I don't know if there's that much work to do for us as people who have had pets who have
died to know how important it is.
I think the work is around the rest of the world, recognizing what an impact the death
of a pet can have.
There's been a few folks I've worked with over the years who said, "You know, my mom died,
my dad died, my dog died, and my dog dying has taken me out of the knees in a way that
neither of my parents' death did.
And that doesn't make any sense to me."
So yeah, I think it's great to be having more conversations and recognizing the role
that a pet can play in your life.
Hi there, grief growers, and welcome back to Grief Grower.
I am so honored and grateful to be here with you, as always.
If you've been growing alongside me in my work for a while, welcome back, and if you
are new to me in my work, hello.
My name is Shelby for Scythia, I am a Grief Coach, two times, soon to be three time author,
and the founder of Life After Loss Academy, which is an online course and community that
has helped dozens of graving people stop feeling lost, stuck, broken, and alone, and start
building lives they genuinely love from the lives lost force them to live.
This includes not only death-related losses, because we know that death is not the only
type of loss.
It also losses like divorce and breakup, major diagnosis, and all the other life transitions
that change your life.
Here on the show, we believe that grief is not something to get over, it is something
that we grow with and alongside, and that when we stop treating grief less like a problem
to be solved, and more like an invitation that we receive to live more deeply, we can
create meaningful lives that are rich with the memories that we carry, the struggles that
we faced and the hard things we've been through, and the precious awareness of what it means
to be right here and right now.
Today on the show, I am joined by Janet de Cristofara of the Duggy Center, and we are talking
about pet loss.
How pets are so influential in our lives, why social media can be a tool for digitally scrap
booking or beloved pets both before and after their deaths, and how whether or not your
pets loss is gradual or sudden, you can offer them a good death or a death that is representative
of your relationship with them.
Here's a little bit more about Janet.
Janet de Cristofara, LCSW is the advocacy and education manager at the Duggy Center.
In that role, she facilitates peer grief support groups, hosts, and produces the podcast
grief out loud, which you can find me on, and provides grief education trainings.
She is also a step parent or that lady to Captain, aka Captain the Fur Pick, who died on December
8th, 2024, at the age of 15.
And we're going to be talking about Janet's introduction to relationship with and life
with Captain as we talk about pet loss on today's episode.
Let's get into it.
Janet, thank you so much for joining us today on GraveGrower.
You are one of the first, you are the host of one of the first podcasts I listened to after
my mom died in 2013, a grief out loud, but also we have become social media friends through
the years.
And I have had the honor and the validation of watching you grieve a pet over the past
little while.
And as someone who myself has lost a pet in the last year, last May, it has been really
validating to be in your digital presence, like be a part of your digital sphere.
So I'd love for in opening this conversation on pet loss grief to talk about the bigness
of it, why it matters so much, like why we should all care more about the pets we lose.
But before we get there, tell us about Captain, your dog, who he was to you in life, who he
continues to be, and anything else you'd like to share about him.
And then we'll just go from there.
Well, thanks Shelby for having me on the show and for inviting me to talk about Captain and
pet loss.
And I think when you and I first met for an episode of Grief Out Loud way back in the
day, I think Gigi was in that interview.
About who he was.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that he made his way across the desk and I remember when you posted
about when Gigi died last May, and just feeling that like soccer punch to the heart and to
the gut of any time hearing about somebody else's animal has died.
So I appreciate everything.
And I'm so glad I got to like meet him.
I know.
And a sense to like, hey, I know that guy.
People lovingly, so lovingly in on my Patreon community back when I did that.
And then also now in my Factor loss Academy, you're like, I'm going to miss him on our calls
because you just sit between my arms like on coaching calls like right next to the
mic.
And they just be next to or they just get a tail in the corner of the video just sort of like
flipping up and down, but he's very social.
And I was having him on calls too, but thank you for saying that.
Yeah.
Well, and Captain, he asked about Cap.
He's been memorialized on a few Grief Out Loud episodes too because he was in my office
at the time I was recording and he's snoring because he was an epic snorer.
And there's a few episodes where you can hear his snoring in the background.
I tried to edit it out, but now I'm kind of glad that the constraints of my editing software
didn't allow me to get rid of it completely.
So I think your original question was why is pet loss so important?
Why should we care more about it?
And then a question about Captain and who he was.
Both very hard questions to answer.
I mean, I think I don't know if there's that much work to do for us as people who have
had pets who have died to know how important it is.
I think the work is around the rest of the world recognizing what an impact the death of a pet
can have, although so for so many people, they get shocked, I think, by the intensity of
grief when a pet has died.
There's been a few folks I've worked with over the years who said, you know, my mom died,
my dad died, my dog died, and my dog dying has taken me out of the knees in a way that
neither of my parents death did.
And that doesn't make any sense to me.
And I feel really guilty and confused and conflicted about that.
So yeah, I think it's great to be having more conversations and recognizing the primacy
primacy.
Is that a word?
That's not a word.
The primacy.
Is that the primacy?
Oh, make it a word.
That a pet can, the role that a pet can play in your life.
I mean, even if you think about the words that people use, I've always used pet that other
people use companion animal or fur baby.
I mean, that term in itself sort of recognizes the the meaningfulness and the profoundness
of that connection that you can have with an animal that you are fully responsible for
and their care from the moment they enter your life to the moment they leave your life
in their physical form.
And I'm not a parent of a human child, but my senses over time kids are able to do more
things on their own.
And eventually maybe they move out or they go forward in their adult life and you're still
connected to them and responsible for them, but they're able to not all kids.
But many kids are able to feed themselves and take themselves to the bathroom and things
that with pets that we are fully responsible for in terms of making healthcare decisions
for them with a being who isn't able to communicate in words.
And we have to work really hard to try to stay connected to them.
So I just think there's an intimacy of knowing a pet and their needs.
