Peace of Mind for Pet Parents Episode 029: Beyond Grief: Celebrating Life Through Pet Obituaries and Stories

Episode Transcript: 

Karen Wylie: Hello and welcome to Peace of Mind for Pet Parents. I'm Karen here, as always, with my wonderful friend Gail. If you've joined us before, you know our conversations are all about helping you find comfort and clarity as you care for your aging and ill pets. This month is especially meaningful because September is National Pet Memorial Month.

It's a time to pause and remember all of our companions who are no longer physically with us but remain on our hearts always. At BrightHaven, we're going to honor this in a very special way. We're going to hold our first Rose Ceremony. It's a gathering where pet parents like you can gather and share stories, light candles, and celebrate the lives of their pets together with us.

And that led us to today's conversation thinking about how do we put our love for our pets into words? How do we write or even speak, share a story or a tribute, maybe even a full obituary for a pet who has passed on? Sometimes it can feel daunting no matter what way we're considering to memorialize a pet through words. And so we're hoping that this conversation today will make it a little less daunting.

Gail, let me start with you because one of the things that I was thinking about as we were preparing for this podcast is how many amazing tributes to pets who have passed on, you have written, that are on the BrightHaven website?

Gail Pope: Just a few hundred.

Karen Wylie: That's the thing. You have found a way to step into this process many different times, and so how would you suggest people get started? Because our words that we write about our pets matter certainly to us and then to others who read what we've written or hear us speak.

Gail Pope: Well, gosh, I don't know where to begin to answer that question to help other people. Let me begin by how I got started because that's interesting. If I look back to… I think it was when the sanctuary first moved to Santa Rosa and maybe it was the early years of Constant Contact. We had our mailing list and email was back and forth a lot more at that point than it ever had been before.

So that must have been around 2006 onwards. So what I was doing, because we had volunteers, we had people who would sign up for our little mailing list that came for seminars and things like that. So it became a habit that, I think I started doing it weekly. When we had a new cat arrive or a new dog or a new horse or whatever, I would just write a little overview of their story and send it out.

Then gradually, there were a lot of stories, so that turned into just sending an odd email, into once a month writing a newsletter, and then I would feature photos and a little history of that animal. Then if there was somebody who'd had a big surgery or something like that, it would be another part of the newsletter.

So I was really starting to get used to sharing information. So as the newsletter grew, then the next step was “somebody died this month”. So I would include a little photo because a lot of people had come to the sanctuary and they would know the animal. So I would just write a little overview, like probably just one little paragraph that we were sad to say "Farewell" and maybe just one little thing that sprang to mind.

I think we did that for quite some years. Until it all got so overwhelming that I think I started sliding backwards. But I think what happened then, was that I started realizing that the little notes that I was writing about the animal that had died, had grown a little bit. They'd become a little bit more of the story of their life merging into their illness and how their ending came about.

That's when I started actually writing obituaries. Yes, I remember now when I started actually writing them after the death. I would go back to my newsletter to see what I'd written about their life first thing. So I would have a story already written and I would refresh my memory with that, and then probably become overwhelmed because it's, "Oh my gosh, Yes, I'd forgotten all about that, but now I'm remembering the recent past."

So it all needs to be pieced together and so I think that's probably what I would do. I would take the story, my current memories, and I would just maybe even do bullet points on a piece of paper because there was a lot of information and I probably wouldn't have wanted to include it all.

So it's morphed into a different process for me now but I'm pretty sure that's how it began— as taking so much information, taking it from here, there and everywhere, looking at photos that we might have saved and then trying to, if you like, write an essay about them. 

But I think as I started doing that, it became important to me and I think it does to everyone— to not only tell their story but create an image in how I told who that animal was, their personality. I remember talking about, I can't remember who it is at this precise moment, that we could always imagine him with his elbow on the bar in a pub, drinking a pint of beer and wearing shabby overalls.

I would try to create a “word version” of the personality and that would make me smile. That made it a lot easier and I found I was enjoying the memories of them. So that's really how it all began. Then it gradually morphed and changed to how I go about doing them as of now which is different.

Karen Wylie: So it sounds like it's evolved over a period of 15 years or so?

Gail Pope: At least, yes.

