significant because, being recent graduates, most of my friends had scattered, taking entry-level jobs in each corner of the country. I was lonely, not knowing quite where to go next. So, in an effort to anchor myself to something, I got Jasper. And within days, he didn’t just fill the empty space. He made the empty space feel safe. It started to look and feel a lot like freedom.

In 2010, I moved to Minnesota to help start a company, knowing almost no one in the “Land of 10,000 Lakes.” There were days when twenty-three inches of snow would fall within hours and I struggled to get the front door open. I’ll spare you the logistics of how a lap dog handles a blizzard, especially one that leaves snow drifts towering over all four pounds of him. But he was always a good sport about it and I never felt alone, despite being alone in every sense of the word. He was the reason I was okay.

Then LA, and he was with me Saturdays at the park and Sundays at the flea market. In New York, he came with me to work, we rode the subways together, and walked Central Park. A boss of mine once told me she didn’t meet many people my age who picked up and moved cities the way I did. I don’t think I would have, honestly, had it not been for Jasper. I think I would have stayed close to home and the people I already knew. But Jasper gave me a subtle strength just being at my side.

When he passed, I packed my whole home into storage, and eventually moved to New York to be closer to family. Without him, my home was no longer a home, and so I removed myself from it. I didn’t return to it or open those boxes for over a year.

In a way, I was saying goodbye to a part of me, too. Loss often does that. It unmoors us and transforms us. And during that transition, an idea was born. I tapped into my loneliness instead of running from it and created a pet-loss support community, one that I needed and couldn’t find.

I’m not sure I’ll ever get over the painful irony of losing the dog who spent fifteen years teaching me how to survive being alone. Because it’s the loneliness he prepared me for, the reality of moving forward without him, that gave me my life’s work.

And then, almost two years after Jasper died, I finally felt ready to bring another dog home.

Theo has opened my world in the way that Jasper once did. Except if Jasper was strength and solitude, Theo is pure, ungovernable joy, with enough energy to power a small city. Instead of embracing solitude, we’re embracing togetherness. Because just as Jasper found me when I needed to learn independence, Theo found me in another season of my life. I’m thirty-eight, unmarried, no kids. It’s a lonely club to be in, especially because making real friends as an adult is hard.

But pets, especially dogs, help adults find community. They start conversations and turn sidewalk hellos into substantial conversations. Scientists call them social catalysts.

They’re not wrong. I’d lived in my building for months before Theo came, and I mostly kept to myself, apart from a little small talk here and there with my neighbors, none of whom I knew by name. Then Theo arrived, and everything slowly cracked open.

The dogs found each other first. The building staff keeps treats in the lobby, so chance meetings turned into social hours. We started running into each other on walks, then joining each other for playtime, and eventually planning playdates in advance. Now, at least once a day, we all go out together: me, my neighbors, and our dogs.

Carly lives right next door with her Staffie, Blue. Alexa lives upstairs with her cockapoo, Bing. They have become two of my closest friends. I’ve watched Blue while Carly was out of town. Alexa has Theo over for playdates. When Theo got neutered and I was a nervous wreck, she lent me four different cones and surgical suits and talked me through the whole process. That is not dog park small talk. That is someone showing up for you in a real life moment.

I’ve always wanted to live in a building where I was actually friends with my neighbors, where I could walk down the hall in my pajamas to go sit with a girlfriend or plan nights in with friends. It turns out I get to have that now. And I credit Theo with that. Can I say for certain I never would have met Carly or Alexa without him? Who knows. But I’m certain we would not have become this close, and I am so grateful that we did.

The clearest picture of all that Theo has given me happened earlier this month. It was the Fourth of July here in Delray Beach, and the town shut down the street for a festival, with vendors, live music, and crowds. I saw them setting it up and thought, “Absolutely not.” I have reached the age of treasuring yoga and a good night’s sleep far more than one more crowded night out. I fully intended to stay in.

Then I took Theo for his walk, and he made the decision for me. He beelined straight for the crowd, into the noise and the lights and the people, pulling me toward the exact environment I had already talked myself out of. I could feel how happy it made him, so I let him lead. I followed my dog into the middle of chaos and I was so glad I went.

We walked home under the fireworks, and I thought to myself: both of my dogs came to me at exactly the right time. Both taught me how to be a better version of myself. Both have given me strength, and both will forever be honored for the wisdom they leave behind.

Jasper taught me I could be my own home. Theo is teaching me that home was always meant to have people in it.

And this is the part I most want you to hear, because it is the reason I do the work that I do. If you have ever loved a pet like this, you already know they are not simply a companion. They are your reason to stay at home in the quiet, or your excuse to leave the house and socialize.They’ll give you the courage to eat in public alone or they get you talking to the neighbor you would otherwise pass in silence. And in a largely digital world where so many of us are silently starved for connection, our animals are often the bridge between us. They pull us out the door, into the crowd, and each other.

This is why pet loss grief is too heavy to carry on your own. Because losing them is earth-shattering, and largely unvalidated. Jasper’s passing was, by every honest measure, the greatest loss of my life, and for a long time I struggled to grieve for him. When I found others who validated my pain, I could feel the healing begin. So now I say it as loudly as I can, for me and for anyone carrying their own version of it: pet loss grief is real. And you don’t have to carry it alone.

Two dogs. One taught me how to be on my own. The other is teaching me how to find my way back. I needed both, and as much as it hurts to move forward through grief, the point is that it’s progress.

Progress, because I’ll always credit my independence to my first love. Because without him, I’d never have started Jasper. And because, as long as I’m lucky enough to have him, I’ll follow the second one into the crowd.

Jean and I know each other from our time in Connecticut, and I have had the privilege of experiencing her work both as a client and as someone who has watched her become such a comforting presence in this community. Her path to this work was shaped by profound personal loss, and that lived experience brings so much compassion and understanding to the way she supports others.

In this conversation, we talked about why grief does not only live in the mind, what it means to process pain through the body, how sound healing can create a different kind of release than talking, and why healing often begins when we stop being so afraid of what we feel.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

On how grief shaped Jean’s work

Britta: You have been through some profound grief and loss. How did those experiences shape the work that you do now?

Jean: There are a lot of things I learned through my grief, but one of the biggest was understanding that, when I was really in the depths of it, I completely lost my sense of control. That was huge for me because I had always been someone who tried to think through things and intellectualize them, but grief forced me into my body in a way I had never experienced before.

I could not think my way through it anymore. I had to feel it.

That was when I started to understand how grief is held in the body. It can become energy, sensation, tension, numbness, and so many other things. Numbness was something I felt a lot, and that has really shaped the way I work with people now.

Even though people call us healers, I do not try to fix someone or heal them. I try to meet them where they are. That is really the most important thing I learned through this work.

Britta: I think that is something I have seen so much in grief, too. A lot of it is not about someone saying the perfect thing or trying to solve it for you. Sometimes what matters most is having someone walk alongside you while you process, navigate, and slowly find your footing again.

On what grief looked like in real life

Britta: When you were in the middle of your own grief, what did it actually look like for you, not in theory, but in real life?

Jean: It was not graceful, I can tell you that. It was really about learning how to get through the waves. People describe grief as coming in waves, and that was absolutely my experience.

In the very beginning, I was just trying to get through the day. I could not get out of bed. I was depressed. I was trying to trust myself again, and there were a lot of layers to my grief that made that difficult.

Little by little, I started pouring back into myself. It could be the smallest thing, like sitting outside with my coffee for five minutes, putting my feet on the ground, and being in nature. Those little things allowed me to be still. I needed to regulate my nervous system because I was so dysregulated, and in the beginning that was really what every day looked like. I was just trying to find my baseline.

