Grieving a Pet
Losing a cat or other pet can be a very sad and isolating experience. But you are not alone—many people grieve animals, and some have asked for resources to help comfort them and manage the difficulty of missing a pet who has passed away. It’s okay to feel sad for as long as you need to, and you can contact NYC Well or reach out to a friend or therapist if you need to talk about it. We hope to provide a safe space to remember and celebrate the lives of pets who are no longer with us through the museum.
1. Read Heloísa Nora’s comic series about losing two very sweet cats:
Part I: “A Letter from Pandora to Polenta” imagines Heloísa’s cat Pandora saying goodbye to their beloved family member Polenta:
Part II: “A Letter from Polenta to Pandora” imagines Polenta greeting Pandora in the kitty heaven after Pandora’s passing a year later:
2. Listen to WNYC Studios’ podcast Death, Sex & Money episode “How to Say Goodbye to Your Pets”:
You can also read the show notes for more listener recommendations.
3. Hannah Shaw (“The Kitten Lady”) explains how she deals with losing kittens for the vulnerable orphan kittens she fosters in an interview with Stacy LeBaron on Community Cats Podcast episode 85 (October 12, 2016):
Stacy LeBaron: “It’s interesting you brought up basically compassion fatigue. We had Jennifer Blough on [Community Cats Podcast] episode number 78 a couple of weeks earlier. She’s a compassion fatigue expert. Certainly, with the 20 years that I’ve been in this business, I’ve certainly hit the wall multiple times. And I’m sure you probably have.”
Hannah Shaw: “Yeah.”
Stacy LeBaron: “And it’s hard to identify and know how to handle it when it comes at you. But if you have some sense of it coming and knowledge about it ahead of time, maybe we can help others. I certainly when I had a little kid at home and lots of foster cats and running a shelter and cats that needed to be trapped, I certainly spent a long time in the shower oftentimes just trying to get away from it all.”
Hannah Shaw: “Right, yeah, I definitely relate to that. It’s something people are ashamed to talk about, especially on social media, where everything I do, it looks so fun, it’s like, putting little paper hats on top of a kitten because it’s his one-week birthday. All of that stuff, it doesn’t show the difficult side of this sometimes. I do try to distill some of those messages and share with people that this can be hard. Especially when you’re working with such a vulnerable population like orphan kittens, you inevitably do lose some of them. And that can be very challenging.”
“A few years ago I experienced a major burnout, and you question yourself, you question: ‘Is this for me? Can I really do this?’ I think a lot of people feel a lot of guilt when a kitten passes away in their care.”
“I have really, really taken steps to have a plan in place. I think if you have a plan in place, then it helps so much. So if I have a kitten that passes away in my care, I allow myself to really feel that for one hour. I let myself just be very upset for one hour. And then I let myself deal with it that day, and say, okay, I’m going to like, whatever it is, if that kitten needs a necropsy, or if that kitten needs to be buried, or whatever it is, I deal with it that day. And then I wake up the next morning and I move on.”
“And that’s not to lack compassion for that animal, but it is because I think it is so important. When I think now if I had stopped five years ago how many lives I would not have been able to save; you know you learn so much every year that I do this, I learn so much. And I do improve every year.”
“I try to tell people: ‘Do what you can. If you do lose an animal, take a deep breath, let yourself feel it for a moment, but don’t dwell. Give yourself a little break, and then move on to the next life, because there are so many lives out there that need us.’”
Listen to the full interview on the episode of Community Cats Podcast here.
4. Listen to Keisha “TK” Dutes talk about losing her cat on NPR’s Life Kit: “Losing a Pet Is Hard. Here’s How to Cope”
For this episode of the NPR podcast Life Kit, Dutes speaks with her friend Alexander Hardy—a writer and co-founder of a creative wellness agency—about how to cope with pet loss.
After Dutes tells listeners about her cat Feisty Misses Peabody, Hardy explains that losing his family dog, Papi, has helped him to explore how to express, process, and share the grief of losing a beloved pet. The takeaways of their conversation include celebrating the life of the pet and sharing this grief with others. They discuss how grieving a pet (a member of a family) is a common burden that is unacknowledged by society, and that as a result, people have sometimes had to come up with creative ways to honor the legacy of their pet and heal their own hearts, whether through art, ritual, or other means.
5. Read Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s essay “Why I Write” in Publishers Weekly, also featured in the book of essays she co-wrote with Sy Montgomery titled Tamed and Untamed, about how losing a pet dog is akin to losing a leg.
“If I were to lose one, I’d grieve, and people would send sympathy cards, but it would be my condition that evoked the sympathy, not the fate of the leg. That’s like losing a dog,” she writes as she spends time feeling alone as she mourns, even among her other dogs and rescue kittens.
6. Do you know someone who lost a pet and want to help them heal? The short book When You Lose a Beloved Pet by Joanne Fink is a great gift option.
The book mimics the process of adjusting to life without a pet, going from black-and-white to increasingly colorful illustrations as life continues and healing happens.
Watch a book trailer and preview the book in a YouTube video from the author here.
Purchase from the author’s websites zenspirations.com or whenyoulosesomeone.com, from the publisher Fox Chapel Publishing’s website, or from Amazon or Barnes and Noble—or ask your local bookstore if they have a copy or can order one for you.
Joanne Fink, who wrote and illustrated the book, previously wrote and illustrated another book that is about the loss of a human loved one (When You Lose Someone You Love) that comes recommended by thanatologist* Cole Imperi on the 2017 “Thanatology” episode of the podcast Ologies with Alie Ward.
*Thanatology is the science of death, dying, and bereavement.
7. Be moved by the words of a historical Gotham cat man, recorded in Peggy Gavan’s book The Cat Men of Gotham (Rutgers University Press, 2019) and blog “The Hatching Cat.”
This book and blog are a treat for all lovers of NYC, history, and cats. John “Jack” Bleek (pronounced Blake) was moved to tears by the passing of Minnie the club cat, of the Artist and Writers Restaurant (one artist, multiple writers, apparently, as Gavan notes) and before that the Opera Café. Gavan writes:
“While leaving the... [Ellin Prince Speyer Hospital for Animals] for the last time, Jack told reporters, ‘She has a face like a human being. She looks right up in my face as if to say to me, I know I’m sick and you’re trying to help me.’ He raised a finger to his moist eyes and, wiping back the tears, said, ‘Just some soot in my eye. She’s just a cat.’”
For this slip of the stoic veil to occur in honor of Minnie the mouser, one might almost forgive him for making his former Prohibition-era speakeasy that Minnie guarded inhospitable to women patrons and the site of Minnie’s motherhood many times over (the poor thing had 110 kittens, according to Gavan)... almost.
8. Commiserate about the joys and sorrows of cat appreciators in dozens of lovingly curated essays and poems in On Cats, an anthology, with an introduction by Margaret Atwood (who writes beautifully here about her own cats).
This 2021 anthology from Notting Hill Editions is a pocket-sized treasure trove that both deftly celebrates cats (“A cat is a luxurious thing for a house to have,” writes Caitlin Moran in “A Death in the Family” [2017]) and mourns them (“On the Death of a Cat, a Friend of Mine, Aged Ten Years and a Half” by Christina Rossetti [1830–1894] and Mary Gaitskill's “Lost Cat” [2019]).