Pet Grief – What is Normal, What to Expect and What Truly DOES Help?

By Shannon Cutts.

Our modern word grief hails from two Latin words: gravis, or heavy, and gravare, or to burden. And isn’t it true that no heavier emotional burden exists than grief! This is precisely what we meet here to talk through. Pet grief – what is normal? What can you expect? What actually does help you get through it?

We must start with a strange truth that needs facing – as pet parents, we actually sign up for eventual grief. In fact, most of us are repeat visitors to the grief experience. How could this possibly be? It is because our precious pets nearly always pass before we do. Whether we are aware of it at the time or not, we go into the pet parent experience with our eyes wide open to the inevitable days of grief up ahead.

In a weird way, this is actually good news. How can this be? Because it means the rest of the pet parenting experience is worth it. The joy is worth the pain. The love is worth the loss.

However, in transition times – just before, during, just after our pet passes from their physical body – we do tend to forget this. We also forget we are brave. We forget we knew this day would come. We forget we’ve (likely) been here before and we will (likely) be here again. And we forget there is a time up ahead when we will fall in love all over again and feel that gratitude, joy, wonder.

By the way, all of this is normal. If we didn’t have the grief amnesia that our bond of unconditional love provides, we likely wouldn’t ever say yes to our pets in the first place. So thank goodness for the love part. It makes up for so much, most especially the grief part.

What is normal during pet grief?

So let’s start at the beginning, with what is normal during the pet grief process. The first thing that is normal is the grief itself. But how can something that feels so ab-normal, even scarily so, be normal? The reason it is normal is because of the bio-chemical and very physical reaction that our body goes through when we feel grief. Believe it or not, you were designed to react this way to grief – and there is even a protective element to your reaction.

When you feel sorrow, sadness, anger, powerlessness, hopelessness, fear, disbelief, any of the other emotions that grief can provoke, your body does something very specific to help you withstand this. It releases a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol more than earns its nickname “the stress hormone.” But why does your body release cortisol when you feel grief? Because, to your sympathetic nervous system, the emotions arising within you signal to it that you are in danger. So it releases cortisol to put you into a state of fight, flight or freeze. Furthermore, the continued presence of cortisol ensures that you remain in high alert mode until your emotions indicate the threat has passed.

It nearly goes without saying that getting flooded with cortisol is very unpleasant. You will feel on edge, restless, perhaps anxious or nervous, and you will likely go through periods of sustained heightened energy followed by sudden crashes where your energy drops and you feel depressed and fatigued and just thoroughly depleted. Over time, as you keep grieving and the cortisol continues pumping out and building up in your bloodstream, you may even get sick. This is because cortisol temporarily suppresses immune system response to redirect all of your resources to keeping you alive and out of harm’s way.

I call this initial systemic cortisol flood the “firestorm of grief.” As unhealthy as it can be, cortisol’s presence is designed to get us through a dangerous and potentially deadly time period. Deadly, you ask? Unfortunately, yes. Aside from the stress hormone, cortisol also has another nickname – “the silent killer.” Grief can actually kill you. The medical term for this is “heartbreak syndrome” and the symptoms are nearly indistinguishable from a heart attack. I don’t want this for you (and I suspect you don’t either, even though – plain-speaking here – in those first fresh moments after losing your pet it can certainly cross your mind. I know it has mine.) So let’s keep going with some real talk about what to expect once the grieving begins.

What can you expect during the pet grief experience?

As a researcher, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross gained fame in part for her five stages of grief process. I remember when I first stumbled across her process. What a relief! Finally, I knew exactly what to expect and what to do. First denial, then anger, then sadness and depression, then bargaining, then acceptance. Got it. Check.

So imagine my surprise when, try as I might, I couldn’t seem to follow these simple-sounding steps at all, let alone in any kind of order. Grief is a dedicated teacher, and for most of us, one of the first lessons it gives us is that no one’s grieving process looks like anybody else’s grieving process. We are all unique. Our grief will be unique.

For some pet parents, myself included, grieving a pet’s passing also opens up an opportunity for other older unexpressed and unhealed grief to come up and out of the body’s tissues. Here is a short story to explain what I mean by this. A few years ago I went through a series of four deep losses all very close together. When my soulbird, Pearl, died unexpectedly one morning, my grief was so profound precisely because I had three other as yet un-grieved for losses already stacked up back to back. So as I grieved Pearl, I was also grieving three other deaths at the same time.

