Life Kit - Losing a pet is hard. Here's how to cope

Episode Date: July 25, 2023

Losing a pet can be devastating. Here's how to process the loss of your special friend and open yourself up to the love and lessons they left behind.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Life Kit from NPR. Hey, everybody. It's Marielle. You may know TK Dutess. She's done some of my favorite episodes of Life Kit. Earlier this year, her cat died. A week later, TK did an Instagram Live. Hey, y'all.

It's one week, life after Mrs. Peabody. Rest in peace to my little baby cat. It was just her walking in Brooklyn and processing. You know, I've been dealing with grief and the unexpected ways that grief shows up. And I realized in my heartbreak and my pain and my just exhaust. Yo, my body hurt, y'all. There's something about the moment right after a loss. It can open something up inside of you.

You feel this raw pain. And with it come these flashes of insight. TK had a lot of those. The video was a celebration of her relationship with Mrs. Peabody, a meditation on how grief expresses itself in our bodies and how it can be a portal for other past traumas, and a validation of other people's grief for their pets. I just want to say all this to just let you know that like pet grief, you don't have to rush back to work. You don't have to start smiling. I can't wait to get out of here. I'm getting out of town for a couple of weeks and

I'm gonna dance with this little baby. It's been about five months since Mrs. Peabody's passing and TK wanted to do a Life Kit episode about grieving for a pet, the importance of acknowledging and processing your loss, and how to ultimately carry on. In this episode, she has a beautiful conversation with a friend who's also an expert on grief. About 13 years ago, I was your classic not an animal person. But big cities being what they are, I posted on Facebook that I needed a pest deterrent and was willing to get a cat to help fill that need. Two days later, I got a call from my friend Sarah saying, I heard you were looking for a cat.

A few hours later, a medium-haired gray cat with green eyes was at my doorstep, and before I could say hello, she jumped out of the carrier and hid somewhere in my house. So I guess that's when we made it official. Over the years, she established a quiet dominance over our lives. Rules about getting on the sofa were quickly broken. She let outside cats into the house a few times. She definitely did not help with the rodents. She kind of befriended them.

This was life with Feisty Mrs. Peabody. On February 28th, 2023, after 12 wonderful years together, Feisty Mrs. Peabody crossed the Rainbow Bridge, and she wouldn't be the only one. A year ago, I began to notice that my friends were posting about their beloved pets passing on and how they were coping by preparing themselves, talking about their pets, making art, or having ceremonies. I would follow their footsteps and do the same. And in wanting to be supportive to people that are going through pet loss right now and assuage my own grief, I began to investigate it, to allow it into my body, to let it trigger

other things that I needed to deal with. So I called my friend Alexander Hardy, a writer, a national mental health first aid trainer, and the co-founder and creative director of Get Some Joy, a creative wellness agency. He also designed and curated Grief Kit, Tools and Considerations for Raggedy Times, a a 57 page toolkit to help us get through our hardest times i'd love to start with like your experiences with pet grief our family dog poppy poppy was just in the family for i want to say like 17 years, maybe like close to 18 years, like an entire adulthood. Poppy was old and blind toward the end was, you know, walking in circles and bumping into furniture and wincing. And, you know, just like hard to call him not eating as much, lost a lot of weight. I could tell there was something going on with his spine and his posture and how he was sitting and walking and holding himself and so you kind of get to that place of like

how can we support this dog that we love we don't want to see him in pain and when they took him to the vet they actually saw that he had you know kidney failure and things going on and unfortunately they had to um they put poppy down that day and this was i want to say less than three months after my mother passed and last july wow yeah so you've been feeling different types of grief yeah and processing that and as a mental wellness trainer like did you feel like you had some special perspective that like you could get through it faster or, you know? I mean, I thought I did, you know, I thought that I could like manage it and schedule the grief, you know? And, and so, you know, I was just always wondering, like, this is a lot, like mom just passed. Poppy wasn't, my, my dad was resistant at first, but

Poppy was his best friend. You know, Poppy had my dad trained to know that when my dad was eating, it was time for Poppy to eat as well. They just had a special relationship. I mean, I didn't know what to do. That was my first time actually losing a pet. You know, we have his they have a paw print. I guess the vet made like a paw print, an impression of his paw print. And we keep that at the at the table. But my mom's wheelchair is still right there.

