05/17/2026
What Losing My Dog Taught Me About Grief
I’ve spent much of my life not really letting myself be sad.
As I grieve the immense loss of my sweet Amica, something unexpected hit me: this feels harder, deeper, and more disorienting than the loss of many people I have loved and lost. That realization stopped me in my tracks. At first, it felt confusing, maybe even disloyal. But the more I sat with it, the more I understood something profound about grief, about love, and about all the ways we learn to survive loss without ever truly feeling it.
When a person you love dies, there is often busyness. There are decisions to make, calls to answer, plans to arrange, people to notify, logistics to handle. There is structure in the chaos. There is purpose in the pain. You keep moving because you have to.
When a beloved pet dies, there are far fewer distractions.
There is just the silence.
My dad died when I was 14. A decade later, a therapist told me I had never really grieved his death. At the time, that sounded bizarre. But it also landed somewhere deep because I knew it was true.
First, we were never taught how to grieve. Most of us aren’t.
Second, my dad had been sick, and what everyone said — with love and good intentions — was, “He’s not suffering anymore.” Somewhere in my 14-year-old brain, I think I translated that into this: if I missed him too much, if I grieved too openly, then I was being selfish. As though my sadness meant I would have preferred him here in pain, just so I could keep him.
So I did what many people do. I kept going.
Then life kept asking more of me.
Over the years, I lost two siblings and my mom. Again, these were people who had suffered, struggled, and declined. Again, there was busyness. There was a job to do. There were people to care for, responsibilities to carry, reasons to keep moving. Grief became something I would get to later.
Except later has a way of never coming.
With my mom, grief actually began long before she died. Memory loss took pieces of her little by little, so mourning her became its own slow ache, unfolding over months before her actual passing. It was anticipatory grief, complicated grief, layered grief. But still, it lived mostly in the background, tucked behind necessity, endurance, and function.
Then came Amica.
Amica was my heart dog. If you’ve had one, you know. There are pets you love, and then there is the one who somehow walks straight into your soul and makes a home there. She was that for me. Our bond was unlike anything I have ever experienced with an animal. She was joy, intuition, comfort, wisdom, gentleness, and love wrapped in fur and expressive brown eyes.
And with her, it was sudden.
We had three days. Then she was gone.
There was no long season of preparing. No emotional rehearsal. No role to step into. No arrangements large enough to occupy my hands and protect my heart. There was just the unbearable desire to go back in time. To one more walk. One more look. One more night. One more ordinary moment I would have gladly known was sacred if only I had understood how little time we had.
As someone with an academic background in social science, I know the theories. I’ve read about the five stages of grief. Some say seven. Some offer charts, frameworks, categories, timelines.
But grief, in real life, is not linear. It is not neat. It does not move politely from one stage to the next.
Grief is palpable.
It is like water. Sometimes it is quiet, steady, and lapping at your feet. Sometimes it is a wave that knocks the air from your lungs. Sometimes it is torrential, merciless, and destructive. Sometimes it is barely a mist, and then suddenly it is everywhere. It changes shape. It changes force. It returns when you thought it had passed.
There is no right way to grieve.
And maybe the only wrong way is to avoid it.
But even that deserves compassion, because sometimes avoidance is the best we can do when survival is all we have. Sometimes numbing is what gets us through until we are strong enough to feel. Sometimes grief waits for us until life becomes quiet enough to hear it.
That is what Amica’s loss has shown me.
Not that loving her more means I loved others less. Not at all. It means that this loss arrived without distraction, without duty, without somewhere else to put my pain. It demanded to be felt. And in feeling it, I have begun to understand all the grief I never let myself touch.
Someone shared something with me recently that I cannot stop thinking about: you grieve as deeply as you loved.
What a beautiful and gut-wrenching truth.
To grieve deeply is not weakness. It is evidence. It is love with nowhere to go. It is the price, and also the privilege, of having been changed by someone — human or animal — who mattered profoundly.
Amica was nothing but unconditional love, grace, wisdom, and joy. She didn’t withhold her affection. She didn’t rush through life. She was present. She loved fully. She delighted in simple things. She showed up every day as exactly who she was.
What if that is the lesson?
What if grief is not just about what we have lost, but about what love asks of us while we are still here?
Life is short. We all know that, and still we live as though there will always be more time. More time to call. More time to visit. More time to throw the ball, take the walk, say the thing, forgive the hurt, hold the hand, sit on the porch, linger in the ordinary moment.
But love lives in those small things.
So hug your people. Make the time. Throw the ball. Take the walk. Stay a little longer. Put down your phone. Be where your feet are. Let the people and animals you love feel it while they are still here to receive it.
Let your legacy be that you were present.
Let your legacy be that you loved.
And maybe that is the thought I want to leave with you: grief is not proof that we are broken. It is proof that we dared to love deeply. And if that love leaves us aching when someone is gone, maybe the answer is not to love less so it hurts less.
Maybe the answer is to love so fully, so openly, and so presently that when loss inevitably comes, our sorrow tells the truest story of our lives.
Live and love like Amica.