It's really special and unique.
Yeah, I agree and I was laughing with my wife yesterday because some of our favorite posts
on the internet and we do not have human children either and I don't want to compare pet children
to human children just kind of like I never want to compare.
I never call my books my baby because I'm like that is not a human child and I get logically
that that's true.
But some of my favorite memes or posts online are like people posting pictures of their
cats or their dogs or their birds or their hamsters and be like, this is my son.
Hello everyone.
This is my son.
This is my child.
And it just, it makes me giggle because it immediately relays like the humor and the intimacy
of knowing a being that's different from you but sharing physical space with them every
single day of your life.
That's what comes across to me.
And yeah, living with Gigi, I think, 11, 12 years of my life, he was with me the day I got
the news my mom died.
He was with me the day I got the news my best friend died.
He was with me when my engagement broke up when I got married to my wife and when I met
her, he was on the Zoom call when I met my wife for the very first time because of course
he jumped up on the desk where I was and they are so integral in, in so many parts of our
lives.
One of my favorite pieces from it's either what's your grief or modern loss.
I don't remember which grief blog outlet wrote about this but the title of the article
is my cat's death broke my brain and it was this person who had gotten a cat around at the
same time they'd also gotten sober and so every sobriety milestone was also shared with
this cat and when the cat died, it was like this whole season of my life where I'd become
presumably a better and different person.
The person I've always wanted to be the cat shared and so when the cat's death sort of
bookmarked a kind of ending to that, it was to your point profound and I wrote down these
words of guilt, confusion, primacy of just like this cat was in the orbit of all of this.
They're literally in the everyday we build our routines around their tiny little lives
or for horses and larger animals, their big little lives.
And they really just are a part of everything and I love how you've continued to validate
that.
I think you also asked me like what was cat like or who cat was.
Yes.
I'll tell you, I'm so sad a little bit to know him mostly in death.
I think you and I became social media friends sort of later in our relationship and later
in his life and so I saw a few pictures of him and his cute doggy stroller but most of
what I know is what you've shared of him through memory and so I'd love to know how
he come to be in your life and what was what was belonging to him like.
Well, Captain came into his dad's life, my partner Finn's life when Cap was too young, too
young to go home to another family.
He was December 5th, 2009 and Finn thinks he was probably, I mean it's unconscionable probably
like six weeks old.
He was so super tiny.
Finn rescued him from town in central Washington and the two of them were just instant best buds
together all the time and I met Captain when he was a tiny, tiny puppy.
It must have been maybe just a couple months after he came into Finn's life.
Finn and his ex-wife, I was wife at the time, ex-wife now and a friend of mine showed up at
my workplace at Ducky Center and brought Captain but I wasn't expecting it.
They just dropped by and Finn reached into his hoodie pocket and pulled out this time.
I mean, just the tiniest puppy fit in Finn's hand and they put him down on the ground and
he was running around in my office and I'm like, oh my gosh, he's gonna pee on the carpet,
bring him into the tile foyer and so they let him run around in the tile foyer and I wasn't
really like a dog person back then.
So I was like, oh, how cute.
See you later.
Yeah.
Bye.
That's nice.
Thanks for stopping by.
And then about three years later, Finn and I reconnected and we went camping and Captain
was on that trip and I went off to pee in the woods as you do when you're camping and Captain
trotted after me and we were just like, that was it for me.
There was no more not being a dog person.
I was like, you're the best thing ever and I'm gonna do whatever I can to be a part of
your life.
So that was when he was three and a half and he died when he was just over 15 years old.
So I got to be a part of his life for about 12 years and he was a Boston Terrier.
He was always, he was funny.
He was small, but he was 20 pounds.
So he was a pretty like solid little sausage of a guy.
And if you know anything about Boston Terriers, they're silly and they snore and they have
gas.
He was very notable for all of those things, but he was also kind of an anomaly when it
comes to Boston Terriers.
My sense of them is they're a little like high energy, a little hyper and he was really
chill.
He was a really calm, easy, easy, easy dog.
We always just said he was perfect.
He could stay home by himself for hours at a time.
You could put a plate of food on the floor and he wouldn't touch it.
He just wanted you to play tug of war with his toys as much as you could and then he would
just crash out on the couch and sleep for hours at a time.
So most of my friends say I haven't actually had a dog.
I just had a stuffed animal that was able to like walk and breathe and bark and snore
because he was just such a perfect guy.
And he was very tolerant of me.
Lots of like dress up clothes and lots of photos.
And I started his Instagram page, kept on the fur pig back in the day because I was, I
started the Instagram page because I like to give animals personalities.
So he became kind of a curmudgeony old man, even though that's not what he was like.
Apparently, that's what I'm like if I decide to eat a dog's personality.
But also I was already thinking when he dies, I want to have this record of his life with
us.
So yeah, it's not surprising given that I've worked in grief for 23 years that I was like,
okay, I need to start memorializing him.
And this is when he's like six, but I was like just in case when he dies.
So yeah, that's why I started his Instagram so I could have a place to, you know, play
around a little bit, but also just to have that record of him.
So he was a really good guy.
He had a lot of health stuff towards the end of his life.
And we did a lot of end of life caregiving probably in the last year and a half and especially
in the last couple of months.
So that's where all the stroller walk pictures come from.
That's what he could do at the end.
We just stroller him all over the place.
And yeah, I don't know.
She'll be in fighting.
It's a really hard question to answer.
Like what was he like?
He was, yeah, it's just hard to cap, you know, to distill down an entire life with a
being and two, a couple of sentences, but he was just the best.
So yeah, it was very, reminds me of like people, tell me about your mom.
I'm like, well, God, turn a diamond in any one direction.
What facet do you want to know about?
Like what can I, what can I tell you about?
Same with my best friend, same with with Gigi.