There's a lot of stuff going on. So it's different in the community to talk about things and guide people through things. But it has been more challenging to do so with my family. So that part I'm still trying to figure out. How do you start coping before the animal is even gone? Because there's something there. I spiritually knew that Mrs. Peabody, my cat, something was up. So, like, when do you, when you know, like, how do you cope before it even starts to happen?

Well, that is anticipatory grief. You know, you are, like, you are going through those emotions around something that is yet to come. Or that is, like, you know you know, it's on the horizon. We knew that Poppy was an old man. It really hurts because you don't know how, like what to do, how to make things better. There's some hopelessness, honestly. It's like, what can you do? He, you know, he has a routine.

He needs to go to the bathroom. He goes away by the back door and, you know he barks and and they let him back in he comes back in kind of under the maze of the the legs of the dining room table and makes his way back to his dish and so over time it's like man he is down there he can't get through that you know he comes in he can't make it through the through the legs of the table and it just honestly the hopelessness is like the biggest and that and that sadness of just like, what do you do? Yeah. I'm noticing something with myself, my friend group. A good amount have had pets or they've got a pet when they became an adult and that pet has been with them their whole adult life how do you cope with that loss yeah so a pet is a family member and so like it may not be

reflected as much in the culture as far as like i need time off to work from work to you know go through these cat feelings you know and so that is more so like that disenfranchised kind of grief that's really not like recognized or like it's not seen at the same level as like a grandma. You know, just like when you lose a relative, you know, especially if you're in the house where that cat is, all the places and spaces are going to remind you. And although he used to hop on this and remember, I used to give them their food in this dish and working to like the impact of seeing and be reminding of this thing you loved day in and day out. We really encourage people to lean into what are the joyful memories that you have? You know, is there a meal with family members? We would often wrap it around food and all the memories and traditions you have around food. So you could do that same thing with a pet.

You know, I'm sure they had favorite dishes. You know, if you, whether you were giving your little one kibble and pet foods, or you were breaking them off of the Thanksgiving table. Like what was the thing that brought them joy? The thing that brought you joy? And the same thing also with, you know, music. Are there, you know, songs or things that are attached to specific memories or traditions that you have, you know, put on music like actually go deep into that memory you know what are the lessons that your pet taught you i'm sure they taught you a lot of things about taking care of yourself taking care of someone else being responsible for something there's probably a lot of lessons that that come out of

that so yes acknowledge the grief um work through it but also like know that the ending and the sickness and like how you lost them that's not the sum of your relationship so like there's just so many good years that you have with them and don't discount or forget those too absolutely i would say miss peabody taught me to always be ready for a camera find your angles yes serve that face mrs peabody was the top notch cat, America's next top model cat. So this is like, like now when I, you know, this is, um, March, April, May, June, uh, July, like my fifth month, we're in our four and a half to fifth month without her. And, um, I decided, you know, when I wasn't crying, I was outside. And when I was outside, I made sure I looked good.

I smelled good and I was ready for a camera because Miss Peabody taught me. Like, I'm trying to live in her spirit. Yeah, which is beautiful. Is it normal to like go out, you know, like real fast and get another pet? And is that like, is that a bad thing? I don't think it's a bad thing. I think that people sometimes need to fill that space you know especially people get older they live alone

kids gone or maybe they don't have family maybe it's they need to have like something there in the house with them maybe it's too quiet um but i also you know caution people to give yourself space and time to process everything that is that you have to deal with relating to like this pet that you lost you know you know and not to think that we can replace them every animal is different i would say give yourself space just like coming out of a relationship you know hopping right into something else so soon you can hop into it but that doesn't like undo you know or reduce the impact of what happened and how it impacted you and that you need to give yourself space to mourn yeah and if you can't be there fully for that new pet you know it's not it's it doesn't help anybody it doesn't so you know with that i feel like this is an obvious question but is there a time period for grief do Do we get over grief faster or is that just us pushing ourselves through like the social conditioning of like, you know, the hierarchy of importance?

