Pets & People

There Is No Right Way to Grieve a Pet. This Book Is Proof.

In 'Good Grief,' E.B. Bartels set out to write the pet-loss guide she wished she'd had as a kid, an encyclopedia of the wildly different ways people the world over mourn their animals.

By Claire Sutton, Staff Writer

September 23, 2022 · 6 min read

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Anyone who has quietly fallen apart over a dead goldfish and then felt embarrassed about it will recognize the impulse behind E.B. Bartels’s book. As a kid, when her pets died, she had no map for the grief and no permission to feel it, so she hid it, sure that classmates would think she was strange for mourning an animal so hard. That loneliness, the sense of being a weirdo for a completely ordinary heartbreak, is the wound Good Grief: On Loving Pets, Here and Hereafter was written to heal.

The book, published by Mariner Books in 2022, is not a tidy how-to. It braids together three strands, her own recollections, scholarly research, and interviews she conducted herself, all circling the same subject, the rituals people around the world use to say goodbye to their animals. And its central argument is quietly radical for a culture that still treats pet grief as a lesser sorrow: there is no single correct way to do this, and there never was.

A life measured in pets

Bartels comes to the material honestly. An only child of sorts, with much older half-siblings, she leaned on animals for company growing up, cycling through fish, birds, turtles, a tortoise, and eventually dogs. Her adult household is its own small ark: a tortoise named Terrence, a tiny, prey-driven mutt named Seymour who a DNA test pegged as mostly Chihuahua and Pit Bull with a dozen kinds of terrier mixed in, two rescued fancy pigeons, and a tank of African cichlids.

She jokes that Terrence will outlive everyone, which is the tortoise-owner’s version of gallows humor and also the whole point. If you keep pets, you sign up for losing them, over and over. What kept pulling Bartels back was that the joy always outweighed the dread, even after the hardest goodbyes, like having to euthanize the family dog, Gus, when she was eighteen, an experience so leveling that she missed a week of college.

The book that started as a distraction

Good Grief began by accident. A decade ago, during her MFA at Columbia, Bartels kept drifting away from her actual thesis toward little essays about pets whenever she needed a break. She brought a few into workshop, and the response floored her. Classmates did not just relate; they opened up, trading stories about how their own families had buried, mourned, and memorialized their animals. When a friend with a reporting background suggested she dig into how different cultures, faiths, and families have honored pets across history, the essays tipped over into a book.

What she found surprised even someone who considers herself steeped in the pet world. There was an enormous, largely invisible tradition of pet-grieving practices, and no consistent thread running through them. She has described the finished book as a kind of encyclopedia of options, a sampler of what is out there so that a grieving owner, overwhelmed and unsure which way to turn, can see the possibilities instead of freezing.

The rituals that changed her mind

The most striking chapters are the ones that dismantle Bartels’s own assumptions. Taxidermy was the big one. She had always found it a little baffling, even judged it, privately filing it under an inability to let go. Then she interviewed people who had preserved their pets and realized how wrong she had been.

One woman, a mortician who had her Boston Terrier preserved, turned out to be more at peace with death than almost anyone Bartels spoke to. She saw the preserved dog not as a clung-to corpse but as a new work of art, the shell that had housed her friend reshaped into something like a three-dimensional photograph. It reframed the whole practice for Bartels, who now wonders whether she might one day preserve Terrence’s shell.

Then there is Larry and Joyce, who loved their Yorkie so completely that when he died, Larry wrote him a poem and the family, Joyce being Jewish, essentially sat shiva for the dog before burying him in a pet cemetery. The detail Bartels returns to is even more piercing: when Larry himself later died, he left explicit instructions that the family’s next dog be brought to the funeral home to see his body, so the dog would understand he had died and not simply vanished. Most of the book is about people grieving pets. That story is a reminder that pets grieve us, too.

Why there is no standard, and why that’s a relief

Across her interviews, Bartels kept looking for a modern ritual that everyone agreed on, and never found one. A lot of the variation traces back to a deep religious split over whether animals have souls at all, which shapes everything downstream. Even inside a single family, she heard, people clash: one wants to bury, one wants to cremate, one wants to leave the body at the vet, the kids want something else entirely.

Her practical advice sounds morbid until you sit with it. Start thinking about this before you need to, ideally around the time you bring a puppy or kitten home, the same way responsible adults write a will and plan for a funeral. Having even a vague sense of what you might want spares you one impossible decision on the worst day.

“The most damaging myth in pet loss is that there’s a ‘right’ amount to grieve, and that an animal doesn’t clear the bar,” says Dr. Nina Kohl. “I tell people what this book tells people: your grief is proportional to your bond, not to the size or species of who you lost. However you need to honor that animal, as long as you’re not harming yourself or anyone else, is the correct way. Full stop.”

What Bartels wants you to walk away with

Two things, really. The first is the antidote to that childhood loneliness: you are not a weirdo, and you are not alone. Whether it is her stories, the strangers she interviewed, or the vets she spoke to, the sheer volume of shared grief is the reassurance. The second is permission. There is no right or wrong way to mourn a pet; whatever you need to do, within the bounds of not hurting yourself or others, is allowed. Writing the book, she says, mostly taught her to treasure the time she has with her animals now, which may be the most useful thing grief can do.

What’s new since this was written

Good Grief found a durable audience, and in November 2025 it was reissued in paperback, putting Bartels’s “encyclopedia of options” back on shelves for a new wave of readers. If the hardcover slipped past you, the reissue is an easy way to catch up, whether you are grieving a pet now or, as Bartels would gently suggest, simply preparing for a goodbye that hasn’t come yet.

Losing an animal can hit as hard as any loss. If your grief feels like too much to carry alone, that is worth taking seriously, and reaching out to a trusted person or a pet-loss support line can genuinely help.