But also keep in mind that the grief that bubbles up doesn’t have to be recent. You may find yourself grieving losses that date all the way back to childhood even while you are also grieving your pet’s death. Most importantly to remember is that, in these types of situations, you also may not know why your grief response is more extreme than you anticipated or could have planned for. Your body is very smart and will take its opportunity to flush out older stored grief, whether you happen to remember it or think you need to grieve for it or not. So if you feel like you are temporarily going crazy with grief in a way you hadn’t anticipated, be aware that your body may be trying to heal you of other stored grief that might otherwise make you ill or worse.

In my experience helping grieving pet parents connect with their pets in spirit, I have observed that this initial firestorm of grief typically lasts a few weeks. After that, the body naturally attempts to adapt by returning you to a more stable parasympathetic nervous system response. It is so easy to forget that the sympathetic nervous system response was never designed to be “on” for days or weeks at a time. It evolved to help us outrun saber-tooth tigers and other sorts of very immediate threats. Either you get away or you don’t. Either way, these types of threats typically would resolve within minutes or hours.

Ultimately, your body wants to help you return to status quo and the parasympathetic rest and digest status that is both safer and healthier for you. But because our modern culture treats death like a problem we should be able to solve and refuses to provide much education or support about the process of grief or how to successfully survive it, most of us don’t know we can work with our body to achieve this goal.

What truly does help you move through pet grief?

This is also why it breaks my heart when I meet pet parents who have somehow gotten marooned in the firestorm of grief response for months or even years. They are often chronically depressed, suffering with clinical symptoms of immune suppression as well as quality of life issues, unable to say yes to a new animal love and hopeless in their outlook towards life in general.

So let’s talk about how to move through the firestorm so this doesn’t happen to you.

Moving through the grief experience requires moving all that cortisol out of your body. This is how your body system finally gets the message that the threat has well and truly passed and it can turn off the sympathetic nervous system response.

NOTE: Please understand, I am not trying to even suggest here that you will suddenly stop feeling grief. Rather, the goal is to move from the initial crisis stage (what I’m calling the firestorm) to more of an integration period where you allow the grief to reshape and reorganize you in the way only grief can. During these integration periods, you may even choose to take proactive steps to honor your pet’s memory in multiple ways, and you will also begin to accept and adapt to the fact that you and your life will never be the same again. It simply isn’t possible to go backwards in this life. But it is possible to move forward with an awareness of how profound and life-altering a love relationship – with any species – can be. And it is possible to do something positive with that awareness to keep learning, growing and (most importantly) loving and being loved.

As far as the brass tacks of you getting there, it is important to know that there are only three ways you can move cortisol out of your body. For this reason, I tell every one of my grieving pet parent clients to start doing these three things right away.

1. Breathe.

As if the experience of pet grief isn’t unpleasant enough already, most of us tend to hold our breath when we are in sympathetic nervous system mode. Feeling the types of emotions grief triggers can cause us to suck it in and try to “get things under control.” But what happens in our body when we don’t breathe? Our cells get panicked. They are suffocating and so they start to send panicked messages to our brain to request oxygen. This causes a vicious cycle of bio-chemical overwhelm that can be very hard to break out of. To break out of it, breathe. The more you breathe, the calmer you will feel, and the more readily you will remember that even the least pleasant emotions are like ocean waves (if we let them be so). A wave of sadness will roll in, express itself through our body, and then roll out again. Ride the waves. Send them back out to sea faster and more smoothly by breathing slowly and deeply through everything you feel.

2. Drink lots of water.

Your liver has the unhappy job of processing all that cortisol and moving it through and out of your body. Normally, the liver is more than up for the task. But in periods of grief when cortisol often builds up to epic proportions, the liver gets overburdened. With more cortisol to process than it can handle, the liver gets backlogged. Meanwhile, unprocessed cortisol continues to circulate through your bloodstream and starts to interfere with your lymphatic system function. The lymphatic system shadows your circulatory system. Its job is to support immune response (which as you recall is suppressed while you are in sympathetic nervous system mode), to absorb nutrients, to maintain fluids and to move toxins and waste matter out of your body.