There is no timeline for grief. Our society wants us to be, you know, robots about it and be back to work in a few business days. And so and that's just not really how grief works. We can't schedule our grief. You know, we can't grieve after work, grieve on the weekends, you know, it doesn't work like that. So we have to just be good Sunday. Yeah. Oh, here we go. It's 3 PM. It's my time. It just doesn't work like that because grief will run up on you just in the wackest of spaces and places. And that's just what it is. You have to give yourself space for that. It may not necessarily be as impactful or debilitating a year from now, five, 10 years from now, but the love is still there. The impact is still there. You just have to give yourself space to feel every feeling that you need to feel. Yeah. I would say one of the feelings that surprised me was uh embarrassed i felt embarrassed for having big huge feelings

and i did not realize that i would have like these huge feelings that i'd be tapping into um what is that about so so that's called love. That's love. And grief is messy. Grief is not. Grief is not fun. It's also not amazing to witness. You know, it's hard.

It taps on things in us that we are going through. Don't want to look at. Don't want to give space to. Because if you start crying i'm gonna start crying and so i i applaud people for grieving out loud like you know don't you don't have to close yourself up in the house and be grieving by yourself like we're not supposed to go through it alone you know there's so many cultures that dance their way through grief and celebrate their way through grief and you know i think it's amazing to have big emotions my mother's

passing is a week from you know yesterday and i want to start a holiday or something you know, I think it's amazing to have big emotions. My mother's passing is a week from, you know, yesterday and I want to start a holiday or something, you know, like I just think, I just think that we should, we should grieve our pets, our, you know, our former life, our, whatever that thing is as big and as long as you need to put Miss Peabody on your wall, on the mural, do that. If you need to get a tattoo, do that. If you need to get a stuffed animal or get a golden cat bowl or create a shrine, whatever you need to do to share your love and be as weird about it as you need to be, do that. Because that is a great love. Everybody who knows you knows the impact that Miss Peabody had on you. And as big as you were sharing and as much as you shared about her in life, like I would expect the same in death. And that's OK. Yeah. And we and I absolutely we absolutely because it's community. We had we had a whole Zoom funeral, you know, and people came and they shared and they even shared about their pets.

And and I just got so much comfort from that. And, you know, I made a little flyer and and all through doing it, I felt like I was like I felt good. I felt dumb. I felt good. I felt dumb. And then it just happened. And the community came, you know, community came through. And I just was like, I'd, it's something I'll never regret. But shout out to you, though, because everybody has felt grief as she knuckled grasp. Like every single person in some way, big or small, an opportunity that you miss, like it's a universal experience. And so I just don't think you should feel corny about it at all.

I think it's beautiful. I think it's beautiful. Thank you. OK, so here's the other thing. So I was going through this pet grief. It surprised me how big it was. And then what tapped me on my shoulder was like other things that I didn't realize I wasn't dealing with or that I had, I had a whole bunch of stuff stored up in my body that I wasn't paying attention to? Is it normal for other things, other issues, other feelings, other hard stuff to use this portal to sneak out, smack you in the face?

I think absolutely, especially if you're releasing big emotions. grief is like, it's a full body experience, you know, it will have you laid out, it will have you exhausted, zapped of energy. You know, some people can't sleep, you know, people don't want to eat, emotions change, it affects your entire being. So I think that it's entirely normal for, you know, related things to be happening and kind of coming through that wormhole of grief. I'm not going to lie. These big feelings are exhausting. And sometimes they'll sideline me. But I still got to do stuff. You know, like, what are some things people can do to work through? First of all, like, talking about it.

Writing about it. You know, if you can, if there are spaces where you can share. There are support groups. You know, other spaces. There are Facebook groups. Instagram accounts. You know, pet owners. Everyone's grieving in like new and creative ways. I just think finding a way that resonates with you, drawing, painting, sculpting, any kind of way you can kind of channel that energy and also honor, you know, this pet that you love and lost.

