What Animals Give Us in Grief

Grief has a way of rearranging everything—sometimes so quietly you don’t notice it at first. And then one day you do. You realize you haven’t cooked a real meal in days, or opened the mail in a week.  

It doesn’t arrive neatly or leave on schedule. Grief shows up where you don’t expect it—standing in the cereal aisle, staring at a box you didn’t mean to pick up. It shows up in the first morning you wake up and remember, all over again, what’s gone. 

There was a period in my life when everything seemed to unravel at once. My father’s health declined, and eventually, he passed. A loved one faced a cancer diagnosis. And then I lost my dog, Jessie—my beloved yellow Labrador retriever. 

I got Jessie when I was 34, at that point in life when you still feel invincible. She saw me through some of the most defining chapters of my life—from career changes to section hiking the Appalachian Trail, to Hurricane Sandy. She was my soul dog. 

Jessie was a therapy dog. We visited schools together, where she helped children navigate anxiety. She had a kind of quiet openness that invited trust. I used to joke that she was the calm one in the family, and honestly, it wasn’t really a joke. 

Of everything I faced during that time, her loss hit me the hardest. It came at the end of a long stretch of difficult experiences, and when she died, something in me gave way. 

I grieved in a way I didn’t recognize. I couldn’t keep it together. There were days I sat on the floor with my back against the dishwasher, not really doing anything, just trying to get through the next hour. I remember thinking there must be something wrong with me—that I shouldn’t feel this undone. 

But grief doesn’t really measure itself against what we think we should be able to handle. It just arrives, and then it stays for as long as it needs to. 

In the weeks that followed, I found myself returning to a journal I hadn’t opened in years. I began to write—not with any clear intention, just trying to make sense of what I was feeling. Sometimes it was a few sentences. Sometimes it was nothing at all. But it was something to hold onto. And over time, it became the beginning of Raising Artemis. 

Like many people, I kept going. There were things that needed to be done—bills to pay, people to show up for, responsibilities that didn’t disappear just because I wanted to. As adults, we carry so much. And as women, especially, we are often the ones who keep everything moving, even when we are barely able to take another step. 

What surprised me most was where I began to find relief. It wasn’t in a breakthrough a-ha moment. It came through the animals in my life. 

They didn’t ask me to explain how I was feeling or apologize. They didn’t expect me to be anything other than what I was at that moment. When I was exhausted, when I was unguarded, when I had nothing left to give—they were simply there. 

Curled up beside me when I couldn’t get off the couch. Sitting with me in those in-between moments when I wasn’t ready to face the world again. 

With them, I didn’t have to pretend. 

There is a kind of honesty in those moments—the ones where you are wearing the old sweatshirt that feels like home, where your coffee has gone cold and you don’t bother reheating it, where you are too tired to explain anything to anyone. Animals meet us there without hesitation. 

They don’t judge. They don’t try to fix anything. They don’t ask us to carry our pain in a better, more acceptable way. They give us a kind of space we rarely allow ourselves. And in that space, something begins to soften. 

Animals seem to understand something about grief that we often lose sight of. They don’t resist it. They don’t cling to it either. They let it move through them. You can see it in animals who have been hurt and, over time, find safety again—they may carry traces of what they’ve experienced, but they also return to trust, to joy. 

They stay present, and then, just as naturally, they move on—to a patch of sunlight on the floor, or to the next walk.Being with them, you begin to feel that shift. Not all at once. Not dramatically. More like the way you notice a bruise only after you bump it again. 

You sit with them, your hand resting on their fur, and for a moment, something loosens. Not because the grief is gone, but because you don’t have to hold it quite so tightly. 

They show you—without trying to—that it’s possible to feel deeply without becoming stuck. That pain can be real and present, and still not permanent and that you can move from one moment to the next, even when you’re not ready, simply by staying where you are. 

Over time, those small moments begin to matter. 

The routine of caring for them. The quiet companionship. The way they bring you back, again and again, to something simple and immediate. 

Grief doesn’t disappear. It doesn’t resolve itself into something neat or finished. But it becomes something you can sit beside, rather than something you are trying to outrun. 

And in that shift, there is relief. 

Not because the loss is smaller, but because you are no longer carrying it alone. Animals don’t take our grief away. But they change how we hold it. 

They sit with us in the quietest, most unguarded moments of our lives. They accept us as we are. And in their steady, uncomplicated presence, they remind us—gently, without urgency—that we can feel what we feel, let it move, and eventually, find our way back to the light.