But unlike your circulatory system, which has a handy inbuilt pump called the heart to keep it moving, your lymphatic system has no inbuilt pump. There are only two ways to manually “pump” your lymphatic system: water and movement. Just like oxygen-starved cells, dehydrated cells will quickly start to panic and begin sending messages to the brain to request water. But often when we are grieving, we aren’t paying any attention to our body and its needs, which can take the very normal and natural emotional “waves” we talked about earlier and transform them into a terrifying tsunami. We don’t want this. To avoid it, drink lots of water.

3. Move your body.

You’ve probably already guessed the third recommendation I share with all my pet parent clients. Move your body. Why? Because YOU are the only pump (other than water) that your lymphatic system has! When you drink plenty of water and move your body, your lymphatic system can once again rehydrate and fluid-balance all of your cells so they will calm down and stop panicking. Plus, as your lymphatic system pumps fluid into the liver, this eases this organ’s workload and helps keep cortisol processing moving along. Plus, movement releases another set of hormones called endorphins, aka the “feel good hormones,” that can lift our mood and our outlook – providing a type of balance to our grief.

A real-life example of how to move through pet grief

Here is an example of how I used all three of these tips during my firestorm of grief after my Pearl bird died. Every day I would visit a beautiful local park that had a three-mile walking loop. After donning my dark glasses and with water bottle in hand, I would walk with deliberate briskness around the loop, crying and talking with Pearl honestly from my heart. If I was feeling angry, I told him. If I was feeling sad, I told him. If I was feeling hopeless, I told him. If I was feeling scared or abandoned, I told him. You get the idea.

This is where being an animal communicator comes in handy, because I know I can’t hide anything from my pets anyway, regardless of whether they are in their body or in spirit. So there is no use trying and doing so actually stifles the still-present heart to heart relationship we share with them. In other words, my Pearl’s body might have given out, but my Pearl himself was still very much vital and alive. All the evidence I could ever need of that fact was present in the deep love I still felt – and feel – for him.

Being in our 3D physical bodies, it is all too easy to forget we are much more than these physical containers, and that our beloved pets are too. Science has been able to measure this in a quantifiable way and has determined that, on average, our life force energy extends up to three feet beyond the external perimeter of our physical skin. We are so much more vital and alive than we give ourselves credit for!

This is part of why pet grief hurts like literally nothing else in life. We get so attached to our pet’s cute furry or feathered or shelled or scaly form that we think when their body gives out and they have to leave it, then they are also gone. This causes us to manually sever a heart to heart relationship that is still very much present in both of our lives. Our pet feels this and we do too and it is so unbelievably painful.

Pet grief is painful enough without adding this potent fuel to the grief firestorm. This is why, in the example I just shared, I emphasized that while I was breathing, drinking my water and moving my body, I was talking with Pearl, sharing everything. I was actively and deliberately rekindling our heart to heart connection to keep the relationship I couldn’t live without alive.

There is one more tool I love to share with pet parents that really does help us move through unbearable pet grief more easefully. And that tool is gratitude.

Remember when I shared earlier that you are brave precisely because you signed up for the grief you are feeling right now? You signed up for the grief part on the same day you said “yes” to the love part and the relationship part. This points to an absolutely vital tool that can forever change your relationship with the grief you feel over your pet’s physical body being gone. That tool is the simple recognition that even though this grief sucks more than anything and is so unacceptable and awful, you wouldn’t trade even one second of your life with your pet – even if it would lift all of your grief away. You love those memories, those times you had together, every tiny moment you shared with your pet, the chance to be their mom or dad, that much.

So remember, breathe, drink water, move your body. Talk with your pet in spirit with total honestly from your wide-open grieving heart. Think of your life together and your favorite moments and allow the gratitude you feel to help you ride the waves of your grief firestorm. And when you are ready to reconnect with your pet for real, remember that animal communication can help (more about this in next month’s article!).

Shannon Cutts is a professional animal sensitive and intuitive, Reiki Master and animal communication teacher with Animal Love Languages. Shannon’s global client base seeks her out for help with pet grief, pet transition, pet reincarnation, new pet selection and much more. Request Shannon’s free Pet Parent Grief Support Guide here: https://www.animallovelanguages.com/griefsupportguide