I can give you the highlights.
But there are, there's so many different things that come out, so many different ways.
And I actually didn't think we'd be going in this direction, but I want to talk more
about memorializing on social media because I think that's something that so many grieving
people don't necessarily give themselves permission to do because they fear judgment
or backlash or you're just seeking attention or you need to be over it by now or whatever
the case may be.
And I'll tell you, I have a private Instagram.
I have the public one.
She'll be for Scythian, then I have a private one.
But kind of again, unbeknownst to me from, I don't know, I'd say about six, seven years
ago until Gigi's death.
Anytime he did something funny or I would, I did my own, whose line is it anyway, like rewrite
improv songs of Mamma Mia when I would feed him.
And he would meow in the gaps between words.
And so I would record feeding times like that or I did like a Billy Eilish cover of the Barbie
song for him when I fed him once and again he'd meow in the gaps and and watching those
back is just like the most precious thing.
And if I had had those on my phone, if I tried to store them on a hard drive somewhere in
a computer, I would not even know where to find them.
But to have this moving record of him of his, his voice and like his purring and jamming
his tiny little head right into my neck to sleep there because that's comfortable.
Is has just been one of the things that I am astounded at how much that has helped me
remember him and also cope with the fact that he's not here.
I contrast it with my mom having little to no social media presence at all and feeling
like she's not pinned in the world in some way.
And almost everything I know of her is on physical paper and I have to go looking for it.
It's not portable like social media is.
And so yeah, I just, I wonder if you can speak more on the intersection of social media
grief, pit loss, like kind of those three things together.
Yeah.
Well, I was thinking about this idea, especially videos.
And one of the things I've learned now, and if I ever have another dog in my life, I'm
just going to have to apologize in advance because there's going to be a video probably
every day because there have a lot of photos of Captain.
And I have some videos of him that really wishing I had more videos because there's
something about taking a memory from the one dimensional, which is what a photo can
feel like to me to the three dimensional of a video to see how they move or hear how they
sound to hear yourself with them.
Some of my favorite videos are of Captain and his dad, Finn.
Because the way Finn loved Captain and the way Captain loved Finn was so precious.
And it's a side of Finn that you don't get to see except with Captain.
And I'm sure that's true for me too, but I'm me, right?
So I'm with myself all the time, but to see the love that came out of Finn for Captain
in the very few videos I have of the two of them together are my favorite.
And you know, thinking back to the beginning of our conversation, how pets get introwoven
into every moment of our life and they're part of so many of our significant memories.
And they're either there in the background or the foreground or they're just always part
of it.
And yeah, thinking about like everything the two of them shared and to have those videos
feels really precious.
So just a little side note there.
And I think that's part of too with the memorialization and social media of am I sharing for me?
Am I sharing for him?
Am I sharing for us?
That always gets a little tricky and I know that can be a challenge for anyone and a family
when someone dies of like who gets to share what and when and how and to try to share
from just your own perspective.
But it's so hard because when you have a pet together as a family or another family member,
like there is a way that your relationship is unique just to you, but it's always connected
to everybody else too.
So I'm just thinking about that in terms of like whose perspective am I sharing from to which
has been interesting because I shared so much from like captain's perspective on his Facebook
page right now.
I was posed for him and I would talk for him and create a personality for him.
And then when he died, I was like, oh wait, is that me?
Is that him?
Do I keep that going?
Do I not?
So it's been interesting to try to differentiate between what I post on his Instagram account
moving forward after his death and what I post on mine.
And I've tended on his page to post like we're getting ready to go camping for the first
time this season.
Here's a picture of Cap.
He was always the best camper.
Here we are paddle boarding, here's picture of him paddle boarding.
And then on my page, I tend to post more for like, this is my first time doing this without
captain and what's that meant for me.
I lost the thread of your original question about memorialization and social media.
Is that where we were going?
Yeah, that's exactly on the right track.
And I think what stops a lot of people is fear of judgment of family members or friends
pointing at these posts as evidence that you're dwelling or you're not okay or you're not
over it yet or it was just a dog.
It was just a cat.
This, this, everything that comes with pet loss, but then compounded by social media.
I don't know, but anybody else, maybe it's because I work in grief by love seeing posts
like this.
I love seeing evidence that people are still connected to the pets and people that they
lost and they haven't, they're not moving forward into the future without them.
And a line that I often encourage grieving clients and students to say to friends and family
who judge them for it or to even post online is, I'm scrapbooking this for me.
This platform, whether it's Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, this is a digital scrapbook
and I'm scrapbooking for me.
And if you want to have an opinion on that, you're certainly welcome to, but it's not, it's
not something I'm necessarily doing to produce any sort of emotion and you are even produce
any sort of response.
I don't need the likes, I don't need the hearts, I don't need the cry emoji reaction that
exists on Facebook.
I post this because he's still in my brain.
I post this because like you said, I'm doing this thing for the first time without him or
it's his first death anniversary or very fittingly.
I think like six months after Gigi died, I had the most vivid visitation dream I have ever
had from a person or a pet where he was present with me on a beach, which is a place he's never
been.
He's never been to the beach.
I'm like, what are you doing here?
But I, but I made a post about it and I was like, I want to put a thumbtack in this
point in time.
It's kind of like my mom, I wish you were pinned to the world in some way and because we live
a lot of our lives on social media that helps.
But I suppose the next question I could go into is like, do you have those voices in your
head?
Despite being in the, in the grief space of judgment of like, it was just a dog, people are
going to think I'm doing it for attention.
The shows I'm dwelling or not over it yet.
And if you do like, how do you respond to that or, or muster up the courage to post
anyway, if that's what you would call it?
I feel very, I feel very lucky and I don't know if it's because the people in my life know
what I do and know better.
But I haven't had anyone directly like, communicate, say like, oh, and I'll spend, how long it's
a been or are you still talking about him?