Karen Wylie: I had so many different thoughts as you were describing your process because as you were saying, you had Constant Contact— a subscriber list. So I was hearing so many different parts of what you were saying that I wanted to pick up on because over the last 15 years, as you were saying you started developing an email subscriber list and so it was a way for you to stay in touch with people who had visited the sanctuary in person. Then you had a web presence and so for those who couldn't be there in person, your stories became a way to connect with them, telling them about each pet, and allowing them to have an emotional connection to what you were doing.

That's very much I think true for all of us with our pets is that, if I think back to 20 years ago, I didn't feel a need to write that much about my pets as they would pass. I did belong to a couple groups that focused on the breed of cat that I worked with. So if I had something relevant to say about something I learned about the health or an illness where I'd lost a particular pet, I would then submit to those groups but basically my grief was still a very private thing.

And yet if we think about our lives now, we have so many people that we may only meet with online who are part of our day to day. Where in our hometown, where we live, that there's going to be times we need to communicate about what's happened to a beloved pet because of how it's affecting us.

So I guess that was the first thing I was thinking of. Then how you would get started in terms of assembling the pieces that were relevant to you in terms of the photographs, finding the stories that you might have used earlier to introduce when an animal joined the sanctuary and then as you were mentioning about bullet points— just not trying to pressure yourself with getting started and jumping in and having multiple paragraphs right away, you were assembling the pieces to help get your thoughts together.

I think that's a gentle way for any of us to begin because it can be really hard to get started on a topic when you're looking at a blank piece of paper or an empty Google Doc screen on your computer. So I think the way you started is very helpful for anyone who feels intimidated by writing about their pets. What do you think is the simplest first step they could take?

Gail Pope: I do mine very differently to how I just described how they began. The final part of the process is probably the same but gosh, how to explain. I think it comes down to the fact, gosh, that animals taught me over a very long time to grieve with them before they died. So there's always a sadness, the remnants of grief, but it's not quite the same. It's a sadness, a sorrow. My Purrci died two weeks ago. I still carry this in my heart and I dissolve into tears time and again but it's not really grief.

It's my sadness because I grieved with him before he left. But what happens for me now, I'm hesitant because I'm trying to put the pieces together myself. After someone's died, I don't think about writing an obituary that doesn't come into my mind. Sometimes in an email or a family or a friend will say, "Are you writing Purrci's obituary?"

And it may remind me, "Oh my God, what am I going to say?"

So various thoughts might may come across but they don't generally end up on paper. The main thing would be, "Oh my goodness. How on earth, I have no idea what I'm going to write. There's just so much I wouldn't know where to begin."

So I guess that sows the seed but I don't do anything about it. Then I think talking again with friends and family, funny instances come up and you laugh a little bit about this that it hurts the heartbeat. It makes you laugh as you remember. But what happens to me, and it's happened too often for me to actually ignore it and it can be anywhere from a week to two or three weeks.

Sometimes maybe more like one to two weeks after the death, I will be in the shower and boom! it's a flow of words. Oh my God and I'm out of the shower with a towel wrapped around me, grabbing a pen and jotting notes because it's suddenly I've been reading what I've written in my mind before.

Karen Wylie: You've been given something.

Gail Pope: Yes. It's so strange but it is so powerful. Then with that as a foundation on paper, I find other little pieces will add to it and trigger in my mind after that I'll maybe add or, "Oh, I should add the story of the beginning a little more there, things will crop up."

But the main part of it which is very often personality based and silly things that might have happened. They become like the meat in the center and then I add the other little pieces around.

In the early days I wrote stories to share with other people and I enjoyed doing them very much so. Now, it's still for other people to read but there's a different kind of enjoyment. They're longer now, they're more personal now perhaps and I write them with love and laughter and happiness rather than sorrow and misery.

So I think one of the things I would imagine it would be very difficult to write an obituary when you are still really struggling with grief. Because it would not allow the funny, quirky things that may have been in the personality. You'd probably be holding those down a little bit rather than taking the joy of the life that you shared.

But we're all different and some obituaries are very factual and they are very reading between the lines. They're very well written but you can sense and feel the emotion. We all write differently. We all have different ways of explaining or expressing ourselves, don't we?

Karen Wylie: We do. I'd have to agree with you that taking the time you need after you lose a pet and not pressuring yourselves to write anything down or do anything in particular is important, because as you're saying, we're all different. When we do lose a pet, we tend to focus on the end.

