Someone I love lost their girl this weekend.
She was old. She had lived a long, good life, the kind of life a dog builds slowly, city block by city block at first, the busy streets of Brooklyn, the park where she met everyone and loved them all, the particular joy of a dog who believes the whole world is full of friends she simply hasn't greeted yet. And then the move upstate, where something settled in her. The slow mornings. The deep sunrises. The kind of quiet that lets a dog be fully a dog. She was a very happy old girl. She knew every creak in the house. And now she is gone, and the house knows it.
Within hours, the well-meaning chorus began. You know the one. You gave her such a good life. At least she isn't in pain. You can always get another one.
I want to sit with that last sentence for a moment, because it tells us everything about what we have lost, not just the animal, but our literacy for grief itself.
You cannot replace a relationship. You can open your heart to a new one, and that is a beautiful thing, and it will come when it comes. But the dog who knew which side of the bed you slept on, who could read your body language before you could read it yourself, who greeted you with the same wholehearted joy whether you had been gone for ten minutes or ten days? She was not a category. She was a being. She was a bond. She was years of loving you without condition and without language, and she is gone, and that is a real loss, a full loss, a loss that deserves to be named as such.
What Science Has Been Trying to Tell Us
The research community has a term for what happens when a person's grief is not recognized, validated, or supported by the people around them. They call it disenfranchised grief. The word disenfranchise means to be denied a right that others hold. In grief terms, it means: your loss is not considered worthy of the mourning you feel.
Pet loss is one of the most common forms of disenfranchised grief in the modern world. Studies consistently show that the depth of the human-animal bond can rival, and in some cases exceed, the depth of human-to-human attachment. The grief that follows can be as acute as losing a family member. And yet the social scaffolding that holds human loss, the bereavement leave, the casseroles, the cards, the permission to fall apart for a little while, simply does not extend to the loss of an animal in most Western contexts.
So people grieve in private. Or they minimize their own pain because someone told them it was disproportionate. Or they perform recovery faster than they actually feel it, because the world moved on while they were still standing in the kitchen looking at the empty bowl.
This is not how we were meant to grieve. And it is not how much of the world has ever done it.
What the Old Ways Knew
The green witch tradition, rooted in Stregheria and the practical herbalism of Italian folk magic, has never separated the human world from the animal world. The land does not make that distinction. The garden does not. The threshold between life and death opens for all living things equally, and the Strega who stood at that threshold understood this in her body, in the way she understood everything: not from a textbook, but from paying attention.
Animals were not peripheral to ancestral practice. They were woven through it. The dog who lay beneath the deathbed. The cat who sat watch. The familiar who held the space when human words ran out. The relationship between humans and their animals has always been sacred, not sentimental. Sacred. Worthy of tending. Worthy of rite.
And across the world, many traditions have held this without ever losing the thread.
How the World Has Always Known This Loss
Ancient Egypt did not merely keep cats. They revered them as embodiments of Bastet, goddess of home and protection. When a beloved cat died, her people entered a period of formal mourning. They shaved their eyebrows and did not shave them again until they grew back fully: the body made the timeline of grief visible. The cat was mummified with the same care as a human family member and buried with offerings. This was not whimsy. It was theology. It was the understanding that some bonds do not end at death.
In Japan, Buddhist temples have long offered memorial services for animals. The belief that all sentient beings possess Buddha-nature means that every animal is deserving of the same spiritual care extended to humans. Monks chant prayers for the animal's peaceful transition. Some temples are devoted entirely to the memorial of animal companions, where families visit year after year, not to mourn, but to maintain relationship. The bond does not stop at the crossing. It continues in a different form.
In Mexico, the tradition of Día de los Muertos extends, in many families, to the animals they have loved. An ofrenda built for a dog will include her photograph, her favorite toy, a piece of the blanket she slept on. The marigold path laid for a human ancestor is laid for her too. Because she was family. Because she belongs on the altar with everyone else. Because the dead, all of the dead, are welcomed home together.
In Stregheria, the ancestor altar is not curated by species. It holds what and who you have loved. The photographs, the objects, the tokens of relationship. A collar. A tuft of fur pressed between two cards. A small stone from the place she liked to run. The altar says: this relationship is ongoing. The form has changed. The love has not.
The whole world, in its oldest parts, has understood this. We are the ones who forgot.
How to Grieve Green
You do not need ceremony. You do not need a tradition. You need permission, and I am giving it to you now: this grief is real, it is proportionate, and it deserves space.
If you want to do something with your hands, here is what I would offer.
Build a small altar. It does not have to be elaborate or permanent. A photograph. A candle. An object that was hers. A small dish of water, because water holds the in-between. You are not being dramatic. You are creating a container for the relationship to continue in.
Speak her name out loud. In the kitchen. In the car. Wherever it rises. The research on Continuing Bonds Theory, the same framework that has changed how we understand human grief, applies here. Those who maintain active, ongoing relationship with the dead, who speak to them, who keep them alive in the inner world, grieve with more resilience and more meaning. The ancestors called this reverence. Modern psychology calls it a healthy adaptation to loss. I call it love that doesn't know how to stop, and I mean that as the highest possible praise.
Tend something living. Plant an herb. Rosemary, if you can, for remembrance. Its compounds support memory and cognitive clarity. The ancestors who carried rosemary to the graveside were not performing poetry. They were doing herbalism. Let something green grow in her name.
Follow the season. The earth already knows how to grieve. She does it every year. She lets things die, she goes dark, she holds the darkness, and she comes back. You do not have to rush your own season. The green witch does not force the bloom.
Consider green burial. If you still have choices to make, know that they exist. Tree-planting urns that use ashes to nourish a seedling. Natural burial in the earth without a box. The body as a gift back to the land that made it. She came from the earth. She can return to it, and something will grow where she goes.
What I Want to Say to My Friend
You are not too much. You are not dramatic. You are not wrong for grieving her the way you would grieve a person, because you loved her the way you love a person, and she loved you back with everything she had, which was a great deal.
She knew your footstep on the stairs. She knew your mood before you did. She stayed with you through Brooklyn and through the move and through everything in between, through every version of your life, because you were the fixed point in her world, and she was yours. That is not nothing. That is a bond between two beings who chose each other every single day.
Grief is not a measure of something going wrong. It is a measure of how much you loved. It is love with nowhere to go yet, looking for a new form.
Let it find one. Take your time. Say her name.
The ancestors have always known: the form changes. The love does not.
(Animal tax {picture}: this is my girl, doing what she does best. Soaking up every last drop of sun. We should all be so wise.)