On Losing A Dog
There’s no way to sugarcoat it, so: On Tuesday morning my 17-month-old dog ran into a busy parkway, met a car, and died on impact.
My husband and I took his body to the vet. Then we came home and wept, in fits and starts. We took all of his stuffed animals and balls and bones and other crap down to the basement. I took a bath, and later, a shower under nice rain shower head. We made sandwiches. We flipped through old text messages for the dozens of photos and videos of him we had sent to each other. We tried to get used to a too-quiet, too-clean apartment.
After a few hours, because this is what I do, I started looking up scientific research about losing a pet. There were more studies than I expected (PubMed produced 66 papers with search term “grieving pet”), and what the studies reported was more comforting than I expected. So I figured it might be helpful — both for my mental health and for any of my readers who are going through something similar — to write some of it down.
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