I have lost my soul dog.
A Reflection on pet grief by Katya Lidsky
As an adopter of senior dogs, I have had more than my share of mourning animals I’ve loved. I’ve known younger dogs who were supposed to have so much more life than they got. I’ve spent weeks and months with dogs who have come into my life temporarily as shelter dogs or foster dogs, and after they’d gone, I was left with permanent marks for each one.
It has been through so much dog-specific loss that I have come to understand it’s unique grief. How grieving a dog is its own kind of heartbreak.
Here are some things I wish I’d known earlier. My hope is that in sharing them with you, you might go into your own mourning with a little more support and a lot less struggle. Perhaps these truths will help hold you now if you are in a time of pain so you will at least know that you are not alone.
Love Cannot Be Ranked
I wish I had known that the grief we experience when we lose an animal often falls under disenfranchised grief—a term coined to describe how our culture had designed a hierarchy to loss. Grief in its many forms isn’t always recognized as legitimate or significant or equal. The death of a parent, child, or spouse is subconsciously – or sometimes consciously and overtly – deemed as more worthy than the loss of a dog, which is somehow socially acceptable to place farther down this invisible ladder.
But there is no great scale out there that tells us how much we are allowed to hurt. Grief doesn't work that way because love doesn’t work that way. Under a microscope, I would imagine that love and grief look the same regardless of who they are directed at or shine upon. We cannot measure one love against another and declare one more real.
There is no little label on an energetic force that says, “This is human love” or “This is canine love” or “This love counts more.” It is simply love, and we would not be able to tell one from the under if we zoomed in.
Loving a dog can be a singular, irreplaceable experience. So when someone says, “It was just a dog,” or “adopt your next one,” they aren't comforting you. They're misunderstanding what you lost. Because you didn't lose just a dog. You lost love.
The Part Of You They Brought To Life
The next layer I’ve learned through mourning a beloved pet is, I didn't only lose the dog. When each dog died, I felt like I‘d lost the part of myself that existed with them.
That may be one of the hardest things about grief that few people talk about. We don't just mourn who the animal was, we mourn who we got to be with them. The silly version of ourselves. A softer version. Someone who talked in ridiculous voices or made up wild songs about pet paws. A person who danced in the kitchen, who was needed, who felt safer around a furry presence, who came home to someone waiting at the door. The dog parent who could look across the room and have an entire conversation without a single word.
Our dogs get woven into the architecture of our days—and, eventually, into the architecture of our identity. So when we lose the warm, authentic being we’d built a life with we might feel like we also lose the version of ourselves that relationship helped create.
Because in reality, grief ripples out. Grief compounds. It is not a single mark. The loss of a dog touches beyond the dog and it extends. We miss them and we miss the self we were with them. Until we realize that self is not gone.
Grief Craves Witnessing
Another thing I wish I’d known is that it is wired into human nature to need people. We require someone who can look at us and say:
Yes. This matters. You loved them and you are hurting. The house feels different and you might still reach for the leash or hear their nails on the floor. I see your ache.
We benefit from being allowed – explicitly – to feel the full weight of our losses.
Conversely, grief that goes unwitnessed can begin to turn inward. It can grow into shame, bringing thoughts like: What's wrong with me? Why can't I get over this? Why am I still crying?
Grief becomes even heavier when we carry not only the loss, but the loneliness of believing we shouldn't be carrying it anymore. This is one of the reasons I do creative grief coaching and grief support for animal people and animal lovers. Because grief yearns for somewhere to go. Someone to hold it with you. I wish I had understood earlier that processing grief doesn't mean trying to make the hurt disappear. It means giving it somewhere to land.
Grief Takes Time
Creativity can help us move through the time grief takes. Writing, painting, crafting, dancing, collaging, singing, making a scrapbook, planting. Even sitting on the floor with a box of crayons and drawing on the side of an Amazon box. It doesn't have to be beautiful or formal. It doesn’t have to be sold at a gallery. It doesn't have to be meaningful or fun when you begin, either. It can be downright annoying, an activity you resist or reject or roll your eyes at, grunting as you do it.
But overall, creativity gives loss the ability to move. Creating taps us into the part of our brain that makes meanings and helps us make connections. It closes loops. Giving shape to what would otherwise exist only as an invisible wound inside the body lets grief be not just a thought but also an experience. A tangible memory. A ritual that shakes up your routine, not because it happened to you like death happened, rocking us out of our chair, but rather because you decide to do something and feel something different. This choice can feel empowering at a time when grief threatens to take your sense of agency.
The truth is, an emptiness collects after a dog passes away, both in us and around us, in the spaces we had shared. Using solid items to express what is unseen can feel supportive, not necessarily because of words but because of doing. Being. Embodying. Unstuck energy flowing.
With the collar, tag, leash, their toy, their sweaters, what could you create to pay tribute to them? If you were to frame a photograph, write their story, or set up a mini altar, would you be honoring both this dog and the love you shared?
Letting Go Is Not The End Of Love
Our hurt is not a sign that we are unable to let go. Our hurt is not something to attach to because it’s all that’s left of them. Our hurt is real, they were here, they changed us, they counted, and then they are gone. All of this is true. But your dog can still count in your life after their death.
I wish I had known that grieving isn't abandoning a relationship. It is about changing the relationship, because death changes the form of your love. But it doesn't have to end. There comes a point when we have to discover how to have a relationship with someone who is no longer physically here. And it is strange. And painful. And vulnerable. And wonderful.