Or, so I haven't had anyone explicitly say that to me.
And hopefully, and also I'm not immune to the fear that people might be thinking that even
if they aren't directly communicating it to me.
So I'm not immune to all the messaging I think that comes with grief for everyone.
And I'll just speak to the society because I don't know about other societies.
But this idea of even if it's a, a human who has died, I'm like, oh, we're still posting,
you're still doing this, you're still doing that, you know, a long time ago.
And one of my groups that their friends were like, are you still playing the dead mom card?
And it had been like a year since their mom had died.
And I thought, yeah, so I feel very lucky.
No one has directly communicated that to me.
And our friends and family were so supportive after Captain died.
I mean, people sent flowers and cards and dropped off food and and acted as if it was a member
of the family because it was a member of the family who died.
So I feel really grateful.
And also I find myself being like, my posting too much about him.
And I think my bigger fear is that people are going to look at me and my relationship with
Captain before he died and after he died and think that lady needs to have more going on
in her life.
Like if the dog is the biggest thing, she's got a sad middle age life going on.
So I'm not always sure if that's me judging me or me assuming other people are judging
me, it's probably me judging me, but I do worry.
You know, I grew up in the era of like, oh, we're going to have going to be a unmarried cat
lady.
That's exactly where my brain just went.
It's like, is the cat lady trope?
Yep.
Exactly.
And I do worry about that because I think a captain's end of life in the last year of his
life, he had a lot of needs.
He had a lot of behavioral needs.
He had a lot of medical needs.
And I do think my world got pretty small and pretty focused on him.
And I needed to and I'm grateful that that was a privilege I had to care for him in that
way, but it's been a little challenging, I think, to come back out of that piece because
he was just such a focus and he needed so much.
And I wanted to give him so much.
Actually, I probably felt like I needed to give him more than he actually needed or wanted,
but that's a different conversation.
So sometimes those are some of the judgments that I worry about.
And I was reflecting on what you said of scrapbooking for yourself and I absolutely love that.
I think it's such a powerful way to reframe what the posting is because if you think about
the libraries, right, they are filled with first person historical accounts, whether it
was just someone's journal of when they were like farming about something and the dust
bowl happened or whatever.
Like, those are some of our most prized historical documents.
And I think same for me, like, I want to document what this grief is like.
I want to document his life and I want to document what this grief is like so that in a year, I can
come back to it and look at, oh, look at where I was compared to where I am now.
Maybe it's the same.
Maybe there's a shift.
There's a lot of things I don't want to forget about the liminal space I think that happens
right after someone or a pet dies.
There's a liminal space that gets created and I really wanted to capture that because it
gets real ephemeral, real fast and it dissipates.
And then I'm left with just the endurance part of grief, right, the ongoing nature of it.
That's just sort of this like day to day can feel a little grindy and there's a, there's
this, I don't know how to describe it except that it's just like this liminal in between
space after he died and I really wanted to make sure I was capturing that.
And oftentimes when I go to post, it's not something I'm thinking about.
I just sit down and something just comes to me and it just comes out.
And I do a lot of writing and it does not come out like that usually.
It's not that easy.
It's like gnashing to get every syllable onto the computer screen.
And yeah, I go back to a long time ago, I heard it.
And it was close with Gilbert's TED talk or she did a talk about how she writes the author
of the signature of all things and eat, pray, love.
And she's like, it's, she's like, I can feel it coming across the field in the farm and
I have to run inside and make sure I open up the door to capture it where it just goes
by me and lands with somebody else.
And I feel that way sometimes with these posts about cap.
I'm like, I gotta just open the door and let it in because it's coming to me.
I'm doing it, but it's coming to me.
So it feels more like an honoring.
But I was joke about being an only child, so I do think I always have this fear of being
perceived as like entitled or what do they always say about only children?
Not selfish.
I mean, I think entitled was a great word.
There's some words that people are like, oh, you're going to don't let them be this way.
I wasn't only trying to remember what the word is, but I was always terrified of that growing
up.
And so sometimes when I post, I worry like, are people going to be like, oh gosh, there
goes that only child again, just turning the spotlight on her.
But it's really turning the spotlight on Captain and who he was and who he continues to be
in my life.
Yeah, I, I want to validate for other grieving people who are listening that might feel
this way of like, oh, there goes that crazy cat person, crazy dog person, crazy reptile
person, crazy horse girl, whatever the case may be.
As the fear of people outside looking in and pointing fingers and saying, that's not a
rich life, or that's a, that's a sad life or that's a small life that you're living.
And if people are looking at you and assuming things like that, then they don't really know
you or care to know you and your grief.
You can also have a rich life while grieving something that a lot of other people perceive
as insignificant.
It just bums me out that people perceive of pet losses as insignificant or not worth
stopping for.
We say that and okay, so I'm going to go down a rabbit home, come back for a second.
One of the first times you and I talked on a podcast, we were so angry that a lot of
superhero tropes and movies were about orphaned children or children who had lost a parent.
And the other trope we have in our media in society is like tear-jerker pet loss movies.
And so we talk, and societally about one side of our mouth, it was just a dog, get over it,
stop dwelling in the past.
You don't need to have a whole funeral memorial, just bury him and get over with or chuck him
in the trash can't get him, it breaks my heart.
And then at the same time you get like, I don't know the movie titles, but like because of
Windixie where the red fern grows, a dog's life or a dog's eyes or whatever the one that
just came out in the last five years is.
And I'm like, okay, so in some love, we acknowledge the preciousness and the meaning and the gravity
of pet's presence in our lives.
And then at the same time we tell people to get over it.
So like pick one, which one is it?
Like I'm actually a rational angry about that right now.
I'm like, what the hell?
What are we all doing here?
We have horse movies and cat movies and dog movies and I'm waiting for better reptile
movies.