Britta: That feels so true to me. Grief is such a messy process, and I am always reminding myself that some days the goal is just neutral. It is not always about big breakthroughs or big goals. Some days it is simply, can I get out of bed, can I put one foot in front of the other, can I make it through this moment?

Jean: Absolutely. You have to give yourself grace.

On making sound healing and somatics feel accessible

Britta: For someone who is new to this world, how do you explain sound healing and somatics in a way that feels accessible rather than intimidating? I will admit that before I got immersed in it, I found all of it very intimidating.

Jean: It can feel scary, and it can feel very woo woo from the outside. People wonder what is actually happening, which is completely understandable.

The way I explain it is that, again, we are not healing you. We are holding space for you to heal yourself. Your body innately knows what to do, but it needs the right conditions.

Reiki creates a space where your nervous system can soften and begin to process what it is holding. Sometimes intuitive insights come through, but it is not always about that. Sometimes the body shifts from within, and that shift creates more clarity.

It is less about doing something to you and more about supporting you.

On why talking is not always enough

Britta: What is it about sound, energy, and the body that can help someone process grief in a way that talking maybe does not allow?

Jean: Talking is important, and talk therapy can be really helpful, so I never want to dismiss that. But grief is not just a story. It is an experience, and it lives in your body.

There are parts of grief that do not have language. Sound and somatic work create a different entry point because they allow the body to release and reorganize without having to explain everything.

Sometimes you do not need to talk more. Sometimes you need to feel safe enough for something inside of you to finally shift, move, or release. There does not always have to be an explanation for it.

Britta: I have felt that, too. I love talking, and I am definitely someone who processes things out loud, but there is something so different about letting go and allowing the sound to take over.

In different sound bath experiences, I have felt different things. Sometimes I see something. Sometimes I feel an enormous sense of relief without knowing exactly why until later. Sometimes I leave feeling ready to rest in a way I did not even realize I needed.

It is such a powerful experience because it reaches a place that words do not always reach.

Jean: Frequency is very powerful. Energy work can be subtle, but it is so powerful.

On why we are so afraid of pain

Britta: Why do you think people are so afraid of pain, and what have you learned about what happens when people stop resisting it?

Jean: This was huge for me because, in my own experience, I was terrified to feel the pain. I tried to numb it. I was drinking, I was doing things that were really just band-aids, and I was in a lot of resistance. I was blaming others. I was angry.

When I finally surrendered and allowed myself to feel the grief and the pain, it was actually cathartic. What I learned was that my real pain was in the resistance. I suffered more in the space of trying not to feel it.

That does not mean you have to unleash all of your healing at once. You do not have to feel everything at the same time, and you do not have to dive into the deepest parts right away. You can touch it little by little, with support, and over time you discover that your capacity to feel is much bigger than you think.

Britta: It is scary, though. It is really scary.

Jean: It is, and grief does not disappear. It is something you learn to move with.

There is a line I love about grief leaving a kind of melancholy that stays with you forever, and I think that is so true. You learn to live with it. It does not consume you in the same way, and it does not overtake you in the same way, but there is still that melancholy, and that is okay.

Britta: I know exactly what you mean. Two years after Jasper died, I still have moments where I am doing something fun, like going to the beach or taking Theo on an adventure, and I think, this would be so much better if Jasper were here.

Sometimes I can smile when I think that now. I can say, Jasper would have loved this, and there is warmth in it. But it still hurts a little. It will always hurt a little.

Sometimes it is painful to bring him up or talk about him, but it almost feels like a good pain in a way because I feel proud of myself for facing it and continuing to include him in my life. It is hard, and it is scary to really address the pain, but it also feels important.

Jean: That is why the community you have built is so important. We have to share. Shame lives in the places where we feel like we cannot share, because then we feel so alone.

Having community, support, and safe spaces to be in, whether that is a sound bath, Reiki, a practitioner, a mentor, or a grief community, is so important in healing.

On saying the thing out loud

One of the things I have noticed in grief is that sometimes you do not realize how tightly you are holding something until you say it out loud.

There is a physical release that can come from speaking the thing you have been ruminating on, carrying quietly, or turning over in your own mind. It is almost as if the body exhales before you do.

Sound can do something similar. It reminds me of the feeling of hearing a song that brings you back to a memory or a moment, when something stirs in your body before your mind has even caught up. I have so many songs that remind me of Jasper, and while some of them still hurt, they also create this beautiful bridge back to him.

That is one of the things I love most about this work. It connects the mind, the body, the memory, and the love.

On turning pain into purpose without rushing grief

Britta: I want to talk about turning pain into purpose because that phrase gets used a lot, but I think it can also feel complicated when someone is still deep in grief. What does it actually mean to you, and how can someone begin to do that without rushing the grief?

Jean: Purpose is not something I forced out of the pain. It emerged. It became a calling.

I would not rush that. It is not about quickly trying to justify what happened or force meaning onto something painful. It is about allowing the experience to change you and shape you, and then letting whatever grows from that naturally be expressed over time.

After you sit with your experience long enough, and after you begin to understand yourself in a deeper way, sometimes you feel this genuine desire to support others who are in a similar place.

There is also no timeline for that. You do not have to be fully healed to hold space for others. In some ways, I think I was able to connect with people even more when I was still really raw.

When I first started, I was so nervous. I hated public speaking. I could not imagine holding circles or speaking about any of this. But grief shapes you, and you grow into it. It becomes this beautiful thing, even if it did not begin that way.

Britta: I relate to that so much. Never in a million years did I think I would be talking about grief every day or creating a company based around it. It was not on my bingo card, to say the least.

But at some point, it became this passion and this act of service. I receive healing every day through helping others. You are right that you do not need to be fully healed to support someone else. Sometimes it is about being there, sharing what helped you, or becoming the kind of soft landing place you needed.

I see that happening organically in the Jasper community all the time. People who joined earlier in their grief are now turning around and supporting newer members. They are sharing what worked for them, validating each other, and offering the kind of comfort that only someone who has lived it can give.

I also notice that sometimes when I am giving someone else advice, I realize I probably need to take my own advice, too. Hearing someone else put words to an experience can help you understand your own.

Purpose, for me, has become something that flowed naturally from the love and the loss. At a certain point, I could not imagine doing anything else.

Jean: It is a calling. I like to call it an initiation.

On where to begin when grief is new

Britta: For someone who is early in grief, where do you recommend they start? What feels like the lowest barrier to entry?

Jean: Everyone asks me this, and my answer is always the same: pour the love into yourself.

We hear all the time that grief is love with nowhere to go, so you have to pour it into you. That might mean inner child healing, or it might mean something creative or joyful that has no pressure attached to it.

When I was grieving, I picked up a charcoal pencil even though I had never really drawn before, and I just started drawing for the sake of joy. I ended up discovering that I had this hidden talent. Then I went back to dancing school and signed up for ballet classes. I was the only adult there, but it brought me so much joy.

Those things heal you little by little. That is my biggest advice: pour that love into yourself like your life depends on it, because it does.

Britta: I love that, and I think it is such an important reminder, especially when it comes to pet loss.

Our pets are often the ones giving us unconditional love, emotional support, safety, routine, and purpose. They are often our reason for getting out of bed, going outside, moving through the day, and staying connected to the world.

When they are gone, all of that love is still there, but the place we were used to putting it has changed. So we have to learn how to show some of that love back to ourselves.

That does not mean forcing ourselves to be okay or rushing the process. It means taking tiny moments of care seriously. It means giving ourselves grace while also finding gentle ways to face the pain. For me, sound baths have become one of those tools. Sometimes I use them to help me fall asleep, sometimes I use them to move through an hour when I am really feeling it, and sometimes they unlock something I did not even realize I was holding.

