Coping After an Accidental Pet Death
The unexpected death of your pet is one of the hardest losses to navigate and process. But what if your unexpected loss was also accidental? An accidental pet death often comes with painful hindsight, where even simple decisions that were made will replay over and over with ‘what-ifs’. It’s common to find yourself trying to pinpoint how a different choice made minutes, hours, or even days earlier, would have led to a different outcome.
My own dog’s accidental death, years ago, still sometimes replays in my mind. I know the moment I made ‘wrong’ decisions. And I know the moment someone else also made a bad choice. Though, now I can be kinder to myself and see more clearly how, at the time, I was just making normal decisions like any other day. I definitely did not anticipate the outcome.
While everyone’s experience is different, people grieving an accidental pet death can find themselves wrestling with the same unrelenting emotions.
Guilt and Blame
Guilt is an insidious bully. It narrows your story and can keep you stuck in a moment or choice, demanding that you relive it again and again. It’s a form of self-punishment and control. You might not have been able to control this accidental outcome, but you surely can control how hard you are on yourself about it.
In hindsight, it can seem like there was a clear fork in the road – a right choice and a wrong choice. But at the time, both paths looked like they were built equally ordinary. There weren’t warning signs, or giant flashing lights, or a reason to believe one path would lead to a devastating loss.
And let’s be honest, accidental doesn’t always mean without fault. The ironic thing about blame, though, is that even when you can identify the decision or person(s) responsible, it doesn’t make grief any easier. It may, however, allow the facts to simply be true without continuing to put yourself, or anyone else, on trial.
Anger and Sorrow
Accidental death can leave you reeling with anger. Anger that might be coupled with blame, anger at the universe and circumstances, or anger at the fact that now you’re forced to live with something so painful and so final.
That pain that anger shields is the deepest type of sorrow. Maybe deeper than you’ve ever felt before. There’s a long lasting sadness that comes along with knowing that the road ahead now looks very different from the one you expected to be living.
Despair & Helplessness
Despair isn’t always a conscious choice, especially after an accidental death. People try hard to talk you out of despair when they see it on your face – “You couldn’t have known”, is a common, meant-to-be-reassuring phrase. And perhaps, in a way, it is reassuring. But there’s also an intrusive realization that nothing can bring your pet back. No action now can undo what happened.
Enter helplessness. The feeling that the world shifted beyond your control or ability to go back for a redo, feels helpless. An unfillable void in your world, feels helpless. Even looking ahead at what a long, tough journey grief and healing will be, can feel helpless.
Feeling helpless, however, does not mean that you are. It’s an emotion not a declaration. In grief, it’s about the tough reality of a loss that can’t be fixed, only carried. The stronger you get, the less helpless you feel.
What Can Help You Survive This Grief?
Living a Sort of Split Life While You Grieve
In the aftermath of loss, many people find themselves living in two worlds at once. There is the you that is deeply grieving, and the you that still has to get through the day, function, interact, and survive. In time, there will be moments when you recognize a familiar version of yourself again, even if just briefly.
Grief experts support this oscillation as part of the Dual Process Model of Grief. Time spent with the pain honors your love and grief. Time away from it lets your nervous system rest, even for short periods.
This split life isn’t about avoiding what happened, but rather it’s how grief becomes survivable.
Coping With Different Parts of the Loss
After an accidental death, grief and trauma can become tangled together, even though they aren’t the same. Trauma may show up as intrusive thoughts, guilt, rumination, or a heightened sense of anxiety. While grief carries the longing, sadness, and love.
Separating them can feel impossible because everything is intertwined tightly. With intention and practice (and maybe even some therapy) we actually can learn to do this. It may look like learning redirection or grounding techniques when your mind spirals. And also accepting that sadness, love, and connection can exist at the same time.
Although we carry it all at once, we don’t have to juggle it all at once.
Finding a place for the emotions
The goal of working on healing is not to get over grief or the emotions, but to give them a place to exist where, someday, they don’t feel as consuming or controlling.
Guilt, for instance, becomes a practice of trying to shift “What are all the things I should have done differently?” to “How do I live with what happened?”
Coping with anger may include thoughts of forgiveness – not necessarily for the action but, rather, for the person (self or other). And what would it look like for those to be separate?
We’re rarely faced with needing to navigate such huge emotions alongside the death of someone so loved. But we can learn, slowly.
There’s really no easy way to grieve an accidental pet death. It reshapes how you exist in the world and can feel extremely lonely. Grief can be consuming if we allow it to be. It’s so important to reach for anything that feels kind, comforting, or grounding and hold onto it tightly. Little lifelines become anchors in these choppy waters we call grief.