I think there's like some reptile slander, especially towards like snakes and stuff in our
society because of the Bible, but like, but there's been parrot movies and there's so many
other, there's the sense of like, yeah, pets are absolutely woven in.
And then we tell people to get over it.
So like how are we doing both at the same time?
Tell me your thoughts.
Well, I think we do the same thing for humans too.
I mean, think about how many tear-jerker holiday movies are out there of a parent who dies.
And it's so profound in the movie and all of that.
And then a year goes by, we say to people who've had a human in their lifetime, like, well,
it's about time.
I'm a little worried about you.
So yeah, I don't, I mean, it feels like it's the same thing in that way of, well, my other
thought about that too.
I tend to avoid a lot of movies that had pets die in them because it just couldn't, but
I remember I watched Hachi.
Hachi?
Hachi, about the Akita that used to follow his owner to the subway station every morning and
wait there for him until he came back.
And then one time the owner died, I think of a hard attack.
And Hachi stayed at the, came to the subway station every day.
And then now there's a statue of him.
So that's one of the movies I made it through.
And I feel like a lot of those movies don't show you the after very well.
Yeah.
So they lead you up to when maybe the dog or the person dies.
And then there's like a montage and then it's a year later.
I feel like there's that, that's sort of the vibe a lot of times.
Not all of them.
Thankfully, there's so many more now that show the day after the week, the month, the arduousness
of the grief in reality.
But a lot of them will like just cut away and come back.
And a year later, everyone's kind of sad and they hang across the Sornaman.
And then there's a new whoever in the room.
There's a new, like they're unboxing a puppy.
Up to the year.
Exactly what they're doing.
And I was like, okay.
And they know there's obviously some element of that that there's a good chance, not everybody.
But there's a good chance that folks will have more than one pet in their life in a way
that people don't have more than one mom in their life.
So it makes sense to me that there's just kind of this expectation of like, okay, I'm
going to have that kind of relationship with another animal.
And just like with humans, like every relationship is so unique in that.
If there were ever to be another dog in my life or my life with Finn or Finn's life, it's
going to be a totally different dog.
And there's a lot that comes with that.
The grief of having a different dog, but also the possibility at this, sorry, Shelby,
this is my recent personal work.
I'm like, Captain was amazing and perfect and any other dog will be terrible and I'll
be terrible at parenting him.
And it will be awful.
It will just be terrible.
We'll regret it.
We should never do it.
And I was like, what if there could be another dog who's not as perfect as Captain, but has
its own like wonderfulness.
So I'm trying to like open up that.
But I noticed I'm pretty close off to that piece.
But for other people, I just wonder if there's a like, well, you know, you can have like 20
dogs in your lifetime.
So you've got to keep your heart open to that.
Yeah.
And I think I just did a different podcast interview on somebody else's show talking about
like a window of tolerance for different things.
And I think a lot of people have a window of tolerance for like multiple animals in their
life.
Like some people are like, I am so excited to have another one because it's such a blessing
to race pets.
And I never want to be in a house without a cat.
For example, and so even if my heart is cracking open from this one, there's always room
for another.
And that's a perspective, I see a lot.
And I'm kind of in your boat right now where my wife, when she moved here from Canada, brought
her cat.
So we had two cats for a few months.
And then my cat died a hour solo parenting one cat.
And even just logistically, I'm like, where I'm not ready for that just space wise, the
endurance of having two cats in a tiny, two bedroom apartment in Chicago was a lot.
And so we kind of already have this protective grief measure outline of our hearts of like,
we're not even thinking about it until we are in a different space.
And that has offered me a bit of relief in that I don't have to even consider that as
a possibility in the near future.
But it's out there somewhere like in the ephemera of like, I know there will be more.
The cat we have right now will not be our last cat.
And I know that for certain, but what comes next, I have no idea.
And it's too funny to there's so many people who.
You know, they'll be like, I got another dog because I know the older dog is going to die.
And I need to make sure I have like a bridge dog.
And we had started having those conversations probably about five or six years ago or like,
should we get a puppy now because captain is so amazing.
And he could teach the puppy and we just kept not doing it.
And we're like, okay, well, and then it just got too late or like, we can't, there's
cat is needs too much right now.
And we had a session with an animal communicator before captain died.
And we asked, or I think I might have asked like, just cat wish we had gotten a puppy or
does he wish he had had another dog.
And he's like, no.
He's like, I don't like puppies.
They don't make any sense to me.
He's like, I am very happy.
I was an only dog.
And even so, when Finn originally rescued him, Cap was there with his brother.
And I think one of the questions like, do you wish we had taken your brother?
And captain said, I really hope he got a family as good as mine.
As in like, no, thank you.
Which is a nice way of saying, yeah, no, no, I'm just going to be an only dog.
So that helped us feel more secure in our decision.
Yeah.
And you quickly, this is another rabbit hole.
An animal communicator is and how people might go looking for one if that's something that
they're interested in.
To my knowledge, this is something that's equivalent to like an intuitive or like a medium
for humans, but for animals.
Is that am I correct in that?
I believe so.
I don't know that much about the world of animal communicator.
I only know this one.
Okay.
And to find through a friend of ours who had connected with her to talk to a cat of theirs
that was struggling at kind of with eating towards the end of her life.
And this is a friend who is not into any of that stuff.
It was like, no, dude, this lady, she helped a lot.
So we reached out to her.
And my sense is just someone who's able to connect with the ways that animals communicate,
which is not with words, but usually through images, I think.
So she was able to just connect with captain and kind of get his take on things.
So I don't want to speak to like their work because I don't know exactly what they do,
but there are many, many animal communicators out there, I know.
And we found it to be really helpful.
In fact, at one point, she was like tuning in to him to ask him about, I think what he was
eating.
And he was sleeping during this whole session.