We have to become our own advocates in grief, even when we are tired, even when we are scared, and even when all we can do is take the smallest possible next step.

Jean: Yes. Those little moments for ourselves are so important, and sound is gentle in that way.

A final note

I am so grateful to Jean for being part of the Jasper community and for sharing her wisdom, her story, and her heart with us. I look forward to our sound baths every month, and I know so many of you have found comfort in the meditations she creates and the way she holds space.

What I took away from this conversation is something I think I will keep coming back to: grief is not only something we think through. It is something we live through, carry, release, resist, return to, and slowly learn to move with.

There is no perfect way to do that. There is no timeline, no finish line, and no version of healing that requires us to stop missing who we love.

But there are ways to support ourselves inside of it. There are ways to soften the body, regulate the nervous system, let the pain move, and pour some of the love back into ourselves.

And maybe, little by little, that is where healing begins.

Grief was never meant to be carried alone. If you’re looking for support, understanding, and a community that truly gets pet loss, I’d love to welcome you into Jasper.

Join the Jasper Community

Long before online therapy became normal, Jasper used to come to therapy with me every week.

I was lucky that my therapist, Stephen, was okay with it. There was always a tell in my behavior. On the hardest days, I would sit on the floor so I could be close to Jasper. I needed the extra comfort and grounding that he provided. On other days, I would perch on the couch and Jasper would wander around the room. It was on those days, I was usually “okay.” Looking back, I didn’t bring Jasper with me out of convenience. I wanted him there for support.

Animals give us one of the greatest gifts imaginable: unconditional friendship. Scientists even have a name for it: the “pet effect.” It’s a measurable cardiovascular response to interacting with animals. Just a few minutes of petting an animal can trigger a release of oxytocin, lower cortisol, and reduce blood pressure. The cumulative result? Better heart health.

And that is something I think animals often understand better than people do.

So much of grief support gets tangled up in trying to say the right thing, take the pain away, or convince someone they did everything they could. But often what grieving people need most is not to be fixed. They need to be witnessed. They need someone who can sit beside them, gently hold what is too heavy to carry alone, and not look away.

That is one of the reasons community is such an important part of Jasper Grief. Because grief needs somewhere to go. It needs people who can be present with it, not perform around it. It needs companionship.

And our animals teach us that.

In fact, when we lose a pet, we are also grieving the loss of the one friend we would normally turn to in moments like this.

That is the part I think so many people still do not fully understand about pet loss. It is not “just” the loss of an animal. It is the loss of a relationship, a routine, a witness, a safe place, a source of comfort, and often one of the most steady forms of love in our lives.

That is why I am so honored to share this guest essay from Jakob van Wielink and Darcy L. Harris, faculty mentors at the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition. Their piece explores what cats and other companion animals can teach us about sitting with sorrow, offering presence, and supporting grief without trying to fix it.

I am also grateful that this is the beginning of a larger relationship and conversation. Jakob and Darcy are doing such meaningful work in the grief space, and I am excited to continue learning from and collaborating with them. Later this summer, we will be hosting a live Q&A and conversation on this topic so be sure to subscribe to stay up to date.

The Purr-fect Grief Counselor: What Cats And Other Pets Can Teach Us About Sitting With Sorrow

By

Jakob van Wielink, MA, PGCert (Didactics)

Partner at The School for Transition, Oosterbeek, the Netherlands
Faculty mentor, Portland Institute for Loss and Transition

Darcy L. Harris, PhD, RN, RSW, FT
Professor Emerita of Thanatology, King’s University College at Western University, London (Ontario)
Faculty mentor, Portland Institute for Loss and Transition

Key Points:
• Research shows that bereaved individuals rate animal support as more satisfying than most human support, including from professionals.
• Animals offer a unique form of non-judgmental presence that mirrors what grief experts consider “good” support: Simply being there, without trying to fix.
• Interaction with animals can trigger oxytocin release and lower cortisol levels, which are neurochemical effects that are especially relevant in grief.
• Grief professionals can learn from animal companionship about the power of presence over performance in supporting those who are grieving.

Between the two of us, we have spent decades studying, writing about, and professionally accompanying people through transitions — and dealing with the grief that goes with them. We have navigated our own losses, supervised hundreds of students and leaders, and published shelves’ worth of articles and books on the subject. And yet, if we are being honest, one of the most consistently skilled grief companions either of us has ever encountered weighs about 9 pounds or four kilograms and naps for sixteen hours a day.

We are talking, of course, about our cats.

As colleagues and friends who share a love of felines (and have a habit of texting each other unsolicited photos of them), we have often joked that our cats embody every principle of good grief support that the clinical literature recommends—without ever having read a single textbook. They don’t offer platitudes. They don’t say “Everything happens for a reason.” They don’t check their watch during an emotional moment. They simply show up, curl into your lap, and purr.

It turns out the science backs them up.

Better than your therapist? (Don’t tell our students)

In a landmark 2021 study published in PLOS ONE, Joanne Cacciatore and colleagues surveyed 372 adults who had experienced traumatic grief. They asked participants to rate the quality of social support they received from various sources: Family, friends, faith leaders, counselors, and, notably, pets. The results were striking: 89 percent of those with companion animals rated animal support as “extremely” or “mostly” satisfying. Animals were ranked higher than every single category of human support, including therapists, support groups, and family members.

Why? When the researchers dug into the qualitative data, a clear picture emerged.

People described their animals as offering something that humans often struggle to provide: Consistent, non-judgmental emotional presence. As one participant put it, people would sometimes literally turn away when the grieving person started crying.

Animals, on the other hand, would walk over and put their head in a lap. No agenda. No advice. Just warmth.

This finding resonates deeply with what we teach in our professional training. In the textbook Loss, Grief, and Attachment in Life Transitions (Van Wielink, et al., 2019), pets are recognized as “secure bases.” It is a concept drawn from attachment theory. Just as children use a caregiver as a safe harbor from which to explore the world, adults can experience their companion animals as a dependable emotional anchor, especially in times of loss. It is a bond rooted in attachment and wordless trust.

The Neurochemistry of a Head Nudge

The comfort we feel from a purring cat on our lap is not merely emotional; it is also biochemical. Research has shown that interacting with pets can increase oxytocin (the so-called “bonding hormone”) and lower cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone. A study (Johnson, et al., 2021) found that even brief petting sessions with cats raised oxytocin levels in their owners.

For grieving individuals, these effects are especially relevant. Difficult grief is associated with elevated cortisol, impaired immune function, and increased cardiovascular risk (cf. O’Connor, 2019). The simple, physiological act of a cat choosing to be near you—approaching, rubbing, settling in—activates the parasympathetic nervous system and helps counteract the body’s chronic stress response. Cat purring, which occurs at frequencies between 25 and 150 Hz, may be linked to reduced blood pressure and calming effects in humans (Muggentaler, 2001).

In other words, when your cat climbs onto your chest at 3 a.m. while you are lying awake thinking about the person you lost—that is not just annoying. It might actually be therapeutic.

One of us (D.H.) has started inviting clients to include their pets in virtual counseling sessions. During online grief counseling sessions, she sometimes asks clients to bring their pet into the frame. When the client becomes dysregulated, they are asked to look at their pet, touch its fur, and see themselves through the unconditional acceptance of their pet. The impact is also similar even when the pet is not in the room with them, such that when they are in the therapy office, they can visualize their pet and this imaginal interaction with their pet will have a similar effect as if it was right there with them.

