Happiness After Pet Loss? Seven Questions to Explore
Many grieving pet parents find themselves asking this existential question, is there a return of happiness after pet loss? Logically, your mind may say, there must be. Lots of people in the world have experienced the loss of a pet and seem to be happy again. Maybe you’ve even personally experienced other significant grief and have felt happiness return.
But there is also a deep void that can occur in grief that happiness seems to fall into, making it hard to find again.
This question – will happiness ever show up again – can come with a sense of dread and no real answer. You may begin to ruminate and feel bottomless thinking about it. Unknowingly, the door is being held open for existential anxiety; that feeling that the foundation of what made you truly happy is now crumbling.
Take some time exploring these seven questions. Start by just reading them and being aware of how they make you feel. Do they make you curious and want to answer them? Ultimately, I encourage you to journal or write your answers. You might even revisit this at different periods in your grief to see if or how your answers are changing.
If the possibility of happiness after pet loss is something that you’re struggling with, having a heart-to-heart with your own psyche is the place to start processing the answer.
What did happiness mean to you before the loss of your pet, even years ago? Can it mean something different to you now?
In grief, it’s easy to measure how you feel and your capacity to experience happiness and joy to a standard that doesn’t exist anymore. The you before grief is different from the you now, so it makes sense that your meaning of things like happiness (and boundaries, priorities, self-care) will change.
With a realistic lens, what would happiness redefined look like?
Are there moments, even small or fleeting, when you feel a glimmer of hope, comfort, or contentment? What are those moments like?
Maybe you are already unknowingly redefining happiness within yourself and the natural evolution of grief. If you search for a replica of previous happiness, are you missing moments of new joy blooming?
Can happiness needing to be rebuilt be something that feels understandable and deserved, rather than a hard stop and it being gone forever?
Like any new beginning, happiness can take a lot of nurturing and patience.
If overall happiness feels largely unattainable, can you envision a percentage of you starting to feel a little more ok over time?
The long-lasting sadness of pet loss is often so unfamiliar that it might feel like you’re the odd person out. Like other people can seem to “get over it”, but you can’t.
Grief changes you. Not temporarily but a part of your core. Other people don’t get over it, they slowly learn to hold it in a way that allows them to live the fullest life possible, with a broken heart.
There is a video out there of Billy Bob Thornton talking about the death of his brother and how it changed him. In it he says, “I’m 50% happy and 50% sad at any given moment”.
Though maybe the video should come with a big disclaimer, *percentages will vary and can change, there is one thing that has always stuck with me about this short video. Your percentage of happy is enough to keep going. Enough to experience joyfulness, even love again. It’s enough to carry the other percentage and continue to live in a way that honors the life of someone so important.
Could you be open to the idea that although your definition of happiness might be changed it can still be meaningful and real?
There are a few things in life that might feel unwavering. Beliefs, values, personality traits, whether you like vegetables. These, along with what happiness means to you, can actually change over the course of life.
If you had trusted religious beliefs as a child and young adult that morphed into something that felt more defined by your life experiences and representative of who you are now, does that make them any less meaningful or real?
The same can be said for happiness. Periods of great transition, especially that carry an onslaught of emotion, can be a tough time to be open to newfound happiness. But with patience (because happiness isn’t jumping out at you from behind a tree) and an open heart, happiness can start showing up again.
And when it does, it may just feel like the color is coming back into your world. Or at least a percentage of it.
Do you believe that good people deserve to find happiness while they are here on earth, even after experiencing deep pain and heartbreak?
This is a “low-hanging fruit” question. The answer is easy…of course you do. I think we could probably all say that everyone – people whose pets, children, partners, parents, or best friends die – deserves to find some happiness again.
After all, that dismissive thing people say to grievers – “oh, they wouldn’t want you to never be happy again” – is actually true. It’s just annoying when people say it because they are trying to be a hero and fix your grief.
Conversely, had you gone first, what would you have wanted for your pet? With the rest of their lives ahead of them, would you have wanted them to be happy again?
I’m pretty sure I know the answer.
Could a path to happiness after pet loss be cultivated by remembering all the time you were together, and not only focusing on your pet’s death?
Grief can be all consuming and loss can feel like the most major life event of your life. But what if the true major life event was the love you shared. The life you built around unconditional love, companionship, and care for one another.
Their life, and your life, are bigger than just death. In a good love story, the heartbreaking chapter is not the only one to remember and certainly not the most important.
Of course it’s painfully tough when someone who made ordinary days feel extraordinary is no longer here. But in reflecting on more than just loss, you might find happiness organically revealing itself.
What would not feeling happy again mean for the rest of your story?
Good stories (including memoirs and love stories) are made up of many parts including a crossroads. If, as the plot unfolds, the main character (you!) never finds happiness again, the story risks becoming only about tragedy and feeling unfinished and unfair to the reader (also you). But there is more to your story.
Grief can feel like an enemy and destroyer of all happiness; and to be fair, it does rearrange a lot. But resist letting grief get the last word.
Remember that while parts of you feel different or missing, you are made of many parts. Your pet’s love and qualities are woven into those parts. When you experience happiness, it’s not without them, but with them shaped in a different way.
No matter how you shake it, grief and healing are complex. Finding happiness after pet loss doesn’t have to be either a mission or a lost cause. It can be a place for curiosity and hope.
