Like many others, I grieved more on the death of my first cat than I did on the passing of my mother, father and sister combined. I think it’s normal or at least understandable but a lot of people struggle with this emotion.
Because a lot of people grieve over the passing of their beloved companion animal – and it need not be a cat or dog because this applies to all companion animals including birds, iguanas and reptiles – bereavement services are springing up in America and I suspect in the UK attached to animal hospitals or they are freestanding bereavement services specialising in pets.
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A good example is Colleen Rolland, the head of the Association for Pet Loss and Bereavement. She used to be an insurance executive until she “was knocked off my feet” by the death of a golden retriever named Maggie. She said that, “She was the first dog that I got as an adult.”
She took some courses on pet bereavement run by Dr. Walter Sife, a Korean War veteran and psychologist who had become in the 1990s a pioneer of pet bereavement counselling, as reported in The Times today.
Rolland lives 40 miles west of Toronto, Canada, on a rocky escarpment where she’s visited by people who are grieving over the loss of their companion animal. Their emotion is expressed in the title to this article. Sometimes they are a confused about feeling deep grief more profound than they felt on the passing of a close relative.
Often they can’t quite believe it and they seek reassurances from people like Rolland.
Rolland said:
I can’t tell you how many times I have dealt with a client who has looked at me very sheepishly and said, I’m grieving more for Sparkie or Mickey or whoever than I did for my mother, my father, my wife. They think they are crazy because how can they be so upset?
Colleen Rolland
She owns and runs a company called Pet Bereavement Services and is a leader in what is regarded as a fairly new field of counselling. It’s gradually grown especially after the pandemic.
It’s resulted in more of these sorts of counselling services and veterinary hospitals employing social workers who I presume act as counsellors to clients using the animal hospitals.
A clinical social worker, Judith Harbour, at the Schwarzman Animal Medical Centre in New York, said that “as veterinary medicine has advanced and people are getting more and more involved in care with their pets”, these services have risen in popularity.
This hospital has probably the longest running pet bereavement support group of any hospital in the USA, being founded in the 1980s.
Harbour trained as a social worker but wanted to integrate animals into her counselling service. She comes from Houston and as a child she fell in love with a paint pony (bicolor) named Patches.
She said that the “acute loss group meets twice a month” and “the longer-term loss group meets once a month.”
She thinks there’s been a shift in the appreciation of animals in American society. She also believes that people who are grieving for their companion animals “still feel unseen”.
Her counselling sessions explore guilt and “the other more painful emotions that can come about in grief-anger, disappointment.”
She said that the bonds between any species of companion animal and their owner are often very strong. Bonds between birds and people or reptiles and people can be as strong as those between dogs and cats and people.
The group sessions are free. Private grief counselling costs the client costs $100 or $150 an hour.
In Ontario, Rolland charges $100 per session but she often works free because she is able to live off her savings from her work as an insurance executive.
Her client numbers doubled after the pandemic. People call her from other countries including Saudi Arabia, India and Costa Rica. She tellingly said that “They just want to be heard; they just want to be understood.”
Comment: it’s perfectly normal to grieve more for the passing of your companion animal than the passing of a close relative. That’s because the relationship was stronger and more meaningful. It’s as simple as that.
RELATED: Feeling guilty for being numb with grief over the death of your cat
