Episode 91: Coping with the Loss of a Pet

Brenda started GAP (Grief About Pets) which offers support services to pet parents and their families before and after the loss of a pet.

Many of us have experienced the painful loss of a pet. Let's talk about what we can do to help ourselves, as well as others, through the process of grief.

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Transcript

Mikel Delgado [0:24] Hi, everybody! I am Dr. Mikel Delgado here from Good Dog, and you are listening to the Good Dog Pod. Today we have a very special episode. I’m going to be talking with Brenda Brown. She’s a grief specialist who received her master’s degree in grief counseling and in thanatology—which I had to look up, but that is the study of death and how humans cope or respond to death. Brenda also completed a fellowship at the Association for Death Education and Counseling, and she completed the North American Veterinary Community’s Human Bond Certificate Program. Brenda started GAPs (Grief About Pets) LLC in 2015 in response to the huge gap in services available to support pet parents and their families before and after their pet dies. GAPs offers individual support sessions of free monthly pet loss grief and educational programs for veterinary offices and organizations. I know that many of us have experienced the very painful loss of a pet (or many). This interview may be hard for some of you to listen to. I’m going to do my best not to weep during this interview. But we hope that you’ll find some comfort in knowing that so many of us have experienced similar feelings and that there are people available to help, like today’s guest, Brenda. Brenda, thank you so much for joining us at the Good Dog Pod today.

Brenda Brown [1:39] Hi Mikel! Thanks for asking me!

MD [1:41] Let’s get started. Can you tell us a little bit about your own personal path to where you are today? How did you end up focusing your education and efforts on helping people cope with the loss of a pet?

BB [1:53] I’m asked that question a lot. I’ve got to tell you something honest: my interest in this field all began with a human loss, with the loss of my father, because I was in my early 30s. At that time, none of my friends had had a parent die. I found it to be the most painful, horrible time I’d ever endured in my life.

MD [2:22] I’m sorry.

BB [2:22] Thank you. But out of that time, I decided to turn it all around and think about what I could do with my life to help other people going through grief. So that’s when I found a job with hospice, and it took off from there. Then I got into pet loss after I left my last job with a local hospital. I started looking around at our area. I live in the Akron, OH area and saw that there was absolutely no support programs out there for people grieving the loss of their pets. Being a huge pet lover my whole life, I knew that pet parents needed help. I started my business, GAPs. 

MD [3:13] Great. So you told us about your experience with a human family member; was there a personal experience with a pet loss during your lifetime that really influenced you or surprised you in how you responded to it? 

BB [3:22] There really has been! Sometimes it’s not until after the fact that you realize what a profound time that was in your life. I experienced the severe loss of my dog, Ellie. At the time, I was actually working at the children’s hospital, not really in the grief field yet. I was in charge of their therapeutic dog program: the Doggy Brigade. In that program, there was a dog that I fell in love with: a King Charles Spaniel named Coby. I was always saying to his owner, Barb, that if I could only have a dog just like Coby… for breeders that are out there, all of you know I was a single parent back then, and it was out of my price range. One day, Barb came to me, and she said, “Brenda, my breeder said she has a dog that she’s done breeding, and she’d like to find a home.” So I went and I met Ellie. I fell in love. And she became the heart dog of my life. Actually became a therapy dog! When Ellie became extremely ill and was dying, I slept with her all night that night, and she just cried, and there was nothing we could do to control her pain. So I woke up that morning and thought: okay, this is it. I took her to the vet hospital and had her euthanized. Then I remember the vet saying to me, “What do you want us to do with her body?” I was so horrified that I never even thought about it. Am I answering your question?

MD [5:05] Yeah! I just was curious if there was a transformative moment where it was like: this is why this topic is so important. Most of us have experienced it, if we’ve had pets for any length of time. That tells it all. You weren’t prepared for—

BB [5:21] For loss! Yeah. 

MD [5:23] And it’s a really interesting topic that is about the body. Do we choose to cremate or bury them at home? Some people just don’t want to keep the body or be there during euthanasia. There are a lot of issues. For me, I like to actually keep my pet’s body at home for a few hours after the euthanasia and say goodbye in the home. But some people are just very uncomfortable. It goes back to the concept of thanatology, how we feel about death and how we process it. It’s a super fascinating topic, to me. I think the big question that probably comes up a lot for you is why is losing a pet so uniquely painful? It’s very different to me. I think a lot of us experience it differently than we do even a human family member. For some of us, we even take it harder than we do when we lose a human family member. Do you have any insight as to why that is for some people?

BB [6:13] I hear it a lot from my clients. I also see them when they say to me that they’re feeling a sense of guilt that they shouldn’t feel this way. They say, “You know I feel worse with the loss of my pet than I did with the loss of my father.” I say, “I think that’s because with our pets, we are so bonded. We are so close with them. We’re with them—for some of us, 24 hours a day. So it’s the death of your love, and that bonding that makes the death so difficult for us.” It just makes sense to me.