He was just like crashed out snoring away in the other room.
And she's like, yeah, he's just letting me know he just wants more meat.
However you can get it to him, he just wants more meat.
And the moment she said more meat, he like popped up and left us.
You know, we're always looking for things that are confirmed our version of reality,
so we are like, that seems pretty classic of him to be like, what?
Yes, what she said, I would like some more meat make that happen for me.
That's so fun.
It reminds me very much of, I'm on a very griefy side of threads, the Instagram sister app
that's basically like nice Twitter.
And somebody who was a horse owner or works at a barn said they had an animal communicator
come in once just to relay the thoughts of the animals that were still present, like
the horses that were still present, so no one had died yet.
And one of the horses said, yeah, I like all the stable hands here and all the trainers
here, but there's one I don't like because she keeps calling me a sandwich.
And she's like, why do I just keep getting this picture in my mind of like a subway sandwich
or like a submarine sandwich?
And this person who had written the thread said, yeah, the horse's name was Hogan and I kept
calling him Fat Hogi.
And no one else knew that, like just no one else knew that.
And it was the funniest thing.
He was like, yeah, could she get her to quit calling me a sandwich?
And it was the funniest.
I was like crying, laughing, reading this.
And I'll say, Grave Growers, if you know an animal communicator, please reach out and have
them come on the show because I'd would love to know more about this.
The only one, I remember there was a guy that did it on like night TV when I was a kid
and we'd watch him.
Was it Caesar, oh god, Caesar Milano?
Animal communicator, I don't know.
He was like a dog, medium or something like that.
But it was like a big TV thing to talk to animals in a way that we could understand, like
to be a bridge of that gap of how they speak and what they want us to know.
I want to pivot really quickly, Jenna, and talk about because both of you and I live in
a great world and both of us got the blessing and the curse of knowing each of our respective
pets was dying.
And so I don't know about you, but that gave, I got about 24 hours notice.
I don't know how long you had, but to sort of like plan, like how do I want his death to
go, which is not something I got to do for my mom or for my best friend.
And so Gigi was the first time in my life where I actually got to do what so many grief
practitioners and death do as advisors to do is how do you create a quote unquote good
death?
How do you make it as tailored to their personality and their life as you possibly can in the
time that you're given?
And sometimes it's a few hours and sometimes it's weeks if not years, especially in the case
of like a terminal diagnosis.
And I know for Gigi and myself, we watched his namesake movie.
He's named after Gigi from Kiki's delivery service and old Haya Mizaki film from the 80s.
We spent the night on the couch together.
My wife and her cat slept in the bedroom and then we slept out on the couch and kind of
had our last snuggle session together.
He developed a lot of food allergies in life and so he could only eat rabbit and then like
a super hydrolyzed chicken at the end of his life, but he loved salmon and tuna and
just was not allowed to have it.
So he got to have as much salmon as he wanted the next day.
He also got to have a lot of brushes and a lot of pets and one of my favorite ways to
greet him was like flipping him upside down and like yelling in his belly.
And so we got to do and my wife recorded on video and I'm so glad I have it a final yell
in Debelly, which is what we did the morning that he died and I went for a walk before the
vets.
We had vets come to our house, which was lovely to not have to go to an office, but the
garden that I grow in our community garden, I grew catnip that year.
And so I made him a little wreath out of catnip with a red flower on it because his collar
was always red.
And after the vets came, I asked them after the, there was a series of two injections to
youth and I said, "After the first one I said, can we just sit here for one minute, just
60 seconds?"
And I just want to feel him breathing on my lap and like say goodbye to him and just be
with his feel what it's like to be with him one more time alive before he is no longer.
And I learned later that this is like a practice in medicine called the pause and sometimes
people will do it before a person dies and sometimes they'll take 60 seconds after a person
dies to just honor the fact that they were freaking here, that they lived.
And after the time was up, they gave him the second injection and he was just, just gone.
And I like to think it's because we took time to pause with him, but we asked for so much
time with his body like two, three hours before the people from the pet crematorium came
to like, "How much time do you want?"
And I was like, "I didn't even realize I could ask for more, for more time."
Because that's something I, again, I didn't consider with my mom and I didn't get with my
best friend and so kind of stacked up like a row of really heavy but really significant
and sentimental grief dominoes.
They all fell in such a way that this terrible thing happened and also it was one of the most
meaningful like 24 hour spans of my life and it felt customized and tailored to him.
So I wonder if, as grief professionals, if anyone is listening, who knows that they have
a pet with a terminal illness who's going to die soon, like if you could offer some ideas
of maybe things you did to make his end of life in grief speak a good, air quotes, a good
death.
Thanks for sharing all of that.
Shelby, you took me right there to those last 24 hours with you and Gigi and just having
that element of choice and opportunity which you didn't get with your mom and with your
best friend and how meaningful that can be and it was tailored to him but it was also tailored
to you and I think that's a big part of it, right?
That we get to tailor it for ourselves as well.
It's interesting, Cap had like a degenerative, there was no name for the condition, he just
slowly lost function by function by function over the last couple of months of his life.
So we had a lot of time but his caregiving requirements were so high and his personality
was so diminished by the time he died that I don't think there was a lot of intention behind
like what would he want because he was not really there and that was really hard.
So it was like what can we do to keep him, he wasn't in pain, he just was not there neurologically
I would say.
So it's interesting, like if he had still been him, the things I would have done at the end
of life would have been really different, like I would have tried to do all of his favorite
things.
More meat.
Yeah, he had meat the morning, the day the grim reprovette came, we gave him his meat,
like he did still enjoy eating right up until the very end but it was really about just
being with him and just being with his body.
He laid with Finn for a lot of the day, he laid with me for a lot of the day, we went on
many, many stroller walks because that was the thing he could do.
But honestly, like his last day was really about us and just being with his body for as long
as we could.