What Cats Know That We Forget

Perhaps the most profound lesson that pets offer us—both as grievers and as professionals who work with grief—is about the power of simply being present. In grief counseling, there is a well-known temptation to “fix” the pain by offering advice, reframing the narrative, or to push toward acceptance. Animals s do none of this. They embody what we might call compassionate indifference. They are not indifferent to your suffering—they clearly sense emotional shifts and often respond to them—but they are entirely indifferent to the urge to make it better. They offer their presence as a gift without conditions.

This mirrors what decades of bereavement research have consistently found, namely that what grieving people want most is not informational support, not problem-solving, but emotional support-- someone who listens, stays present, and remembers their loved one with them. The Cacciatore study (2021) confirmed that emotional support was by far the most valued form of bereavement support. And yet, it is the one thing that human supporters most often fail to provide.

Animals, it turns out, are not indifferent to loss. A 2024 Oakland University study (Vonk & Greene, 2024) found that cats whose companion animal had died sought more attention, appeared to search for the deceased, ate less, and slept more. These behaviors mirror what has been documented in grieving dogs (cf. Uccheddu et al., 2022). That these changes were observed in cats is particularly striking, given that cats evolved from relatively solitary ancestors. Their sensitivity to loss is not incidental. It may be part of what makes them such attuned companions for humans who are grieving.They do not approach loss as strangers to it.

Losing Them, Too

We would be remiss not to acknowledge the flip side: The grief we experience when we lose our beloved animal companions. A 2026 UK study published in PLOS ONE (Hyland, 2026) surveyed 975 adults and found that among those who had lost both a pet and a human loved one, more than one in five selected the death of their pet as their most distressing bereavement. The study also found that 7.5 percent of those bereaved by pet loss met the diagnostic criteria for Prolonged Grief Disorder, a rate comparable to losses of close human relationships.

This is not trivial. It speaks to the depth of the attachment bond and to the fact that pet loss remains, in Ken Doka’s ( 1989) terms, a form of “disenfranchised grief,” a loss that is real but not fully recognized or acknowledged by society. “It was just a cat,” people may say. Anyone who has held a–dying–cat in their arms knows exactly how inadequate that sentence is.

Lessons From the Lap

So, what can we take from all of this? For anyone who is grieving, if you have an animal companion , let it do its work. Accept the head nudge at an inconvenient moment. Let the purring settle into your chest. You are not being silly to find comfort in your pet. You are doing something that is neurochemically sound and empirically supported.

For professionals who work with the bereaved: Pay attention to the model of presence provided by animal companions. Ask yourself whether your support looks more like a trusted pet—steady, present, unhurried—or more like well-meaning Uncle Frank at the funeral, who cannot resist telling the widow that her husband is “in a better place.”

And for everyone, take the existence of the millions of companion animals on this planet, not just as a testament to human affection for small fluffy beings, but as a quiet reminder that sometimes the most healing thing another living being can do is simply sit beside you and not say a word.

References

Cacciatore, J., Thieleman, K., Fretts, R., & Jackson, L. B. (2021). What is good grief support? Exploring the actors and actions in social support after traumatic grief. PLOS ONE, 16(5), e0252324. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252324

Doka, K. J. (1989). Disenfranchised grief: Recognizing hidden sorrow. Lexington Books.

Chang, H., Zhang, J., Huang, H., Aviles-Rosa, E. O., Huang, H., Guo, Y., Xiao, Z., Liu, Q., Deng, B., & Zhang, L. (2025). The effects of owner-cat interaction on oxytocin secretion in pet cats with different attachment styles. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 283, Article 106523. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2025.106524

Harris, D. L. (2019). Non-death loss and grief: Context and clinical implications. Routledge.

Hyland, P. (2026). No pets allowed: Evidence that prolonged grief disorder can occur following the death of a pet. PLOS ONE, 21(1), e0339213. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0339213

Johnson, E. A., Portillo, A., Bennett, N. E., & Gray, P. B. (2021). Exploring women’s oxytocin responses to interactions with their pet cats. PeerJ, 9, e12393. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.12393

Von Muggenthaler, E. (2001). The felid purr: A healing mechanism? Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 110(5, Supplement), 2666. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4777098

O’Connor, M.-F. (2019). Grief: A brief history of research on how body, mind, and brain adapt. Psychosomatic Medicine, 81(8), 731–738. https://doi.org/10.1097/PSY.0000000000000717

Uccheddu, S., Ronconi, L., Albertini, M., Coren, S., Da Graça Pereira, G., De Cataldo, L., Haverbeke, A., Mills, D. S., Pierantoni, L., Riemer, S., Testoni, I., & Pirrone, F. (2022). Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) grieve over the loss of a conspecific. Scientific Reports, 12, Article 1920. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-05669-y

Van Wielink, J., Wilhelm, L., & Van Geelen-Merks, D. (2019). Loss, grief, and attachment in life transitions: A clinician’s guide to secure base counseling (1st ed.). Routledge.

Greene, B., & Vonk, J. (2024). Is companion animal loss cat-astrophic? Responses of domestic cats to the loss of another companion animal. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 277, Article 106355. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2024.106355

About the authors

Jakob van Wielink is a leadership coach and grief counselor and co-author of Loss, Grief, and Attachment in Life Transitions. He is a founding partner of The School for Transition and lives in the Netherlands with 2 cats who provide unsolicited supervision during all his writing sessions.

Darcy L. Harris is a Professor Emerita of Thanatology at King’s University College / Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. She is the author of numerous books including Non-Death Loss and Grief and Compassion-Based Approaches in Loss and Grief. Her cats have occasionally taught her more about presence than any clinical training ever did.

Darcy and Jakob are both members of the International Work Group on Death, Dying and Bereavement (IWGddb) and Faculty Members at the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition.

The authors share a transatlantic friendship, a professional interest in loss and grief, and an alarming number of cat photographs.

He never made me breakfast in bed. He never ordered flowers. He never said “Happy Mother’s Day.” And still, for 15 years, he made me a mom in every way that mattered.

I still clearly remember my first Mother’s Day without him in 2024. It was only a few months after Jasper died, and the day felt off before I even had language for why. It wasn’t like Mother’s Day had ever been some big production for us. There were no reservations, no gifts, no traditional markers of the holiday. But I woke up that morning with this lingering emptiness, an ache that I couldn’t quite place at first.

Eventually, it hit me that for 15 years, I had been Jasper’s mom. So without him physically here, who was I now? Was I still a mom? Was I still his mom? Was I allowed to claim that when I was no longer actively taking care of him in the ways the world could see?

I remember feeling almost afraid to say any of that out loud. Even in grief, you might start second-guessing yourself. Don’t say that. People will think you’re being dramatic. People will think you’re comparing pet loss to something you’re not allowed to compare it to. People will think you’re crazy.

But that’s the thing about pet loss. So much of it happens in silence because we are terrified that the depth of our grief will make other people uncomfortable. And holidays have a way of making that silence even louder.

Mother’s Day is complicated for a lot of people. It can bring up grief, longing, resentment, gratitude, uncomfortable family dynamics, infertility, estrangement, caregiving, loss, and love all at once. It is one of those days that gets packaged commercially as flowers and brunch, but emotionally, it can be so much more complicated than that.

For grieving pet parents, there is another layer that often goes unnamed. It is the grief of missing them, yes, but it is also the grief of wondering what happens to your identity when the one who made you a parent is gone.

Because for so many people, pet parenthood is not just a cute label. It is not only something printed on a mug or a sweatshirt, and it is definitely not some quirky personality trait. It becomes part of how you move through the world. Your days are shaped around them in ways you may not fully realize until they are gone. When you wake up, how long you stay out, what you worry about, what makes the house feel full, what gives you a reason to get up when everything else feels heavy. Over time, that love becomes woven into your identity so completely that when they die, you are not only grieving their absence—you are grieving the version of yourself that existed when they were still here.