We've talked about that in some of our other podcast episodes. It's natural that we have invested so much energy caring for them at the end of life and not getting to keep them as long as we wanted. That it's easy to focus on the disappointment, the sadness, and the true grief that comes when they physically leave us.

And so time may very much be needed but it's as you were saying, as you're describing what you do, you know. What is a memory that makes you smile when you think about your pet?

Gail Pope: Yes. That's what brings the happiness, the happy part back and you can put it onto paper. You can have this visual of them playing that silly game or something. Actually, you find that the writing is buoying you up and it's making you laugh.

Karen Wylie: Yes, yes. Because that's when you can really convey who your pet was, what their personality was and all silly things they did. All the silly things you did to make them happy.

Gail Pope: Generally, yes.

Karen Wylie: Anything they want, anything they need. Many of our pets change our lives in some particular way where we adapt. They all tend to change us in some way but maybe each pet in a different way. So that's always something to begin capturing too because in the end there's also lessons that they taught us and that can be another thread to grab onto— to begin thinking about the memories you want to treasure and perhaps share with other people.

I certainly have found for myself, and again this is always so different for everyone, but when I think of obituaries, I think of the ones in the local newspaper for things that are so factual. When somebody was born, when they died, all their relatives, what they died of. It's a lot better now when more people are more comfortable writing about their loved ones who died.

Gail Pope: Yes.

Karen Wylie: There's obituaries now that we'll read that do reflect very much the personality of the person who died. But I still think, when I think of obituaries, I think of it as more factual. Whenever I write about my pets, it is always about the stories. It's always about the fun things and the amazing things. So when you think about across all the various stories and in memoriam tributes that you've written over the years, is there an example of something you tried to include all the time?

Gail Pope: Yes, probably not in the very early days. But I'm sure a lot of people will know that BrightHaven follows a three day process to honor the animal, the being after the death.

So I take photos of that event and I usually include those in an obituary because I want to mention things as part of this little ceremony, if you like. I use a Buddhist prayer shawl or they maybe have a favorite toy or 10 toys or things that were theirs or things that reminded me particularly of something they'd done.

All sorts of different things. Teddy bears from the past we had when one animal died long, long time ago, one of our volunteers brought me a unicorn, a little toy. Beautiful fluffy toy unicorn, a white one with a beautiful sil. Oh, and I still use it now. Every single animal that dies has the unicorn with them and various other mementos. They're family.

They're part of everyone who dies. They have these special tributes plus things that were important to them. Their toys, teddies, friends, whatever. And so yes, I always include a little note about how we celebrated their life for a few days and a photograph of that celebration.

Karen Wylie: That's really wonderful. I've always enjoyed seeing those photos because they were always so different, and yet I'd recognize several anchor pieces that were always the same. It was what was always important and then what was uniquely important to that pet and the memories you would have about that pet.

So for you then, in some of the writing you've been doing, you include the rituals, the three-day honoring ritual, the photograph and information there. That's certainly what other people can also think about sharing, is whatever rituals they have at their pet's end of life.

So let's now take a look a little bit more at the emotional side of writing these kind of tributes because just as you've been describing, they were very personal and unique for each pet as you were writing them.

Gail Pope: Yes.

Karen Wylie: It's not just about the words that we're putting on the page, it's also about what's happening in our hearts as we're remembering these various things that we might want to include. I guess this brings me back to what I started to say about the obituaries in the paper that are so fact-based because that isn't where I go when I think about writing about my pets. It's all about the relationship I had with them.

Now, I still might reflect back on how they came into my life and the fun things and the silly things and the lessons, and there's so many different ways for each of us to capture what was most meaningful to us. But I think a lot of it is the relationship that we had that was so unique with that particular pet.

Sometimes trying to put that into words can help you laugh, can help you start laughing, brings up tears as you were saying. It's going to do both but both are healing and that's where I think writing can be very healing. 

Some people journal and do keep daily journals, and maybe that's something to also keep in mind as a possibility that you're writing about your pet but it doesn't have to be for public consumption. It can just be what's important to you and that can be very healing. That way you don't have to worry about how it's going to sound to anybody else, or making sure that you share it with someone who thinks the same way about pets that you do, where they're the center of your lives instead of what can happen when some people hear that you've lost a pet. It's like they let you have a day and after that it's like, "Hey, come on. It was just a cat. It was just a dog."