MD [7:00] Yeah, me too. It’s like you said: especially people being home more, we’ve seen the pet–human relationship change a lot in the last 2 years since the pandemic started, so I think people are closer than ever to their companion animals. Let’s talk about the society norms, because I think that can really influence the experience of losing a pet. Can you talk about what disenfranchised grief is, and why that compounds the difficulties people experience when they lose their pet?

BB [7:28] Sure! But let’s go back to what you first said about society norms, because if we look at it today, we have progressed from where we were 100 years ago or even, I’ve realized, where my parents were. Initially, when my father brought home our first puppy to our family, he built a pen for it. Out in our backyard. We thought that was the norm back then. You didn’t even let your pets in the home!

MD [8:03] That’s true. When I was growing up, that was true. My grandparents had a Husky who lived outside, and I don’t know that that dog ever came inside. 

BB [8:12] I’m so glad that we’ve gotten much further than where we used to be, 50-some years ago. However, I still also hear very often that people don’t get it. That we’ve got pet parents who are horribly grief stricken after their beloved pet dies, and neither family nor friends sometimes understand the depth of their grief or the longevity of their grief. 

MD [8:47] I think that’s where people hear things like, “You can just get another dog,” or “They’re just a dog.” That can be very painful for people to hear, or they feel like they have to go back to work right away. We don’t, as a society, support people—even with human loss! We try to put blinders on, right? And not think about it too much.

BB [9:07] Because it’s so painful, people don’t want to talk about it. They just want to roll along and get over it. But Mikel, go back to your question about disenfranchised grief, because not everybody hears that term. For me, it really means that grief is unrecognized, that we’re not going to give it value. Unfortunately, we still see that today.

MD [9:32] I think that is very true, on many levels. Like you said, probably a lot of it stems from fear. When people are experiencing pain and grief over the loss of their pet, what are some things that can help them cope? Should we be thinking of this the way we do human grieving? It’s kind of expected that if you lose a person in your life, there’s going to be some kind of memorial service or funeral—these rituals that maybe help us acknowledge and support the griever, where people come together. Are there things that people can do when they lose a pet that can help them cope in a similar way?

BB [10:08] Absolutely! The suggestions that I will give to you really can also be applied to human loss grief. From working in the pet loss field now for 5 years and just coming out of a long-term career in human loss, I see no difference. I see the level of grief being very much the same. I think the number one first thing that we need to do is called self-care because what happens to us when our loved one—whether it’s a pet or a human—dies, we are in shock. The intensity of the grief is so horrific that we cannot even eat, sleep, sometimes not even speak. So we just need to really surround ourselves with self-care and take it one day at a time: I’m going to get through this first day, and I’m going to do whatever I can to try to eat. I tell people even if it’s drinking a milkshake, get something into you. Even if you can’t sleep, just make yourself rest. Number one thing. 

MD [11:26] That makes sense. And it’s hard! Some people don’t feel like they can take that time to take care of themselves, but it sounds like that actually does help make things easier for people.

BB [11:36] I have more! The other thing I advise people—especially people who are working outside of the home; that’s the part of Covid that’s maybe a little bit of a blessing, that we work more at home now—but a few years ago, we worked more outside the home. That’s really tough when you’re grieving. You have those moments at work where you can barely function. You know you’re just going to start bawling. You need to allow yourself to have those times to be tearful. Even if you work at home! I really think it’s helpful for us to work with bosses or administrators who will be a pet lover and say to you, “Oh, I get it. Please take a couple of days off work.”

MD [12:25] I’ve been very lucky. I’ve always worked at animal centered places, where it’s been okay to take a day off, or even more if I needed. Those kinds of things seem very subtle but important to help people. What about the idea of some kind of ritual or funeral? Do you see some of your clients doing that to honor their pet or help them cope with the loss? 

BB [12:49] I don’t see as many having formal funerals. But once again, going back to disenfranchised grief, we just need to keep progressing. We do see that there are even some pet care places out there that are offering pet funerals, and I think it’s a beautiful idea. I have had a few of my clients say that they did it. I think it’s a great idea, especially if you have children in the home. Surround everybody. If you want to have a written note or a letter to your pet who died or have some kind of a poem—once again, to have thought through that body-post-death piece, whether you’re going to be burying your pet or having them cremated. Take time for that. I think it’s important.

MD [13:40] Thank you. We’re here with Brenda Brown, grief specialist for pet loss, and we’ll be right back.

MD [14:09] Okay, everybody! You are tuned in to the Good Dog Pod. We’re here today with Brenda Brown. She is a pet loss grief specialist, and we’re really thrilled to have her here today. I wanted to talk about the pre-death part. If you have an older or chronically ill pet, do you think there’s anything that can help people prepare for this impending loss that you don’t necessarily know when it’s going to happen, but you know it’s closer than you’d like? Or is it better to just live your life every day and not think about it? What’s the best approach? 