For 15 years, Jasper gave me a role I never had to explain to myself. I was his person, his protector, his home—and yes, I was his mom. After he died, the routines that had structured my life disappeared almost overnight. No one was waiting for me to wake up or follow me from room to room. No one needed breakfast, medicine, a walk, a check-in, or the thousand tiny acts of care that had become so automatic I barely realized they were holding my days together.

That is what makes this kind of grief so disorienting. The day-to-day caretaking stops, but the relationship does not. Their body is no longer here, but the bond is still very much alive, and you are left trying to understand what it means to still feel like their mom when the world no longer sees you mothering them.

I think Mother’s Day can bring that tension to the surface in a really painful way. It asks the world to celebrate a role that, for grieving pet parents, may suddenly feel invisible. There is no school craft coming home in a backpack, no brunch reservation, no card signed with a paw print, no socially accepted ritual that says, I know this day might hurt for you too.

But it does hurt, and it makes sense that it hurts, because for so many of us, pet parenthood is not symbolic. It is real, daily, embodied care.

To be clear, pet care does not need to compete with anyone else’s version of motherhood or fatherhood. Pet parenthood is simply a different kind of parenthood. We love them, care for them, sacrifice for them, build our days around them, worry about them, and make impossible medical decisions for them out of love. We learn their moods, their needs, their sounds, their routines, and the look in their eyes when something is wrong. That kind of commitment is not casualIn fact, for so many of us, they are family in the deepest, most lived-in sense of the word.

In 2023, Pew Research Center published data on pet ownership in the U.S. They found that 97% of U.S. pet owners consider their pets part of their family, and 51% say their pets are as much a part of the family as a human member. And it’s not just Americans. Globally, the human-animal bond is just as strong. Approximately 94% of pet owners consider their pet a part of their family and 92% said they could never be convinced to give them up.

So when I say they are family, I mean that when a pet dies, we are not simply losing an inanimate object, a casual hobby, “just a dog,” or “just a cat.” For many, we are losing the closest thing we had to a child, a partner, a daily companion, a witness, a purpose, or a safe place.

And when the world refuses to acknowledge the role our pets played, it does not make the grief smaller. It makes the grief lonelier.

It’s days like Mother’s Day that can bring up the ache of no longer being needed in the same way. Father’s Day can do that too. So can birthdays, adoption days, gotcha days, holidays, anniversaries, and random Tuesdays when the house is too quiet. These dates can crack something open because grief is not linear, and love does not follow a calendar.

One day you are functioning, and the next you’re standing in the dog food aisle crying because, for half a second, your body forgot you don’t need to buy their food anymore. After they die, we are not only learning how to live without them. We are learning how to live without the version of ourselves that loved them in real time, the version with the routine, the leash by the door, the medication schedule, the little shadow following behind, and the daily proof that our care mattered to someone.

Rebuilding after that kind of loss is not dramatic. It is human.

I wish someone had said that to me sooner. I wish every grieving pet parent heard it before the holiday hit. You are still their mom, their dad, their person, their parent, their home. You are still the one who knew them best, the one who carries their story, and the one whose life was permanently shaped by having loved them. Death changes the form of the relationship. It does not erase it.

And I know this in a new way now, too, because I am a dog mom again. Theo has brought love, life, chaos, and tenderness back into parts of me that I wasn’t sure would ever feel alive again. And while bringing him into my life forced me to rapidly adjust—as we all must do with any new member of the family—I quickly learned that being Theo’s mom did not make me less Jasper’s mom. It did not replace that bond or close that chapter neatly. If anything, Theo has taught me that love expands, even while grief lingers.

Being Theo’s and Jasper’s mom has become my new identity.. One relationship is alive in my daily routines, and the other lives in my memory, my body, my story, and the way I love now. They are different, but they are both real.

So ahead of Mother’s Day, I want to say this clearly. If this day feels complicated for you, you are not alone. If you feel grief, jealousy, confusion, anger, tenderness, numbness, or nothing at all, you are not doing it wrong. If you are grieving the pet who made you a mom, that grief is real. If you are grieving the routines that gave your life meaning, that grief is real. If you are grieving the identity you had when they were here, that grief is real.

And if part of you is scared to say, “I’m still their mom,” say it anyway. Whether you have opened your heart to another pet or cannot even imagine doing that yet, you are still theirs, and you always will be.

Finally, if you love someone who has lost a pet, especially someone facing their first Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, or meaningful holiday without them, please don’t overthink it. Reach out. Say their pet’s name and acknowledge the day. A simple message can be enough: Thinking of you and Jasper today. I know Mother’s Day might feel complicated this year. You’ll always be his mom.

Jasper never got me a card. He never said “Happy Mother’s Day.” He never made a reservation or wrapped a gift or wrote some sentimental caption about how lucky he was to have me. But for 15 years, he made me a mom in all the ways that mattered. He gave me someone to care for, someone to come home to, someone to protect, someone to build a life around, and someone to love with my whole heart.

And even though he is gone, that part of me is not.

I am still Jasper’s mom. I will always be Jasper’s mom. And if you are missing the one who made you a parent, you are still theirs too. 🤎

I recommend watching Shrinking to anyone who listens. Recently, I found myself trying to figure out what makes it so relatable. Why it sticks the way it does and can make you laugh, then immediately make you feel something in your throat. I think I finally landed on it.

Shrinking is a show about community.

Not community as a buzzword. Not “join our group chat” community. Real community. The kind where people notice and check in even when the initial shock has passed, where you don’t have to earn your place by being upbeat, polished, or “doing better.”

It’s the kind of community so many of us don’t realize we’re missing until grief shows up and exposes the gaps.

We live in a world where it’s normal to be far away from the people who knew you first. Loved ones move to opposite coasts, or to different countries, away from family, childhood friends, and the familiar rhythm of being surrounded by people who already get it. I grew up in Connecticut and live in Florida now. Making friends as an adult can feel like a full-time job. It’s hard to find people you connect with casually, let alone on a deeper, intimate level. It’s even harder to find people who are willing to talk to you about uncomfortable experiences, like loss.

Add to it this reality: loneliness and disconnection are widespread enough that the U.S. Surgeon General has identified a public health crisis. The advisory and related materials point to roughly half of U.S. adults living with loneliness. (Source)

So if you’ve been feeling like connection is harder than it should be, you’re not imagining it. And if that’s your baseline, grief can be overwhelming.

It doesn’t wait until your support system is ready. It doesn’t pause if your friends are busy, or your family is far. It rearranges everything, from routines to your identity, your nervous system to your home.

In the early days after Jasper died, I experienced something that I think a lot of us don’t talk about, a feeling of excitement to go home, like he would be there. It was l my body hadn’t caught up with my mind. Sometimes I spent hours sitting in my car procrastinating going inside, because walking through the door without him felt like admitting he was no longer there.

The smallest habits suddenly felt exposed. I’d be cooking or eating, drop something and I’d immediately rush to pick it up, because Jasper had pancreatitis and he couldn’t have table food. My brain knew he was gone. My instincts did not. My body still moved like I was protecting him.

That’s the thing about pet loss that people underestimate. It isn’t just losing a friend. It’s losing a sequence of behaviors that made up your daily routine. Like any family member, he was woven into every hour of every day. He was a witness to my life, there for its routines and its ruptures, and the reason my home never felt empty and cold.

