Weeks after Maria Sandomenico's Chihuahua, Luigi, died in August, she posted a lengthy post on a New York City neighborhood Facebook group about her struggle to come to terms with the death of her adopted rescue dog. shared.
San Domenico said in an interview last month that during the seven years she and Luigi lived together, he became her “north star,” walking by her side in the various custom-made clothes she bought him. Told. His signature outfit was a pink and black pom-pom hat, but he was also known for wearing cashmere.
San Domenico said she turned to Facebook when Luigi died because she didn't want to burden her friends with her feelings and because she longed to connect with others who had experienced the death of a pet. He said it was because he was doing it. She was surprised by the number of responses to her post from people who said they too were grieving the loss of an animal companion and didn't know where to turn for support.
San Domenico, 53, who owns a dog walking and training business, met several members of the Facebook group at a local bar shortly after posting. She invited them to informal grief processing sessions.
“Within about 20 minutes, everyone was crying in front of everyone,” she said. “They all have very different experiences, except we all had the same feeling of no one understanding us.”
She said the meeting was cathartic. “It made me feel like I wasn't crazy,” said San Domenico, who has a silver necklace with Luigi's photo on it. She has since hosted other gatherings and plans to host them regularly.
Celeste Jones, an interior designer in Palm Beach, Florida, also struggled to cope with the loss of her 12-year-old Maltese, Zaza, in 2020.
“The more I looked into it, the more I looked, the more hopeless I became,” she said. Jones, 45, eventually paid for an online program that gave her the tools she needed to process her emotions. Since then, she has started hosting free online sessions for others suffering from pet loss.
These sessions and San Domenico's informal meetings are part of a growing number of resources available to grieving pet owners. Some providers said demand for support services has increased since the start of the pandemic, with many people adopting new pets or bonding with their pets as restrictions have meant spending more time at home. It is said that some people deepened their knowledge.
According to a 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center, approximately 62% of Americans own a pet, and an ASPCA survey found that from March 2020 to May 2021, nearly 5 of American households owned a pet. One household was found to have adopted a dog or cat. , the most popular pet in the United States, has a much shorter lifespan than humans, as do many other animals kept as pets.
Colleen Rolland, 67, president of the Pet Loss and Bereavement Association, said most people die before their owners, and many have complex feelings of grief that they may not be able to cope with on their own. That's what it means.
“People sometimes wonder if they're crazy because of how they're feeling and how bad they feel,” Roland says. She said her organization, founded by a Brooklyn psychologist in 1997, offers a free online chat service and attracted more users in 2023 than in 2022.
Jill Goodfriend, a nurse and social worker in the San Francisco Bay Area who works with grieving pet owners, has also noticed an increase in interest in services such as free consultations. said.
Goodfriend, 79, who started counseling pet owners in 2005, blamed the surge on the pandemic, saying people were “more aware of grief and more likely to express it.” .
Schwarzman Animal Medical Center, operating in Manhattan, New York City since 1910, has been offering free pet loss support groups to its clients since 1983. Susan Cohen, a 79-year-old veterinary social worker who came up with the idea, said her group started with about five people attending each in-person session. By 2011, when she stopped working at the center, that number had doubled.
The demand for such gatherings has led the center to expand its offerings. There are now multiple grief groups that meet several times a month via video call.
One is for people who have lost a pet within the past three months, and the other is for owners who are still grieving a pet that died within the past year. Judith Haber, 40, a veterinary social worker who leads the center's grief group, recently started a third initiative aimed at owners of dogs with serious health problems. Each group has her 20 participants from all over the country, and some are on a waiting list.
Participants come from a variety of backgrounds and range in age from 18 to 85, Haber said. The pets they memorialize are not only dogs and cats, but also turtles, cockatiels, parrots, lizards, horses, rabbits, and many more, all of which have been raised in a variety of environments. The same goes for sessions, she said.
Haber's job includes daily counseling for the center's private clients and veterinarians, but many of the group's participants feel unable to fully express their grief over the death of a pet to those closest to them. said. Some people felt judged for making their pet sad, while others felt ignored by their loved ones to get another pet and move on, she said.
She said the pain of a pet's death is often not recognized by the person's community or society. “When you go through something like that, you really feel like you're not seen and you feel like you're all alone,” she said.
Victoria Villarreal attended grief group sessions at Schwarzman Animal Medical Center for a year after her 13-year-old gray tabby cat, Einstein, passed away in 2022. Villarreal, 55, a nurse from Seattle, named her cat after her because of her intelligence and intelligence. She always had him with her, both at home and on trips, she said, including one trip to New York where she charmed a housekeeper at a pet-friendly hotel.
She said her sadness over Einstein's death was no different than the sadness she felt when her father and husband died. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that nearly half of pet owners consider their pets to be part of the family, just like humans.
“I don't think we could have gotten through the first year without AMC,” Villarreal said, using the abbreviation for the medical center. “Your pain is acknowledged. You don't have to explain why you're sad. All you have to do is show up.”
Hamilton Funeral Home in Des Moines, Iowa, operates a free virtual grief group for pet owners ages 18 and older. Like the group at Schwarzman Animal Medical Center, the group draws people from all over the country, said Buffy Peters, who oversees bereavement services at the funeral home.
“We know they bring a lot of light and love into our lives,” Peters said of pets. “Yes, it's okay to be mad at them because they messed up. But you also love them more than you can sometimes think.”