I think like really getting it out is probably the most important thing. Like letting it, letting it stay bottled up in you, you know, with your shoulders all scrunched up and just clenched all tight. It's just, it's not, you're not living life like they want you to do. Miss Peabody will want like you're doing out here, Gallivant. And then just like doing the most. Yeah. Life has to continue. You can keep them with you in many ways. You can keep their leash with you.

You know, any of their toys. You can refashion things you can um you know share their toys and you know bedding and things with another pet owner who loves their animal like there's so many ways to to carry that to keep that love going um and you know they don't have to cease to exist you know people cease to exist when we stop talking about them or when we you know we forget them that picture, do that mural, whatever you need to do to keep that love and keep it with you because it's impactful and it is a significant relationship. For many people, people's pets are with them at their lowest or have been with them through their highs or have, oh, child, I don how we survived that but girl we did that you know oh my god me can i tell you real quick yes me and miss peabody have lived in four different apartments went back home to my parents things were rough on both ends and when i finally moved back to like you know tk's real apartment um

i mean it feels dumb to spend a lot of money on a place where a cat's gonna poop but i bought her a mid-century modern litter box that you couldn't even tell that's where she went but i was like if i come up you come up you know suddenly i was eating better. Then I got name brand food. I was like, girl, we have been through the trenches. We lived in the projects. Shit was crazy. We deserve. That's right.

I just want to say, she saw me get to Bushwick. She saw me get to Gentrification Promise Land. I'm just proud of us. I'm just proud of us. We moved on up she would be smiling down on you and your deluxe apartment yes i just had to ask alex to tell me a little more about poppy what his vibe was like who this little guy was poppy was a tiny come up to your shins, 10 pound black and brown dog. A lot of energy, very energetic, very loving. Poppy loved Vienna sausages.

And my dad put a scoop of grits on the on in his little bowl. And I was like, why? Why did you do that? He's like, Poppy. Poppy likes grits, too. I'm like, how did you do that he's like Poppy Poppy likes grits too I'm like how do you know that Poppy likes grits like why why are you feeding this dog grits but that Poppy Poppy lived a luxurious life I love Poppy before we go I asked some of my friends members my community, to share a little bit about how they're processing the loss of their pets. My name is Natasha, and I lost my best girl, Black Kitty, about two months ago. It still feels really painful and overwhelming. I think when I'm ready, I want to focus a lot more on finding ways to preserve her memory because she was so important to me. So we had a long, complicated relationship with our beautiful boy, Max, a.k.a. Bark Obama.

He gave us an amazing life. At the end, we had him make a painting for us, a little craft. You put a canvas and some paint inside a plastic bag and then you cover the plastic bag with peanut butter and he smears it around and makes a painting and we have it hung up in a little shrine to him. That helped a little bit as we knew the days were coming. So about a year and a half ago, Tonka was diagnosed with a melanoma in her throat. And that week, I happened upon a gigantic eight-foot-tall canvas someone was just throwing away. I took it home and painted little Tonkas, animating all

these little scenes of her life from my memory. Like when she went swimming, when she was eating her favorite snack, carrying a stick, and suddenly there was a big pattern of happy little baby Tonkas on the wall, just staring back at me. Thank you to Natasha, Cynthia, Manny, and others who shared their pet stories for this episode. That was journalist TK Dutess. TK's hosted episodes for us on changing careers, being a caregiver, and becoming more handy at home. You can find those at npr.org slash life kit.

And if you love Life Kit and want even more, subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org slash Life Kit newsletter. This episode of Life Kit was produced by Sylvie Douglas. Our visuals editor is Beck Harlan, and our visual producer is Kaz Fantoni. Our digital editors are Malika Gareeb and Claire Marie Schneider. Megan Cain is the supervising editor, and Beth Donovan is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Andy Tegel, Audrey Nguyen, Margaret Serino, and Thomas Liu.

Engineering support comes from Valentina Rodriguez-Sanchez. I'm Mariel Seguera. Thanks for listening.