Pet grief is still minimized in a way that doesn’t match how common it actually is. The American Pet Products Association reports that 94 million U.S. households own at least one pet. (source) That is not niche. That’s nearly a third of the population, millions who love their animal(s) deeply, build their life around them, and eventually experience heartbreak when they pass. Millions who live with grief that’s too often undermined, chastised, or even ignored completely.

This is called disenfranchised grief, and there’s a reason it hurts so much. Pet loss often carries complex emotions of guilt or shame over euthanasia decisions, second-guessing medical choices, and discomfort with the intensity of grief for a loss that is often socially minimized.

So when someone says “you can get another one,” what they’re really saying is “I don’t know how to acknowledge this.” And your grief gets pushed into isolation.

Here’s what did help.

Friends checking in with me on Mother’s Day because I always associated the holiday with Jasper. Loved ones letting me tell stories about him. Photos and videos of Jasper. Memories of him. My community helped keep him present in a world that moves on far too fast. I didn’t want to stop talking about him, and the most impactful thing was being around people who didn’t try to make me.

And then something bigger happened. The talking and sharing and connecting evolved. It became a place, not just a fleeting moment. Stories were celebrated instead of tolerated. Photos and memories and the pain of grief itself could be shared in a way that felt honest. And instead of staying stuck, we created something that routinely honors our loved ones and ourselves.

What I’ve seen inside this community has been nothing short of incredible.

People come together from different backgrounds, different countries, different religions, and different life circumstances. But the familiarity is immediate. We get it. The heartbreak of losing a pet has a particular shape, and when you’re in it, being understood is not a luxury. It’s oxygen.

I’ve watched people build real friendships here. Deep bonds that turn into sacred connections. Many Jasper members don’t have deep community ties or family members that will understand their grief. Finding a (virtual) room full of people who speak the same emotional language as them can be the difference between feeling broken and feeling human.

And here’s the part people so often forget: community doesn’t just benefit the person who speaks. It benefits everyone listening.

I’ve seen firsthand how one person sharing can ripple through an entire group. It validates what others are going through. It puts words to something they haven’t been able to name. It gives them permission to stop minimizing their own pain. That’s the power of spaces designed for community.

That’s what Shrinking captures so well, underneath the humor. People refusing to let others disappear. People staying in the room to help. People making sense of life’s mysteries together, not by pretending the losses don’t hurt, but by acknowledging the messiness and staying connected anyway.

So, if your existing family and friends aren’t showing up the way you need them to, it doesn’t mean they don’t love you. It doesn’t mean they don’t want to understand, or that they wouldn’t undo the pain if they could.

But grief has a way of unmooring us anyway and care doesn’t always translate into comfort. If you’ve been navigating it alone, I want to say this clearly: you don’t have to.

There are people out there who will get it, people who will understand the messiness, the doubt, the second-guessing, and the pain that resists resolution.

Speaking from experience—of loss as it’s actually lived, unpretty, imperfect, and forever unfinished—many of them are at Jasper.

Jasper is the community I wish existed when I was grieving Jasper.

A place for the guilt, the regret, the love, the memories, the questions, and the kind of pain that too often gets minimized. Through live Q&As, grief education, community conversations, and one-on-one support, Jasper gives pet loss the space it has always deserved.

Because grief this real should not have to be carried in silence.

Join us here. 🤎

In my own grief journey, the sadness feels less like a ride with a clear beginning and end, and more like a train moving along a circular track, stopping at the same stations over and over again. Some of those stops last days, weeks, or even months. Others are fleeting, a brief slowdown that lasts an hour before the train moves on. The point though is that the track doesn’t run in a straight line, even though we’re often taught to believe it should.

Much of that belief comes from the “stages of grief.” We’re given a linear checklist of emotions, like denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. We’re encouraged to move through them like steps in a manual, as if completion is the goal. What’s rarely acknowledged is that these stages were originally developed to help terminally ill cancer patients come to terms with their own mortality. They were never meant to be applicable to those learning how to live after the loss of someone they love. When that framework is applied to bereavement, especially to losses rooted in deep attachment or trauma, it can create unrealistic expectations and unnecessary self-judgment.

Guilt is a good example of this. It wasn’t a stage I encountered, processed, and then left behind. It’s something that has resurfaced repeatedly over time, often in different forms, triggered by different memories or moments. Even now, 21 months later, it still appears. Not because I’ve failed to grieve “correctly,” but because grief doesn’t resolve emotions once and for all. It revisits them again and again. And some feelings stay with you forever.

I’ve had countless moments where I’ve told myself that I must be going backwards. That I’ve somehow returned to day zero, the day he died. That same fear came up recently in a conversation with one of our community members. This is someone I’ve watched grow in profound ways over the past six months. Her self-awareness, the boundaries she’s learning to name and draw for herself, and her ability to articulate her needs have all shifted dramatically. From the outside, her growth is unmistakable. But she couldn’t see it. All she could feel was the intensity of her pain, and to her, that intensity meant regression.

That moment was a powerful reminder of how complicated and, at times, deeply frustrating grief can be. It’s painful to invest so much time and energy into healing, to commit to grieving openly and intentionally, only to be confronted with emotions that feel just as sharp as the day you first felt them. When that happens, it’s easy to believe that the work hasn’t mattered. Or worse, that it has failed. That belief can be discouraging enough to make people give up entirely, to push their grief down and avoid it rather than risk feeling like they’re losing ground.

But it’s time to acknowledge that grief doesn’t move forward in a straight line. It travels in loops. There are returns and revisits. There are triggers that pull us back into the most painful moments, and anniversaries or milestones that can dismantle whatever sense of stability we’ve built. None of that erases the progress we’ve made.

The train keeps moving, even when it stops at familiar stations. Each time we pass through those feelings of guilt, anger, sadness, and longing, we arrive as someone different than the last time we were there. We bring more awareness, more language, and often more compassion for ourselves, even if it doesn’t feel that way in the moment.

Progress in grief isn’t defined by the absence of pain. It isn’t measured by how far away we feel from loss. Progress looks more like the willingness to embrace ourselves when the pain returns, to recognize it without immediately reframing it as failure or regression. Feeling something again doesn’t mean we’re back to where we started. It means we’re still on the journey. And the reality is, grief is usually a lifetime commitment because so is love. The fact that we’re still here, still riding the train, still choosing to engage rather than shut down, is what life—and loss—are all about.

Just weeks before Jasper passed, I was laid off. Reeling from both losses, I decided to spend time with my parents and friends in Florida. Most days looked the same: long walks on the beach, tears hidden behind sunglasses, and stacks of books I tore through in days. Reading gave me an escape; I consumed Kristin Hannah’s The Women in just two days. I didn’t want to sit alone with my thoughts, so I let stories hold me together.

Walking helped too, retracing the places Jasper and I had explored together at sunrise and sunset. It gave me a sense of routine, even when it took all my energy just to put my shoes on.

I also tried journaling. People told me to practice gratitude. I hated it. The only words I could manage were “Dear Jasper,” written over and over again. Nothing else came to mind. There were too many thoughts, too many things I wanted to tell him if only I could.

The Early Weight of Grief

I remember the first time I laughed. I can’t recall the joke, but I do remember stopping abruptly, overcome with guilt. How could I laugh when my best friend was gone? Looking back, I wish I could hug that version of myself and whisper, “Laughter doesn’t mean you loved him any less.”

It’s something grief researchers talk about often— how guilt is a natural reaction, but largely misplaced. Studies show that grief and joy can coexist, and that positive emotions, when they arise, don’t invalidate the depth of loss (Stroebe & Schut, 2010). Still, it took me months to believe that.