And yeah, looking back, there was a lot of grief leading up to it because he was so different.
And I see people who posed about, he was himself right up until the very end, which is painful
in its own way.
It's so painful to have your pet still be completely embodied and themselves and have their
personality.
But his personality had changed so much that we would say goodbye to him a thousand times
over.
Yeah.
But it was, yeah, it was just trying to be physically close.
I got up at like three in the morning and went out to the kitchen where his bed was and
just laid on the kitchen floor and held his paw for hours until I got up and...
But you're asking me what I would suggest other people to do.
Let me pull out of my personal story and into my professional little and I think...
I think so much of it goes into like the last moments, but it's like backing it up a little
bit to say like how can we cultivate that sense of presence with our pet or our people prior
to those last 24 hours, which so many people do.
But that was a big thing for me was like the whole last six months.
I was like, this is the last time I'm going to do this with him.
This is the last time I'm going to do this with him and like trying to just be as present
as I possibly could.
I do think getting information ahead of time is really helpful.
We tried to get as much information as we could ahead of time, but it was the first
time either one of us had had a pet where we were intentionally saying goodbye in that
way.
And everyone's like, oh, you want to do it at home?
You want to do it at home?
So we just did it at home.
And it was fine to do it at home.
But then I was like, oh, there's people who actually choose to go to the vet and that's
an okay thing.
And I just had this idea that that was the bad thing for the pet.
Like never go to the vet.
Always have the vet come to you if you can.
And I was like, no, there's some people who don't want their pet to die in their home.
And that's okay.
So just gathering as much information so that you can make some of those choices.
But I also think giving yourself a lot of grace for when it happens and then you look back
and you think, oh, I could have done this.
I could have done that.
That's always going to happen.
Even when you have all the time in the world, you know, we went to spread a little bit of
his ashes at the beach on New Year's.
He died on December 8th and on New Year's, we went out to the coast because we would always
spend New Year's at the coast with him.
We were going to spread just like a tiny bit of his ashes like eight grains maybe.
And we were going to go and all these conversations and trying to make decisions and that happened.
And it felt, I felt like, oh, I should have been that person who put out candles and drew
a mandala in the sand and gathered up leaves and branches and made it look beautiful.
But we didn't.
And that was okay.
But I felt that like, oh, I wish I had done more.
So I think the practice for me has just been knowing that that's going to happen.
No matter what, I'm going to feel like I wish I had done more so that I can just let that
be the experience and not give myself such a hard time for that.
Yeah.
Because I think in the moment you're doing what feels the best and right for you and for
your pet and in retrospect, it's like one of the downsides maybe of social media and
seeing people posting about what they do for their pets.
It's like, oh, I could have got the blue one.
I could have done the green one.
I could have turned it into a diamond.
I had tried to.
Yeah, all those things.
Yeah.
And then just in the moment trying to like take a moment to just be present to be like,
does this feel like the next right step?
And it doesn't have to be curated all the time.
Yeah.
And something I want to grant permission for too if people haven't considered doing this
is you can continue to have like pseudo or semi-fuehnerals.
Orals, rituals, remembrances, months and years later.
Like to me, I'm like, what's stopping you from going to the beach and drawing a mandala
on another year?
Like it won't be the same as if it had happened in the moment and that I can validate for sure.
And also something we talk about often in life after a loss academy is my community is like
you can, loss takes a lot of power away from you, but one of the things you do have the
power to do is insist on your loved ones coming with you all the time.
And kind of doing these re-doos or these add-ons to the house that was their memorial is another
way that you can keep their presence with them.
And there's some things you can't go back and undo.
Like obviously I can't get my cats ashes back and turn them into a diamond.
That was a silly example I was sharing, but there are some things that aren't undoable
or re-duable.
Like you're not able to do them again, but other things especially where it's like now I have
more energy or now I have people with me or now I have no one with me.
Like no one's watching how I'm going to do this so I get to do it by myself or now it's
been X number of years or now I'm in this location that they would have never seen or that
they would have loved or that we always went to together for the first time without them.
Like there's so many like tiny doorways of opportunity to not just maybe redo something
but to continue memorializing too.
And I will say I know that Jan and I are talking about the blessing and the curse of knowing
in advance if a pet is going to die and also kind of like you can have social media exist
for fun with the dark knowledge that it will also be a grief scrapbook one day.
You can also think about it any time like the if worse comes to worst so many of my childhood
cats ran out into the street and we never saw them again.
You can also think about how if that becomes my reality how will I memorialize them then
because you do still have some choice, some agency, some power within that to make that
devastating experience something that still belongs to you and your pet and any other members
of your family.
And again as an adult looking back I wish I had known that.
I think we lost four cats to traffic.
We lived on a very busy street as a kid and they were like outside.
I have to go outside and we were like okay you can go outside.
For years they would go outside and then one day just was their last day outside and we
would never know when that was.
And I grew up in a family that you lose a cat and you immediately go out and get a new
one and the old cats are not even buried in the backyard.
I won't tell you what happened to them but they weren't buried in the backyard.
And not having ceremonies or memorials at that I was like I wish I could go back and do
that with my childhood self.
She would have liked that.
The most I got to do was draw pictures of them and hang them on the fridge.
But yeah there are still ways I continue to carry them with me.
So even if sudden death is something that has happened to a pet that you've loved or
even to a person that you've loved or something that you fear happening in the future you can
even consider then how will I memorialize them and show myself potentially show others
or include others that they were a part of the family and that they mattered and that
they changed me with their love for their presence.
And I think there's something about grief that inspires and encourages, kicks us in the
butt to get to know ourselves more than we ever did before.
You know because when you were like well you can still go to the coast and do a mandala
and I was like yeah but I think what I realized is like I'm not a mandala person.
It's just not me.
