Grieving the Loss of a Dog: Learning to Stay Open Through Heartbreak

Nearly every week on social media, I see pet memorial posts.

My finger swipes me past them.

I feel rotten when I do it, but I viscerally cannot tolerate them.

My finger swipes me past them. As if they’re contagious. As if I will catch a case of “my dog died.”

The thought of grieving the loss of my dog has been one of my greatest fears since the moment I fell in love with her 10 short years ago.

I knew one day this love would undo me. It wasn’t a matter of if but when.

I knew one day I would be writing my own memorial post, hoping people wouldn’t scroll past mine.

One day is today.

Grieving the Loss of My Dog Is Exactly as Hard as I Feared

We always joked that Piper was the one thing our family could all agree on. She was unequivocally adored.

We made her our sun and willingly - gleefully - orbited her. She organized the cosmos of our family, kept us spinning safely, kept us from colliding.

There is great risk in loving this way and I always knew it. Dogs don’t live forever and stars die.

Piper and I were together for 3,628 days. So many days. Not even close to enough.

Grieving the loss of my dog is as brutal as I feared. We have lost our sun and are drifting. I am lurching around my upside-down days, feeling like I’m always about to step off a cliff.

I can’t picture a life without my girl, and I am sick with disorientation and longing. There are moments when grief overtakes me so completely that I feel less like someone crying than an animal calling out for what she's lost.

I thought I was decent at being with other’s grief. I’m pretty comfortable with emotion and swimming in the deep.

Turns out I was wrong.

Because all the things people say to me that make me want to scream? Those are all the same things I used to say to them.   

What I'm Learning About Being With Grief

It’s hard to watch people hurt.

That's it. That’s the whole thesis. It’s hard. We don’t like it. We’ll do anything to change it.

But as I sit inside my own broken heart, I find I only trust those who can sit with me there.

The most comforting, true things people have said:

I know what you have lost.

I’m here.

It makes complete sense that you feel that way.

Take your time.

It just needs to hurt.

Every attempt to cheer me up, to focus on the silver lining, feels like dismissal. It feels like an attempt to speed up the process. But to rush it seems like missing something sacred.

I know it comes from care. I know it’s rooted in love. I know because I’ve done it and my intentions were so pure.

But I used to try to subvert people’s pain just like I’d swipe by their memorial posts. Not just to ease their discomfort, but to also ease mine.

People ask me if I’m okay, hoping aloud that I’m “doing better.”

I wonder what that means. Does it mean in less pain? Does it mean caring again about stupid things like dinner or the grimy countertop or returning a phone call?

Would anyone be happy to know that, to me, being okay means crying more, not less?

That it means screaming alone in my car?

That it means cancelling commitments to give myself space to grieve?

Because the bottom has come out of my life and this raw, pure pain feels like the appropriate response.

Am I comfortable? No.

Is this right for me? Absolutely.   

Staying Open Instead of Running From Grief

When Piper was passing, everything in me wanted to move away from the pain.

But I thought of the quote by Andrea Gibson: I want my heart to be covered in stretch marks.

After ten years of teaching me how to love so completely, I wondered if this was Piper’s greatest invitation to me.

I asked myself: Can I stay open when all I want is to close?

And so my heart was wide open when her soul moved from her body. And I heard her say to me, "And now we begin."

Since then, staying open has meant pressing myself against grief's sharp edge instead of instinctively pulling away from it.

And I’ve asked it to stay open when I lean on the counter in the middle of making dinner because the grief folds me in half.

I’ve asked it to stay when I leave for my morning walk without her leash in my hand.

I’ve asked it to stay open when she is not at the door to greet me.

I’ve asked it to stay open when I wake up each morning and she isn’t there.

And each time my heart has answered the same way.

YES.

Because I don't want to miss what this love is still doing to me.

We Aren’t Broken by Grief - We’re Built for It

I’ve been so furious about the injustice of life’s design. That all that is born, dies. That we are all destined for loss of what we love. Including, eventually, our own selves.

What a stupid fucking set up.

But I think I’ve had the wrong idea all this time. Trying to prevent pain – mine and yours – while it was built into our human framework.  

Maybe that means we are also designed for grief. For rupture and for healing.  

What if there is no shortcut to grief because there was never supposed to be one?

What if a broken heart isn’t something to avoid at all costs? What if, like any muscle, it’s the tearing that makes it stronger?

Strong enough to hold even more.

I want to be the person who can sit with a grieving person. I want to be the person who conveys, “I believe you're strong enough to survive this experience without me taking it away."

I'm learning to become that person for myself. To witness, instead of managing, a process I’m literally made for.

No one needs to shrink their grief to make me more comfortable. Nor do I need to shrink mine to make anyone else feel better.

I surprised myself by saying to a friend, “I’m slowing down and making space so I don’t miss a moment of what this is offering me.”

Because I did not consent to Piper's death. But I do consent to being changed by loving her.

I want every last bit she has offered me. Even if the lessons look different now.

Grieving the Loss of a Dog Means Learning a New Way to Love

When a star dies, it doesn't simply disappear. It releases the very elements it spent its lifetime creating. Those elements drift through space until gravity gathers them again, forming new stars, new planets, and eventually new life.

The oxygen we breathe, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones - all of it came from stars that died long before we existed.

We are, quite literally, made from the remnants of stars.

This is what grieving the loss of my dog feels like: I miss my girl with my whole body. It's primal, like childbirth. My body has taken over. It knows exactly what to do, even when I don't.

All I can do is witness my body loving her the only way it knows how.

I’m struck by how much death feels like birth. It makes me wonder if they are one in the same.

None of it is easy. Nothing has settled into its new orbit yet. I’m learning a new orientation. Learning how to be remade.

My every instinct says: Away.

But my heart says: Toward.

I’m beginning to wonder if grief isn't something love leaves behind. Maybe grief is love doing its deepest work.

Moment by moment, I’m practicing not scrolling past my own grief. I’m practicing being someone who stays.

“Stay with me forever,” I used to say when I tucked Piper in at night.

What a good girl. She seems to be doing just that.