And for all of us it's, "No, it wasn't just anything. It was everything."

So emotionally, I think writing can help us process how we feel. And of course the immediacy of losing a pet, we may be feeling numb because we're feeling so much. It can be hard to reach in there and find anything to begin writing about. But writing a tribute to your pet can help you process grief.

I wanted to know, Gail, if there were sometimes depending on the timing because you talked about not always rushing into the writing for each pet. Have you found that writing can help you process grief? That you feel that is left over and continuing on after your pet physically leaves, even though you have been grieving with your pet along the way?

Gail Pope: Yes, I think so. For sure it has to. I think, as you say, my grief has dissipated a lot and become sadness. Sadness is still a part of grief anyway. But I think for me, what really helps is as I'm writing an obituary, I'm more focused on the happy memories, the silly memories, the things that stand out as "What am I going to most remember about this being?"

He made me laugh. He made me cry. He bit me. Whatever. All the funny little or difficult or angry things that come up, they come bubbling up. Which ones am I going to actually want to remember in the future? Which ones would I like to tell a friend or a relative, "Oh, you do remember when he did so and so and he jumped into grandpa's lap?"

Something silly and the quirky little things, those are the things that I particularly want to capture. Because if I pick up an obituary that I wrote 10 years ago, I learn so much. I remember all the animals but in recent months, people have mentioned a particular cat or a dog and I thought, " Oh wow. I remember." "Oh, I wonder."

I don't necessarily remember a whole lot. I remember who they were, how they made me feel. Do I remember what was medically wrong with them or how they died? Do I remember where we lived? So I sometimes go back and take a look and oh my goodness, I love reading them because they bring life back to that being for me. It's absolutely beautiful because I've tended to forget an awful lot.

You just remember the snapshot with so many animals. I guess most people don't, they do remember the whole lot. But when you've had a several hundred, it's difficult to remember everything. So going back to read these is so precious for me now, which is why I think what I'm saying is underscoring the things that he or she did - with or without you -  that made you laugh or made you cry but made an impact. Those are the things that you want to remember.

Karen Wylie: What you're describing of what you remember about each of them is who they are, who they were and still are to you and the relationship you had. Those are the most salient things about them and not how they died.

Gail Pope: And that brings me back to, of course, the umbrella over it again is when you're thinking about how to pull this together, that poem that I'm always talking about "A Reason, A Season, A Lifetime", sometimes when you start to look at the spiritual component of your journey together that will lead you into other things you want to write about.

If they come to you for a particular reason, for a shorter part of your life while you were dealing with an illness or something, and they were there for you on your bed the whole time, looking at a reason, a season, or were they with you for the whole of their lives?

Oh my goodness. Now you've got an awful lot more to sift through but I honestly believe that each animal has come to me for one, two, or three of those things.

Karen Wylie: I think this is a perfect transition to asking you if you would be willing to share a short excerpt of one of the tributes that you've written for one of your pets.

Gail Pope: Yes, absolutely. Which one of the several hundred million? I think, actually, you know what?

Karen Wylie: I think, of course, I'm most attached to the one you've been working on most recently.

Gail Pope: Absolutely.

Karen Wylie: What about Mr. Purrci?

Gail Pope: I've just brought it up. I have the word document that I had been working on. So I actually wrote this one for my beloved Purrci. Actually, this is a painting so that everybody can know. This is a painting of Purrci. This sits on my desk every day.

So this is the beginning of Purrci's obituary and it's actually much longer than most that I've written because there was so much to say. But I'm more than happy to read the beginning because to me the beginning was very much a part of the reason, a season, a lifetime, because he came to us in one of those situations.

The 13th of July, 2023 was a BrightHaven Red Letter Day. It was the day that our dog, Ziggy, who was an Italian greyhound, invited Purrci which everybody thinks of P-E-R-C-Y, but he was P-U-R-R-C-I or however you want to do the S-E-E or the C-I but it was all about the PURR. I didn't name him. He had, he brought it to me.

Our adored golden retriever Rosie, who was brought into the family originally by Ziggy too, had recently transitioned after her beautiful hospice journey. Equally adored Italian Greyhound Ziggy was approaching his own end of life and we were visiting our vet hospital that lives up to its name of Wise and Wonderful.

