Pet Loss Grief Support
Why We Deserve Nurturing and Self-Care
Grief is indifferent to the species lost™
As a person who loves and has lost a cherished animal, you deserve understanding and comfort in your time of pain. You deserve to feel acknowledged and honored as a person who is grieving a significant life loss. You deserve to feel absolutely, positively normal in loving animals as deeply as you do. You deserve to know that there is nothing wrong with you if you love animals as much or more than people. You have given your heart deeply and completely to another being who is now physically gone from your life. You have a right to mourn. You need to mourn and you deserve support and acceptance as you do.
Your heart may be in great pain now, in pain as deeply as you have loved. Experiencing a major loss creates a wound, an emotional wound that needs conscious attention to heal as much as a physical wound needs attention to heal. An abundance of tools are available to help you cope and heal. Support groups, counseling, books, guided meditations, classes and flower essences are just some of the resources available to help with healing our grief, to find meaning in our loss and to embrace the legacies left to us. Reach out for support. Take care of yourself as lovingly as you did your beloved animal. You may find help that is just right for you at the Library of Resources for Pet Loss.
There are people, animals and divine sources waiting to support and nourish you. Keep your heart and mind open to all who are available to help you heal. You may feel very much alone. In a way, you are, because no one has ever loved and lost the animal you love and have lost. Every animal, every loving relationship with an animal, and every loss is unique. But you are not completely alone. We are all here together, those of us who love animals, to love and help one another. Let yourself be loved and supported by others who understand and have experienced similar losses, even if not in an identical situation to yours. The depth of your love for your animal is a reflection of your capacity to love greatly. Let that ability to love extend to yourself now. Let that love--from your animal, from yourself, from other humans and animals who love you and from the spiritual sources of your belief system--fill your heart and give you strength during your time of pain and healing. Even as you cry, let yourself feel the love inside you and around you. Your capacity to love and be loved did not die with your animal. It is your animal's body that has died, not the love. All the love is still there. Along with the sadness, the anguish and doubts that you may ever feel joy again, the love is there. The love you and your animal share is bigger than any pain. It is as big as all the oceans of the earth. Love never dies. Let yourself feel it, right next to your pain. And always, be gentle, patient and loving with yourself as you heal.
For in-depth support, consider taking this on demand class filled with resources that can lovingly guide and support you both immediately and at any time in the future:
