Grieving the loss of a pet? They want to help.
Weeks after Maria Sandomenico’s Chihuahua, Luigi, died in August, she shared a long post in a Facebook group for residents of the Park Slope neighborhood of the New York City borough of Brooklyn about how she was struggling to come to terms with her adopted rescue dog’s passing.
In an interview last month, Sandomenico said that in the seven years she had lived with Luigi, he had become her “north star,” trotting by her side in various custom-made clothes she had bought him. A pink-and-black pompom hat was his signature look, although he was also known to wear cashmere.
Sandomenico said she turned to Facebook when Luigi died because she didn’t want to burden her friends with her feelings, and because she craved connection with others who had experienced the death of a pet. She was surprised by how many people responded to her post saying they were also grieving the loss of an animal companion and didn’t know where to find support.
Not long after she posted in the Facebook group, Sandomenico, 53, who runs a dog walking and training business, met with several of its members at a local bar. She had invited them there for an informal grief-processing session. “Within like 20 minutes, everybody was breaking down in front of everybody,” she said. “They all have these really different experiences, except we all had the same, you know, feelings of just feeling like nobody understands.”
She described the meeting as cathartic. It “made me feel like I wasn’t freaking crazy,” said Sandomenico, who has a silver necklace with a picture of Luigi. She has since hosted another gathering and has plans to host them regularly.
Celeste Jones, an interior designer in Palm Beach, Fla., also struggled to find ways to cope with the death of her 12-yearold Maltese, Zsazsa, in 2020. “The more that I searched and the more that I looked,” she said, “the more desperate I became.” Jones, 45, eventually paid for an online program that she said gave her the tools she needed to process her emotions. She has since started to host free online sessions for others grappling with pet loss.
Those sessions and Sandomenico’s informal meetings are among a growing number of resources available to grieving pet owners, who should compare different options when considering any services to avoid bereavement scams. Some providers said there has been an uptick in demand for their support services since the start of the pandemic, when many people acquired new pets and others developed stronger bonds with pets because of restrictions that forced them to spend more time at home.
About 62% of Americans own a pet, according to a 2023 study by the Pew Research Center, and an ASPCA survey found that almost 1 in 5 American households had adopted a dog or a cat between March 2020 and May 2021. But dogs and cats, the most popular pets in the United States, have a much shorter average life span than humans — as do many other animals kept as pets.
The majority die before their owners, many of whom are left with complex feelings of sadness that they may be ill-equipped to handle on their own, said Colleen Rolland, 67, president of the Association for Pet Loss and Bereavement.
“People sometimes think they’re going crazy because of what they’re feeling and how badly they feel,” Rolland said. Her organization, which was founded by a psychologist in Brooklyn
in 1997, offers a free online chat service that drew more users in 2023 than it did in 2022, she said.
Jill Goodfriend, a nurse and social worker in the San Francisco Bay Area who works with grieving pet owners, said she has also recently noticed more interest in her services, which include free consultations. (Her paid services are offered on a sliding scale, but they typically start at $150 for a 45-minute counseling session.)
Goodfriend, 79, who started counseling pet owners in 2005, credited this spike to the pandemic, which she said made people “more aware of grief and more inclined to express it.”
At the Schwarzman Animal Medical Center, which has been operating in New York City’s Manhattan since 1910, a free pet-loss-support group has been available to clients since 1983. Susan Cohen, 79, a veterinary social worker who came up with the idea for the group, said it started with about five people attending each inperson session. By the time she stopped working at the center, in 2011, that number had doubled.
The demand for such gatherings led the center to expand its offerings: There are now multiple grief groups that meet on video calls a few times a month. One is for people whose animals have died in the past three months, while another caters to owners still grieving pets who have died within the past year. Judith Harbour, 40, a veterinary social worker at the center who leads the grief groups, recently started a third for owners of dogs with serious health issues. Each group has 20 participants from across the country, and some have waitlists.
Attendees come from a variety of backgrounds, Harbour said, and range in age from 18 to 85. The pets they’re mourning aren’t only cats and dogs — turtles, cockatiels, parrots, lizards, horses and rabbits have been brought up in sessions, too, she said.
Hamilton’s Funeral Home in Des Moines, Iowa, operates a free virtual grief group for pet owners ages 18 and older. Like the group at the Schwarzman Animal Medical Center, it has drawn people from across the United States, said Buffy Peters, who oversees bereavement-support services at the funeral home.
“We know they bring so much light and love into our lives,” Peters said of pets. “Yes, you can get mad at them, because they made a mess or whatever. But you also love them more than sometimes feels possible.”