Good grief
The question I get most often: How do I get over the loss of my dog? My answer is always the same: You do you. But have you considered fostering?
I was leaving a friend’s apartment the other day and rode down in the elevator with a tall, striking woman with silver hair and a peppy Jack Russell terrier. I was petting him and asking him how he was dealing with the heat, when she told me he had only recently arrived from Puerto Rico. She rescued him two days after her 17-year-old Jack Russell died.
I must have looked surprised because she quickly said, slightly defensively, “I know it’s fast. What is there to wait for? I love having a dog, and if another one needs a home, why let them sit in some shelter?”
I told her I was really impressed by that. I was thinking it was an almost superhuman ability to move forward. She said she had always done that since she got her first dog as an adult in 1977.
When I was walking away I was thinking about the awful day your dog dies, and the excruciatingly empty spot you feel in your home and heart. And how great would it be if the dog died and you just went, “Next!”
Of course I’m not suggesting that’s what this woman did. I’ve no doubt she grieved as she had before.
Processing grief
I spoke to my dear friend Claudia Glaser-Mussen, a therapist in New York City and mother of Ziggy and Mel, about how we grieve. “Grief is messy and nonsensical and surprising in myriad ways,” she said. “There’s no rulebook as to how to grieve and no two people grieve exactly the same way.”