Mornings were especially brutal. Jasper had always been my alarm clock—ready for food, ready for walks, ready for life. Without him, I felt like I had no reason to get out of bed. Jobless and purposeless, I remember spiraling one morning— convinced that everything was my fault. Jasper’s cancer, his death, even the day I chose to let him go.

A Turning Point

That day, I called my therapist. I know how much of a privilege that was— not everyone has a therapist who will pick up the phone, thanks, Stephen! He asked me to start small: drink a glass of water, make my bed, step outside for ten minutes. While we stayed on the phone, I made breakfast. He reminded me of the tools I already had. The grounding techniques and rituals I had forgotten in the fog of grief.

That moment became a turning point. It wasn’t exactly a “success,” but it was survival. And survival required structure. I needed a routine to keep me moving, even if it meant simply putting one foot in front of the other.

Creating New Anchors

I decided to take up tennis. I hadn’t touched a racket since I was twelve, but it gave me three important things: something new to learn, a social environment, and a space where no one knew my story. On the court, I wasn’t “the girl who just lost her dog.” I was just someone trying to hit the ball over the net.

I also sought support. I joined a grief group and worked with a grief coach who validated my messy, contradictory emotions— the anger, the guilt, the loneliness. Validation matters. Disenfranchised grief, like pet loss, often goes unrecognized, making it harder to process. Having someone tell me my feelings weren’t “crazy” changed everything.

I scoured Reddit threads, read academic papers, even reached out to PhD students writing on pet loss grief. The information was out there, but what I wanted—what I needed—was a community. A place to go beyond validation and actually do the work of grief.

Lessons From A Survivor

Looking back, here are some things that helped me survive those first few months:

• Creating a care plan. Identify who you can reach out to, your daily non-negotiables, and the things that help you feel grounded. (You can download the one I used here).

• Add structure. Even a loose routine—walks, meals, reading— can help anchor you when everything feels uncertain.

• Find your safe space. For me, it was reading. For others, it might be cooking, re-watching a comfort show, or staying with family.

• Try something new. Learning a hobby or skill gives you something to focus on outside of your grief.

• Aim for neutral. You don’t have to be grateful or happy. Some days, just getting out of bed is enough. Research calls this “complicated grief” for a reason—it taxes your brain and body (Shear et al., 2011).

• Find support. Grieving in isolation can feel impossible. If your circle doesn’t understand, seek out people who do. The Jasper community exists for this very reason. (You can sign up here, and use code BRITTASGIFT for a free month)

• Give yourself grace. Grief is exhausting. Scientists call it “grief brain”—a fog that makes concentration and memory difficult. If you spend the day crying in bed, that’s okay. It doesn’t mean you’re failing.

On the Other Side

I won’t sugarcoat it. The first three months of pet loss grief are raw, brutal, and lonely. But you can make it through. Over time, grief doesn’t vanish, but it shifts. By seeking connection, creating routines, and allowing space for the messiness, you give yourself the chance to carry both the love and the loss—and eventually, to carry them with strength.

If you’ve recently lost your pet, I’m so sorry. You don’t have to go through the early days alone. When you’re ready, I’ve put together a collection of free tools and resources to support you. You can find them here: https://www.jaspergrief.com/resources

Jasper is a community for those navigating one of life’s most disenfranchised forms of grief. Through live Q&As, educational content, and one-on-one support, Jasper helps pet owners process guilt, regret, and love in all its complexity. At its core, Jasper’s message is simple but radical: grief deserves space, not silence. Sign up here. community.jaspergrief.com

“Do you know what the most addictive substance is known to humankind? It’s hope.” – Dr. Sarah Hoggan, Chief Veterinary Officer at Jasper

My decision to bring on Dr. Sarah Hoggan as Chief Veterinary Officer marks a major step forward in Jasper’s mission to normalize pet loss grief. A former emergency vet and grief psychology expert with two TEDx talks on the subject, Dr. Hoggan brings both scientific insight and deep compassion to the role—reinforcing the platform’s foundation as a trusted home for healing.

In our first livestream together, Dr. Hoggan and I tackle the hardest questions: how to know when it’s time to say goodbye, how to live with guilt, and how to find meaning after loss. Dr. Hoggan reframes euthanasia not as defeat, but as deep and loving mercy:

She explains that the act of letting go—however painful—is the final expression of love. Grief, she says, isn’t something to “get over” but something to integrate.

Dr. Hoggan’s perspective reminds us that pet loss grief is real, valid, and deserving of community. Her work explores what many of us feel, but can’t articulate: that we carry our animals forward with us, as stories in what she calls our “love library.”

Watch the full interview above for Dr. Hoggan’s insights on compassion, euthanasia as mercy, and the power of community in healing.

Jasper is a community for those navigating one of life’s most disenfranchised forms of grief. Through live Q&As, educational content, and one-on-one support, Jasper helps pet owners process guilt, regret, and love in all its complexity. At its core, Jasper’s message is simple but radical: grief deserves space, not silence. Sign up here. community.jaspergrief.com

As I wrote last week, bereavement leave–or taking time off from work to grieve the death of a loved one–is a relatively new phenomenon. As modern medicine became more sophisticated and clinical, our emotional rituals around grief and acknowledgment of the pain around it subsided. Instead of learning how to lay wreaths or wear different-colored clothing to honor the dead, we learned how to self-optimize and move on. Taking time to grieve became a luxury, something that people who have money or are employed by the creme de la creme of employers have access to.

In most realms, after death, we’re expected to compartmentalize ourselves to pull it together for the sake of productivity. If we’re lucky, we may have a couple of days immediately after the death or loss in order to sit in our feelings and cry a lot. Some workplaces offer five days of paid leave upon the death of an immediate family member, and one or two for extended family members.

And the law is even catching up in some places to provide more. In the United Kingdom, miscarriages are now covered by the law as a form of bereavement leave. New York City is one of the few places to consider giving workers paid time off to tend to their pets’ medical needs.

Candidly, as a startup founder, a six-week bereavement leave sounds like a lot for any employer–maybe unless they are large and well-resourced enough. But there is something to this evolving culture, perhaps a pendulum swinging back to the way things once were, where people can’t just pull it together for a meeting about numbers after seeing a physical being, whether a pet or a loved one, evaporate into memory. The whole adage “bring your full self to work” is being taken seriously, especially by Gen Z, and if your full self needs to howl in pain for a couple of hours after someone dies, that needs to be respected by an employer.

When I lost my dog Jasper, the idea of seeing an acronym like KPI or caring about a performance review at work seemed laughable. Jasper was literally the being that allowed me to be as productive as I was in many of the fast-paced workplaces I contributed to for over a decade.

So after he died, the brain fog, the physical pain in my chest, the waves of tears that would take me over–these were things I had to feel in order to healthily move through, to even be running a company or writing this post today.

I now employ people at my company, and I understand the stressors that one can be under, that someone’s family member’s death may not be your problem. But maybe it is. Because the death of a loved one is one thing that we are all certain to experience in this life. And when you experience it, perhaps that grace is exactly what you need, too.

I’m the founder and CEO of Jasper, a community for pet loss and disenfranchised forms of grief. If you’re grieving or want to share your story with us, we’d love to hear–sign up here.

I was feeling irritation, misery, and hollowness at varying times of the day. Then I’d have moments of unexpected lightness and joy–and then subsequent guilt for feeling that joy. When I talked to friends who had lost a parent, pet, or friend to unexpected death, they shared similar feelings.

Why weren’t our variations of grief able to seep from moment to moment–as if the passage of time would somehow erase the former presence or current void of a physical being? I started to think about times before we became obsessed with personal optimization, hustling, and making everything efficient. Before everyone started to see negative feelings as counter to an “upward trajectory” in life–whatever that means–how were people coping?

It turns out that people have exhibited similar symptoms related to loss throughout history. In the 1500s and 1600s, it was reported that grief manifested as a physical disease, one that could be treated by physicians using leeches, laxatives and vomits. Luckily we’re not leeching ourselves anymore, but I can understand the physical manifestation of that crushing loss–the sluggishness of one’s body, the cloudiness of one’s perception, the weight on one’s chest. It is physical.

Later on, there were times when grief was proudly and culturally acknowledged as part of the process–not seen as a feeling to lock up in a box or store away. In the Victorian era, widows represented their shades of grief through color and fashion, quite literally fading their grief from black to grey and purple as time moved through the death of a loved one. From The New Yorker:

Widows wore their weeds for years, graduating through various sheens of black and eventually to gray or purple as their loss receded into the past, and skeleton jewelry became a common luxury item.) Although grief was public, the emphasis of grieving moved from the passage of the departed to the pain of those left behind, a shift that continued into the twentieth century, by which time grief was considered personal, psychological, and even intensely private.

So yes, the horror of seeing a loved one sick or dying was acute in the days after death. But even then, people realized that loss was not just about the person or being dying, but those left behind.

Around the time of the Victorian era, doctors and the medical industry progressed at such a rate that people were surviving sicknesses that would have killed them before:

The deathbed, once the province of the priest, became, more and more, the domain of the doctor. As death became medical, it became something to be fought or fixed, and in these parallel shifts—from the religious to the medical, and from the communal to the private.

So, there became this paradox. As medicine became more sophisticated to treat people, the rituals around dying, death, and grief became more clinical, sanitized, formulaic. According to Brandy Schillace, a medical-humanities historian and author of “Death’s Summer Coat: What the History of Death and Dying Teaches Us About Life and Living,” there is an inherent misalignment about mortality:

That misalignment, in her view, is largely due to a core tension in contemporary Western culture: we are “bent on living forever, but committed to the disposable nature of absolutely everything else,” which has left us ill at ease with the realities of physical existence and without the rituals that used to lead us through loss. “The modern westerner has lost loss,” she writes.

Now in the early 20th century, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud provided a bit of a counter to the clinical nature of medicine, writing a psychological study of grief in a paper called Mourning and Melancholia:

Freud proposed that a bereaved individual must engage in ‘grief work’ to properly heal from a loss. Grief work is the process by which an individual breaks their bond to the deceased, adjusts to their new life, and forms new relationships with others. According to this Freudian theory, the best way to overcome grief is to throw oneself into other aspects of life.

“Grief work.” In many ways, even without the loss of a person or pet, it occurred to me that we are performing grief work all the time. We are losing our innocence, our physical environments, versions of our loved ones, the prior versions of ourselves before we had an experience–all the time, every day, as our bodies age and time passes us by. Not all of this is a tragedy in the traditional sense. Perhaps sometimes it is growth. But we are constantly shedding past versions of our lives and of ourselves as we make our way through life. And sometimes, the way we process that is not always linear.

Modern medicine and ways of sustaining life is a beautiful thing. It’s allowed us all to have more moments with our loved ones. But we are all mortal beings who will die. And perhaps we even experience forms of “death” and rebirth as we cycle through iterations of ourselves in our living bodies. Other cultures recognize this: in yoga practice, we cycle through a sort of birth, movement, and death ending in a “corpse” pose; in French, the very phrase for orgasm is “petit mort” –little death.

To me, “grief work” is a daily practice of living. We can absolutely throw ourselves into new passions. But we should not always be blindly throwing ourselves into other things without feeling the pain of a loss–as if a new pet, partner, or hobby can be a substitute for what we went through.

If it suits us, rituals to remember can be heartening rather than dragging us down. And after that, we can fully move not on, but through.

I’m the founder and CEO of Jasper, a community for pet loss and disenfranchised forms of grief. If you’re grieving or want to share your story with us, we’d love to hear–sign up here.

Jasper was an effervescent platinum blonde Morkie (a Maltese Yorkie) who I found right around the time I was graduating college. I always thought that I wanted a girl dog, but when a small male puppy jumped up at me from the litter, I felt smitten. I called my mom, who mentioned that we could dress him in sports attire. I was working for a professional hockey team at the time, and I was sold.

Since that day, Jasper and I pretty much never left each other’s sides. From Tampa to Minneapolis to Los Angeles to New York and Connecticut. He velcroed to my body in bed as we slept, he licked me when I was feeling down, and he jumped for joy when we were walking in the park and he had a burst of energy.

Colleagues, best friends, acquaintances, and everyone in my orbit knew me as Britta with Jasper. I brought him to the office, to weddings, to dinners out, on planes–anywhere that I could. Everything in life was an adventure with him–even going to the grocery store or a friend’s house was exciting. I still reach over to him in the passenger side of the car, expecting him to be there.

And I was the most important person in the room to him wherever we were, whatever was happening, however else anyone was treating me. When I was having stressful moments at work or crying over a break-up, Jasper curled into the perfect position as my little spoon. His little head fit perfectly in the nook between my chin and chest, and we were two peas in a pod. The weight of him on my chest was better than any weighted blanket, it was us against the world. Put simply: I took care of him, he took care of me, we took care of each other when the other needed it.

In March of last year, Jasper was diagnosed with cancer around the time everything seemed to be falling apart around me in my life. My dad had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. I was freezing my eggs–a departure from how I always thought I might have a family with a partner. My job wasn’t going well, and I needed to leave.

When the reality of losing him washed over me like a tidal wave, I knew I had to find a way to be as present as I possibly could in his final moments. I had to show him what he meant to me in my life–and to give him the utmost grace and dignity of a peaceful ending.

I left my job that I wasn’t loving anyway, and became Jasper’s full-time caretaker. Nothing else mattered–I had blinders on, subduing my own swelling pain to focus on Jasper’s transition and comfort. I carried him when he could no longer walk, and I woke up throughout the night to make sure he could go to the bathroom. We experimented with different foods when his appetite changed, and I just held him close and told him how much I loved him every second I could. I knew his end was near, but to give him at least a sliver of the strength that he gave me throughout half my adult life was one of the best things I’ve ever done.

Jasper passed away a year-and-a-half ago today. The morning of, we went to the beach one last time together. He passed at home, surrounded by me–his partner ever since he left his litter–and my brother and best friend, without whom I would be lost in a sea of bewilderment and pain.

When Jasper was gone, it was empty. And then it was a deluge. I could not unfeel my feelings.

Some people say that grief is an overwhelming amount of love for someone or something who is no longer physically there. Where do you put the love? Who am I after this?

It made no sense that people could keep it together after someone close to them just evaporates. How do they go to work and pretend to care about anything other than the gaping hole in their heart? How could I not constantly think about the absence of Jasper’s body in my bed, his feet tip-tapping on our floor? How are we all not absolutely crushed by waking up with the literal disappearance of our best friends and companions?

Grief is a rollercoaster, as I’ve learned–and emotions hit you when you least expect them. Now I know that if I grieve out loud and feel my emotions wash over me, I can move through the pain with more ease–releasing it from my body instead of holding it inside.

My dog and friend Jasper was and still is the love of my life. I’m healing on my own time, with some days better than others. My experience with grief and with losing him hasn’t always been consistent or felt the same every day. But my desire to express it remains constant. It’s the least that Jasper deserves. And it’s the only way forward to being a new version of the person that he knew and loved.

I’m the founder and CEO of Jasper, a community for pet loss and disenfranchised forms of grief. If you’re grieving or want to share your story with us, we’d love to hear–sign up here.