One is a cat owner, and the other has a dog. Both recently shared how difficult it will be when their pets die. They will need some downtime and space to adjust and grieve. Both thought that it might not be possible to return to work the next day.

In another conversation, a man older than me shared how he still misses his dog. They had a routine, and he misses that routine along with his dog’s presence in his life and home.

There was a younger woman, younger than me, who talked about how the death of her cat impacted her life more than the death of her grandmother. She wasn’t suggesting that her cat’s life was greater than the worth of her grandmother’s life, but she understood that her cat was part of her everyday life in a way that her grandmother was not. The void left behind by her cat impacted her mornings, evenings, days, and nights in persistent and personal ways, unlike any other relationship.

When we got married, we had a cat. He was warm and funny, but wasn’t a very bright cat. He would repeatedly run around the carpeted areas of our apartment and then skid into the kitchen table when he got to the linoleum. He struggled with the concept of the litter box. One day, I left our apartment and took a personal time-out when I discovered that he had used my closet as his litter box and also thrown up in my shoes. When he died with feline leukemia, I was profoundly and surprisingly moved.

There are so many stories about the profound impact that our animal companions have on us, both through their lives and their deaths. Many social media posts are shared about “crossing the rainbow bridge,” along with the gracious and kind expressions of sympathy and condolence that follow in response. Many in the “great cloud of witnesses” of our lives have four feet, feathers, more than four feet, fins, or no feet at all.

What is it about our pets that can impact us so significantly, and why are these relationships and losses often still minimized?

We are wired for connection, and the relationships we develop with our animal companions are genuine. The more they are wired for connection, too, the greater potential for meaning in our relationships with them. Relationships blur the boundaries between two lives. It is not just me and another, there is an us together. We watch and are aware of each other, communicate with sound, expressions, and touch, and respond to what we see, hear, and feel. For many of us, our relationships with our pets provide a constant presence and comfort, grounding us when much of our lives may be in flux and sometimes feel out of control.

Animals are not people, but we as people are not limited to connections with only our own kind. We form deep bonds with seemingly inanimate objects like our homes, our cars and trucks, and our many things. While these things may have no pulse or ways of responding personally (but people have stories otherwise), we endow them with meaning, and they can matter deeply to us. Plants and trees are not people or animals, but they respond to their environments, and we respond to them. We make and nurture relationships in all aspects of our lives.

Interestingly, we don’t question our ability to have deep relationships with infants, even though they lack language and respond in limited ways compared to the breadth and depth of responsiveness that typical adults show. Our relationships with infants are not dependent on them growing into typical adults. We connect with them as they are and where they are, no matter what their future holds. And we do this with our animal companions, too.

Part of the reason we struggle to give our pets the relationships they deserve is due to difficulties with language. We often say “pet owner,” but is “own” the best word? “Own” too strongly suggests our pets as objects with no independent lives and dignity of their own. We don’t refer to parents as “child owners” as doing so would reduce children to property. We have a responsibility to our pets more as stewards and friends, perhaps caring for them as older brothers or sisters.

There is no need to rank the relationships we have with other people, living things, or anything that lives in our hearts. Our philosophy and approach can be one of addition rather than competition. Each relationship in our lives is unique and has its own meaning, which can change and grow over time. Our animal companions mean things to us, and we suggest things to them. These meanings are more than transactional—we do this for them, they do this for us, end of story. The stories of our lives with animals are much more than this.

The bonds we make and experience with animals are not solely of our own creation. They are something that happens between us as we both initiate and respond to and with each other. These are real relationships, and so when our animal companion dies, it is a real loss with real grief. Such losses deserve the time and work of mourning and support from others.

We are making progress with how we think about and support pet loss. Increasingly, losses of our animal companions are recognized and affirmed rather than disenfranchised. More and more, we are not saying “just a pet.” We can say our dog or our cat, and better yet, we can say their name, for they had a name as surely as they had a home in our hearts.

Greg Adams

Greg Adams is a social worker at Arkansas Children's Hospital (ACH) where he coordinates the Center for Good Mourning, a grief support and outreach program, and works with bereavement support for staff who are exposed to suffering and loss. His past experience at ACH includes ten years in pediatric oncology and 9 years in pediatric palliative care. He has written for and edited The Mourning News, an electronic grief/loss newsletter, since its beginning in 2004. Greg is also an adjunct professor in the University of Arkansas-Little Rock Graduate School of Social Work where he teaches a grief/loss elective and students are told that while the class is elective, grief and loss are not. In 1985, Greg graduated from Baylor University majoring in social work and religion, and he earned a Masters in Social Work from the University of Missouri in 1986. One answer to the question of how he got into the work of grief and death education is that his father was an educator and his mother grew up in the residence part of a funeral home where her father was a funeral director. After growing up in a couple small towns in Missouri south of St. Louis, Greg has lived in Little Rock since 1987. He married a Little Rock native in 1986 and his wife is an early childhood special educator and consultant. Together they have two adult children. Along with his experience in the hospital with death and dying and with working with grieving people of all ages, personal experiences with death and loss have been very impacting and influential. In 1988, Greg’s father-in-law died of an unexpected suicide. In 1996, Greg and his wife lost a child in mid-pregnancy to anencephaly (no brain developed). Greg’s mother died on hospice with cancer in 2008 and his father died after the family decided to stop the ventilator after a devastating episode of sepsis and pneumonia in 2015. Greg has a variety of interests and activities—including slow running, reading, sports, public education, religion, politics, and diversity issues—and is active in his church and community. He is honored to have the opportunity to be a contributor for Open to Hope.

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