I might be like oh wow I wish I was that person but I'm not that person.
I guess there's ways of realizing like oh I feel like I should do this but going below
that to be like what is real and true for me and for my pet and my family the other people
involved in my pet's life and getting to a place of feeling completely entitled to do grief
the way that works for you and it doesn't have to look like anybody else's and you might
be someone who wants to go back and create a memorial or do a mandala in the sand for your
childhood cats who have died or you might be someone who's going to do something totally
different or not anything at all and I think that is the both the opportunity and the
fear and grief is that you there's so many different things you can do and so you feel a little
lost about what should I do and then you try something on and that doesn't feel quite right
and you try something else on and that feels sort of like the right thing but then there's
always that like is am I doing it right or wrong and when folks can be you know sit in a
group together and be like wow that sounds like an amazing memorial that you did for your
dad and it's totally not what my family and I wanted to do and have both those two things
be equally valid and okay and then it's like whoop job well done a group in getting to that
recognition so that's just what I sit with at theters there's a process of getting to know
myself and this grief that's a way of carrying captain's memory forward or keeping him with
me or transforming that relationship but it's really about knowing who I am.
Yeah yes absolutely and am I am a mandala person am I a turning into a diamond person am I
a make a flower crown out of catnip person that's the person I ended up being and a lot of it will
feel thrown together or haphazard even if you've thought about it in advance because nothing's
going to feel good in the moment I have had too many many times release the expectation that any
of this is going to feel meaningful in the moment I think what it feels is as good as it can or
as meaningful as it can and the richness comes for me in looking back because nothing has felt
necessarily in the moment glorious or transcendent or happy
sometimes the best I get is connecting and I think that's more the target that I aim for in
thinking about what constitutes again air quotes a good death because you're talking about groups
Jan I do want to pivot for our last question to the work that you do with the Dougie Center
where you are and not just grief out loud which is another fantastic podcast that people
listening to this show should go listen to right now and you can go back and start with my episodes
on the show I think I've been there twice I'll be there soon in the future to talk about my third
book but also the Dougie Center and the work you do for grieving kids and families and how
or if that ties into pedal loss at all too yeah so yeah I work at Dougie Center National
Grief Center for Children and Families we're located in Portland or again for our physical services
and we are a peer grief support group program for children teens young adults and their adult
family members both before and after a death we work with kids anywhere from the ages of three up to
18 and then young adults 18 to 40 and our entire program are peer grief support groups so it's an
opportunity for kids teens young adults to be with other people their own age who have experienced a
death or have someone in their life with an advanced serious illness and our hope is to decrease
isolation to increase connection and community and to help folks know that they're not alone
in what they're going through in their grief so in my role there I facilitate some groups for
kids and teens and young adults and then I also do the podcast grief out loud I do a lot of trainings
for folks a lot of written resources and materials that are available on our website and one of those
that I would point out to folks as we did a collaborative resource with Doug Lewis who is a local
animal hospital here in Portland and they have a pet loss support programs one of the first in the
country as well so I collaborated with their pet loss grief support coordinator and we have a
resource tip sheet for families supporting kids and teens when a pet or companion animal dies and
Deborah who's the person I worked with shares some really amazing helpful language and ideas for
talking with kids about uh end of life for a pet and then also ways to memorialize and
and to have that conversation about whether or not we're going to bring another
animal into our family so it's a really really helpful resource for families who have kids and teens.
I love that because I think oftentimes um from my personal experience and even clients I've
talked to is like a pet was one of the first things I ever lost that was that was my first introduction
to death as a possibility for anything or anyone in my life and oftentimes how families respond to
the death of an animal will show you how they'll respond to the death of a family member or another person
in the future and there's kind of all these stories that get interwoven with that and and
cliches or practices or cultural things they get woven in it's like this is often how you teach
your family what it is to grief and so to grief well again heavier quotes around well um as well
as you can around a pet loss can often help kids and families feel more settled or more guided into
what it is when a person dies and that's not to say that animals only roll in life is to instruct
us how to grieve people there's so much more than that and also simply because of their tragically
short life spans in comparison to ours a lot of the time as humans um statistically just a lot of
them go go before our relatives or or friends do um and so they're kind of these
in their deaths opportunities to figure out what it means to honor someone we care about a whole
whole freaking lot. Jana thank you so much for coming on grief grower today i am so grateful to talk to
you about captain and hear even more about him uh i'm gonna think of him every time i eat meat now
because that would just tickle me so much um and uh my sweet jiu jiu who was just a monger for anything
salmon related uh he's in good company so that made me very happy um yeah thank you so
much for telling us about pet loss telling us about doggie and talking about the role of social media
and grief i think all of these things are so important to cover because they're part of the world
in which we live well shall we thank you for inviting me on for wanting to know more about captain
for creating a platform to talk about pet loss and for just holding such uh gracious space for me
in this time together so yeah very appreciative of that.
That's all for this episode of grief grower thank you so very much for joining me today
if you're looking for grief support beyond this show you can find free workshops, blog articles
and my signature what's your grief support style quiz at shallbe4sithia.com/links and if you'd like
to get support from me for your unique loss experience i hope you'll join us in life after loss academy
my online course and community i'll walk you through my five step grief model for rebuilding after
loss and you can get live coaching from me every single week to answer your questions. Replays are
always available if you can't attend life it's just $33 a month to join or $22 a month if you
were marginalized or financially stressed grower and you can cancel your membership at any time.
Now through august 31st there's just a little bit of time left to join us you can try one month
of life after loss academy absolutely free with the code grief grower and you can find a link to do
that in the show notes and be sure to share grief grower with a friend because you never know what
someone you love is going through. Grief grower's hosted by me shall be first at the at with music
by Annie Goldstein until next time i see you i am so proud of you and the work that you're doing in
the world and i love you because even through grief we are growing.