Feeling the most sadness you’ve ever felt is normal, even if you’ve experienced grief or loss before. Your cherished pet has been an anchor through life’s ups and downs, a constant source of love and support that was effortless. Your pet is the one who made even the hardest times you’ve had, a little softer.

Now, there is sadness in the finality of loss. There is sadness in the quiet of your home and the void where they’ve always been. That sadness is a non-negotiable of grief and its constant presence is often incomparable to anything you’ve experienced before.

Grief is disorienting, and brain fog is a common, but frustrating, part of it.

After loss, your brain is doing a lot of work to absorb the reality of what’s happened, try to make sense of it, and adjust to a changed world. Your memory, concentration, and decision-making skills may be compromised for a period of time. 

And while this is temporary, it can be an aggravating aspect of grief, particularly if it affects work, school, or other important areas of life (like remembering to pay bills. 🥴) 

Reminding yourself that brain fog is a normal part of the grieving process can help you see it with compassion. Coupled with a few practical strategies, like list making and sticking with routines, it can and does improve.

When your grief journey began some weeks or months ago, and you start to feel worse than you did at the beginning, it can feel like you’re going backwards or that something is wrong with you.

Surprisingly to many grievers, this is normal.  

There is nothing wrong with you. Acute, raw grief is wildly filled with an overload of emotion and heartbreak. Nestled in there is also numbness. You might not feel the numbness working because the heartbreak is so cutting, but it is there. 

And it wears off. Underneath is the pain and sadness. Coupled with the continued reality of needing to adapt to a world you didn’t ask for, feeling “worse than before” is normal. 

You have not gone backwards and you are not stuck. This major life adjustment can be filled with angst, protest, depression, and hopelessness.

If there is one compassionate thing you can remind yourself of, it’s that grieve does evolve and change. No feeling lasts forever, and yes, this is all normal. 

Guilt and regret are very normal parts of the grieving process. The thing about guilt is that it’s pervasive and can overtake your grief.

Instead of feeling powerless in grief, your mind knows what it can control – how badly you feel about yourself. While guilt ruminates, it festers, and even when you manage to overcome one source of guilt, another creeps right in. 

Guilt is a bully that feeds on vulnerability. Easing the weight of guilt is not easy and takes time and a lot of work. 

The feelings of unrelenting guilt and regret gives your mind something else to focus on rather than the sheer pain of loss. It’s an element of suffering. But it can hinder the grief process if it sticks around too long, so finding ways to work through it is important.

It’s inherently normal to replay something that so deeply affects your life. Grief feels very surreal, and replay is your mind’s way of processing the reality of everything that has happened.

Grieving takes a lot of emotional and cognitive work, and replay is a part of that. Your brain needs to understand how you got here. Going over the details is normal, especially if your loss has been unexpected or feels traumatic. 

In grief, replay has its purpose but can lead to hindsight bias. This is when, now that you know the outcome, you feel that you should’ve been able to predict this all along and taken the steps to change it. 

Self-doubt and self-blame are two of the pitfalls of replay. Conjuring up a kind inner voice to remind yourself that you’ve always done your best in any situation is not always easy, but it’s necessary.

This is where healthy support is important. A person, people, or even a journal, where you can safely share your thoughts and experiences and to give replay an actual voice.

Crying is a normal reaction to loss and sadness. Sometimes you can’t stop crying or there may also be times when you feel like you want to or should be crying, and you’re not. 

Though crying can be exhausting, it does have a function. Emotional crying helps relieve stress and process feelings. It doesn’t make the pain go away, but can act as a release in that moment. 

It’s normal to cry, to not cry, to want to cry but can’t, and to cry in places you wish you weren’t. 

If you find that you can’t stop crying, you could try to find small distractions to give yourself a break. This can also help if you find yourself crying at work, school, or in a store. 

Distraction might be an upbeat song you love, a grounding technique, or making a list of things you need to do today (even if this is not a totally realistic list, it helps refocus your mind).

On the flip side, if you think you should be, or want to be, crying but aren’t, just know that it’s not a measurement of your hurt. If you’re not crying, it doesn’t mean you’re not sad or aren’t grieving enough. 