BB [14:41] From what I’ve talked about before, I highly recommend that we take a little bit of time to think about it. Because I do have clients that I see often who are alone and maybe more mature in life, and they have a pet, and what I highly recommend is that 1) I really think, if we are more mature in life, that we need to think about if something happens to us—what is going to happen to our pet? I really think you need a plan for that, or something in your will that states that and ask someone. And then I think 2) you should talk to your vet about it. Even our vets feel uncomfortable sometimes talking to us about the death of our pets. So it might be helpful for them if we’re the ones that have the courage to mention that—that we have thought about this. This is what I’m thinking I might want to do. And then to have friends—understanding friends—that surround you and that you can talk to about these times that you’re thinking about, that it’s going to be rough, that you can share with somebody. 

MD [16:03] That’s a great point about having a conversation with your veterinarian. Veterinarians are not grief counselors, but they kind of get thrown into that job every day. I think some of them are just naturally better at it than others, or are more comfortable with the human element. You have to imagine having people in tears all the time might be really difficult to deal with, so I like the idea of having a plan. I think the other part is people don’t always know when it’s time to say goodbye, and your veterinarian can certainly help you assess your pet’s quality of life and help them make a decision. It’s a big decision to make!

BB [16:41] Definitely. Most veterinarians usually have a quality of life scale that they can show to their pet parents. That really helps people. 

MD [16:52] I didn’t even think about the fact that we have to make the final call in some cases might impact grief as well. Because there might be some guilt or questioning of the decision involved that people also have to process and deal with, and that is something often different from human loss. 

BB [17:11] That is true. That is different. It’s something that I see with so many pet parents: that guilt is the number one thing that they’re struggling with.

MD [17:22] There was an interesting article recently about whether grief of a human loss could be a mental health disorder. The manual that they use for deciding what counts as a psychological disorder is considering this. They decided that grief for a pet could not be a mental health disorder. There’s danger in pathologizing loss and grief anyway, but my question is: how do we know when our grief is too intense, and when do you see that someone probably needs some level of professional help, whether it’s with a pet loss support group or a grief specialist or therapy? What should people be looking out for, when maybe it’s time to get help?

BB [18:00] I try to let my pet parents know in group or in one-on-one about this topic because a lot of people ask me this. I think it goes back to—I don’t know if this is in that manual, the DSM-5—in the field of thanatology, we call it complicated or prolonged grief. When you start to feel like the intensity of the pain is not getting any better or where you’re getting to the point where you literally cannot get out of bed in the morning and function—those are the times that we need to reach out for added support, whether it’s to go to a licensed mental health counselor or see someone like me, who is a grief support pet loss specialist. But it doesn’t mean that you’re not normal! It just means that you need that added extra help to help get you over the hump and to progress a little bit along the way. 

MD [19:09] I want to ask you a few questions about your work: What is the most interesting or rewarding part of your job? 

BB [19:16] That’s a really good question! It’s kind of simplistic, but the reality of it is that I have a passion for helping people who are grieving. I think I mentioned at the very beginning about the death, the loss, of my father—that it’s the worst physical, mental, emotional pain that we can ever go through, I believe. So if something I’m doing in life makes that a little bit easier for someone, it’s made my life worthwhile. I have been blessed to see it with many of my clients, that they have progressed. 

MD [19:53] That’s wonderful.

BB [19:53] Does that mean that you accept that your pet is gone or that you have that closure? I don’t think so. The people that I see constantly, no matter how long it has been, continue to love and miss their pets. 

MD [20:13] I can speak to that. It’s true. It’s a thing. Brenda, I want to thank you so much for being here today. I think your work is really so special. I really appreciate the empathy I can feel coming from you. You talk about working with your clients: where can people find you, if they’re interested in learning more about GAPs or how to cope with pet loss? Is your support group open to anybody who needs help? How does that work? 

BB [20:40] It is! I now have people from all over the US coming to the support group. So the best way to access that is to look at my website: Grief About Pets. Just Google that, and it should come up. You can see what we offer. After that, if you also want to email me at brenda@griefaboutpets.com, I check my email constantly. 

MD [21:07] That’s how I found you! We’ll be sharing the link to your website in the show notes as well, so people can find you. Obviously if you’re out there and you’re having difficulties coping with the loss of a pet or think you might need help coping in the future, then I would just say: find supportive people, reach out for help if you need it. It’s a really difficult thing to go through. So many of us have been through it. Even if people are not talking about it, I think a lot of people share your pain and grief, so don’t feel like you have to go through it alone. Brenda, thank you so much for being here today. It’s been a real pleasure talking to you. Like I said, I really admire what you do.

BB [21:47] Thank you very much, Mikel. 

MD [21:50] Thanks everyone for tuning in to this very special episode on a very sensitive topic. Next week we’re going to actually hear the breeder perspective on pet loss with Julie Walker from Knucklehead Cane Corso. I think you’ll want to tune in and hear about her personal story. Everybody, take care. You are listening to the Good Dog Pod, and we’ll see you next week.