We learn to incorporate our dogs into our lives differently. Maybe we recognize their mannerisms in another dog or remember something they taught us. Maybe we make better choices because of them or have learned to be more patient, courageous, and attuned, traits we now share with others in relationships. The part of ourselves that they helped develop doesn't die when they do. That part stays and that part IS the love remaining. It is them still here, but now inside of us.
Perhaps one of the most tender things grief asks us to do is to find that part again and be with it, own it, without the dog to catch us. We learn to do so in homage to the dog who caught us. But it isn’t easy to adopt this teaching because grief has its own way with us. It comes when it comes. The sadness, the anger, the denial, the bargaining, the replaying, the missing and the longing. Once a cycle of it is over, it may return again, as its phases are not linear. Some days we will think we are okay and then other days a patch of sunlight on the floor will knock the wind out of us because it will remind us of a funny story about them which we had forgotten to remember until it came crashing in.
And it takes us down when it does. We must learn to stand again.
Stay With Yourself
And then there are the what-ifs. I wish I had known sooner that there is no way out of the what-ifs when it comes to grief.
If your dog dies on their own, you may wonder: What did I miss? Was there a sign? Were they trying to tell me? Were they looking for me? Did I wait too long? Did I do something wrong? Could I have known? Did they feel alone?
If you had to make the unbearable decision to let them go, the questions are just as relentless. What if there had been another treatment? What if I opened another credit card? What if I found the right specialist? What if there was a cure somewhere out there? What if I could have given them two more months? Two more weeks? One more morning?
The truth is there is no way out of the what-ifs because grief puts us face-to-face with what we spend most of our lives trying not to look at: We are not in control.
We live within the illusion that we can prevent enough, plan enough, save enough, and know enough. But when someone we love dies, we suddenly stand at the edge of the fact that we cannot control life. And we wrestle with this. We rage against it. We deny it. Until slowly, arduously, we begin to accept what is, and all the mystery that comes with what is. The unanswered questions. The things we will never know. The things we could not change.
What-if is part of loving. You are a normal, natural person spiraling with what-ifs. When you care for another being—especially one who cannot speak your language—you get good at watching, listening, and relying on your intuition to interpret what you observe. Gradually, you learn the smallest changes in your dog’s face, their gait, their breathing, their appetite, their eyes. You became fluent in their silence. You paid attention because you loved them.
You did this with them, this sacred way of being.
But despite all of that love and all of that attention, you still cannot save them from their fate. That is not proof that you failed. It is proof that you loved someone completely who you could never completely control. Couldn’t that be a definition of true love?
Sticking with ourselves through all the grief waves and what-ifs—rather than judging them, rushing them, or trying to outrun and fix them—teaches us something. We learn that we can feel enormously, deeply, and fully, and survive it. Eventually, although we may have never wanted this lesson, we begin to understand the final gift our dogs leave us:
The ability to trust ourselves with our own hearts.
Those Special Animal People
A shout out to those who’ve committed their lives to taking care of or rescuing animals.
Shelter workers, volunteers, fosters, rescuers, networkers, transporters, veterinarians and their teams. You are people who carry each loss into the next kennel, another intake, one more euthanasia, another emergency, and the next animal who needs you.
How many suitcases of grief you are lugging around if none of those losses are acknowledged! How heavy it may feel when you are expected to keep functioning while your grief has not gone anywhere or been held or heard. The world asks you to care and then acts surprised when that caring costs you something. But resilience doesn’t mean not feeling. It doesn’t mean not grieving and not needing a witness. You are allowed to grieve, process, and set those bags down.
There is no inconvenient or incorrect way to mourn. You don't need to hurry, check a box and move on, focus on or adopt another dog because someone else thinks it will heal your wound, make you stop talking about them or crying about them. You don’t need anyone to tell you when you should be finished with your grief. There is only the slow work of learning how to go on.
What I wish I’d known about grieving a dog, is that little by little, letting go happens on its own. There isn’t much to do. We must turn towards it and receive it. We make room to feel for the one we lost, but also we make room for ourselves.
I’m So Sorry For Your Loss
The daily schedule has changed. The house feels...less. There is a before and an after. But love does not disappear simply because its object is gone or because you release some pain.
We come to realize the dog is still here as part of the person we’ve become. They are IN the way we love. They exist IN our presence and IN our breath when we get still and quiet enough to notice them, reach for them, and be met by them in meeting our own selves.
If you are grieving a dog right now, please don't worry about whether you are doing it right. Let yourself miss them, and when you are ready—whenever your ready is—consider becoming open to discovering that you don’t have to stop loving them even if you keep living without them.
It may not happen all at once, and that’s okay. In these tiny acts of faith, you will begin to sense that the love will never leave you. That was never the part you were meant to lose. As the sharp acuteness of loss subsides, the love remains. It will color the rest of your days with something worthy, someone you are grateful to have known.
Written by Katya Lidsky
Katya Lidsky is the Founder of The Thriving Volunteer, a guided online membership community designed to provide animal shelter and rescue volunteers with support, connection and resources so they can stay in this work. She offers workshops specifically designed to support shelter staff as well. Katya is a certified, trauma-informed Breathwork Facilitator and Creative Grief Coach, has worked in the animal welfare nonprofit space for over a decade, and is herself a long-time animal shelter volunteer, dog foster, and advocate. Lastly, Katya is a writer. Her book, Be Your Dog's Best Friend: The Benefits of Mutual Bonding and Relationship Building was published by McFarland (2025) as part of their Dogs In Our World series. You can follow her @KatyaLidsky.