Tears typically do come, but if you want to try invoking a good cry, you could look at photos, listen to emotion filled music, or try writing a letter to your pet.

Fear of healing and what that means or looks like is a common and normal part of grieving. In grief, the endless love you have for your furbaby can translate into feeling like you must live in endless anguish to prove your loyalty. 

Joy, laughing, crying less, and not thinking about grief can all make you suddenly ultra judgemental of yourself. What kind of person are you if, after losing one of the greatest loves of your life, you can laugh or forget for a minute. 

Well, it makes you a normal human. Us normal human beings are built to live with both love and loss. One does not negate the other and, in fact, they are a complement to each other.

If we want to never grieve, then we have to never love. And never loving or making connections sounds pretty bland. Experiencing loss helps us be genuinely grateful for love. It reminds us that we’re worthy giving and receiving love so deeply that it’s terribly hard to say goodbye. 

One of the most compassionate thoughts you can tell yourself is that healing is not the same as forgetting.

It’s normal to still see, hear, or feel your pet’s presence after loss. Over the time you had with your pet, the bond created has become an integral part of the wiring of your brain. Your brain has learned to predict that your pet will always be there, sound a certain way, look, and feel a certain way.

When they aren’t here anymore, your brain needs to relearn this. It constantly searches for what it has learned over the years. It takes time to relearn and anticipate the opposite.

This is a very hard part about grieving because it feels like repeated losses and reminders of your pain, throughout the day.

It’s absolutely normal to feel envious that other people still have their pet, but yours is missing from your life.

Grief often feels unfair and unjust, particularly if your pet was young, didn’t reach the life span you had anticipated, or if your pet was taken from this world quickly.

If translated, envy might sound like My pet and I deserved better. We deserved the same longevity that others have gotten. We didn’t deserve life cut short.

Envy is a tough emotion because it can have a negative connotation, so it’s often something you may not share with others. But envy doesn’t mean you want others to lose their pets too. It’s about missing your beloved and longing for more time.

Being anxious about the health and safety of your remaining pets while you’re grieving is very normal. Now that you’ve experienced a painful loss, your brain would like to ensure that you never do again. Of course that’s not really possible.

In grief, it’s normal for your mind to be on high alert and your heart to feel guarded. You might find yourself preoccupied with the safety and well-being of your remaining pet. This is common as your mind focuses on keeping those still with you as protected as possible.

Give yourself grace when it comes to anxiety, as it’s such a natural reaction after pet loss.

A strong impulse to buy memorial items is a normal part of the grieving process. It is a way to honor your sweet pet’s memory and create tangible connections to them. Without someone physically here, it can feel very hard to do that. 

If you start to recognize or feel like you’re spending too much, you could give yourself a spending limit or tap into your own creativity and find a ‘grief project’. Something that is on-going, will take time and effort, and isn’t just a one and done purchase. 

Remember, you’re cultivating what your relationship with your pet looks like now. Though it does not always need to be with things that are purchased, having some speical memorial items is an important piece of that process.

As much as it seems like it would be, grief is not just an emotional experience. It can have significant physical effects as well. 

You might sleep all the time or not at all. Might experience dehydration from crying so much. You may not be hungry at all or the opposite and are stress eating. Headaches are common, as well as feeling generally under the weather.

Muscle tension or general body pains are normal as well. Even digestive issues and heart palpitations might arise. 

Physical manifestations of grief can be surprising and distressing. If they persist or worsen, seeing your physician makes sense. This is also the best time to employ self-care for survival tactics. 

Eat right, drink enough water, get some sun, move your body, and take hot showers to name a few. Present day you needs to be sure that future you is ok.

A normal and natural emotional response to pet loss is anger. It can even show up as frustration, irritability, and resentment.

One of the hard parts about anger is that it’s difficult to know how to constructively cope with it and not just be aggressive or mean. 

Sometimes your anger is warranted – if someone was involved with how your pet passed. Or if someone is particularly dismissive of your heartbreak. And sometimes anger is generalized and can be displaced onto others in your life. Even yourself. 

Anger is active and will build up without an outlet. Physical exercise, journaling, screaming alone in your car, or simply talking it out with someone you trust. Similar to guilt, if you don’t give anger a way out, it festers and can overshadow your grief.