At the same time, Richard, my beloved husband of 60 years was also just weeks away from his own journey beyond this world. I like to believe that Mother Nature stepped in that day at the vet's office as a rather beautiful but strange looking orange and white cat with his tail stuck up in the air, went man to man with Ziggy, licking each other's faces gently and lovingly.

I was then informed that the cat named Purrci had lived at the clinic for around 12 to 13 years after a nasty car accident had rendered him badly injured and homeless. I was also told that now in his golden years, Purrci remained unadoptable because his bladder and bowels did not function properly and needed to be manually expressed every day.

Plus, he had nerve damage and neurological issues. I had dealt with these same issues many times while caring for animals at BrightHaven. So then I go on to tell the story of Purrci at BrightHaven but I had to write that piece at the beginning because he came to me for a particular reason. Nobody in the last, what, 12 or so years, no one had been able to adopt him because they couldn't care for his medical issues.

Ziggy had already chosen Rosie and brought her in and so now he was holding the torch and passing it to Purrci. The day I brought Purrci home, I was like, "Oh, no. I really didn't, this isn't what I had planned."

And Ziggy's like, "I got him. He's mine."

And Ziggy died a few weeks later. He'd passed the baton and he left. 

So some of the stories that we need to write do encompass more to the beginning and perhaps more at the ending, and some don't. Some travel through with a particular journey to spend with you and so it's whatever feels the right thing to write down. It's not important because it's about what you want to treasure.

I think for me, I do a little more because I was so ingrained in sharing everything with the people that were part of BrightHaven by visiting or by online experiencing. So I just felt like I needed to give them more and open the story right up, especially when I saw deeper meanings. Because we all love to know about the spooky little things, the coincidences, and strange things because they touch our hearts and they give more meaning, don't they?

Karen Wylie: They certainly do. Certainly gave a lot of meaning to Mr. Purrci's entrance into your life. And now that he's physically gone it's still very important to think about how he came into your life ushered in by Ziggy.

Gail Pope: By Ziggy, yes.

Karen Wylie: I think that sharing how a pet comes into your life or any aspect of your pet's life with you and sharing that can be very healing just to share it with people. That's actually why we are reviving, reinventing the BrightHaven Rose Ceremony starting this coming Sunday, which is the second Sunday of every month. This particular one is September 14th, this coming Sunday.

You may start writing to help yourself heal but as you write down your memories of really special times and fun times, I think it's hard to not begin feeling grateful for what they brought into your life. As you just keep thinking about each of the situations that you want to remember and share. Of course in the end we run out of time with them and we don't get as much time as we want with any of them. But if we can begin to look at the parts of their lives with us that made us smile, then we can start to feel that gratitude again.

We would like to invite you to join us on the second Sunday of each month for the BrightHaven Rose Ceremony,

which is going to be a memorial or a celebration of life is our approach to it. Those who attend will have an opportunity to have a couple minutes to share about their pet and tell us a story or you can also write it out and it'll be provided in a Keepsake PDF— especially if you write long like I do, I know.

I knew you were going to come get me at that. But if you are someone who tends to write long, you'll have a place for that too in the keepsake PDF. The most important thing though, I think, is to realize it's not about being a polished writer. It's about the love that you shared with your pet and honoring the relationship that you had. We'd love to hear about that and love to have you with us. So Gail, I'm going to give you the opportunity for last words.

Gail Pope: Gosh. I don't know the word gratitude stuck with me from what you were saying before, talking about the rose ceremony, that we are just going to be starting. I think that really is a foundation for writing our obituaries, for our memories. It really is gratitude to the animals who have come into our lives, crossed our paths because they've all come to teach us something.

They're so wise and wonderful, aren't they?

Karen Wylie: Yes, they are.

Gail Pope: They really are.

Karen Wylie: It's all love. We're fortunate to have them in our lives for however long they're with us.

Gail Pope: Yes.

Karen Wylie: They make a world of difference for each of us. So with that, we will close this episode of Peace of Mind for Pet Parents and hope that you will be able to join us this Sunday or any second Sunday of the month for our celebrations of life and our Rose Ceremony for pets that have passed on.

We hope that you will be with us next week for our next conversation about our wonderful pets. Thank you for being with us. Bye-bye.

Gail Pope: Thanks. Bye-bye.