Grieving the Loss of a Pet – Understanding the Stages of Grief

When someone loses a beloved pet, the emotional toll can be staggering. While grief is a deeply personal experience, it often follows certain emotional patterns that help us understand what’s happening inside us. Most people have heard of the five stages of grief denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

First introduced by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. While they were originally used to describe the grief of people facing terminal illness, they’ve since been applied to a broader range of loss including pet loss. But here’s the thing: these stages don’t always show up in order. They’re not boxes to check off. They’re emotional waves that come and go, sometimes overlapping, sometimes repeating. And in the case of pet loss, they can show up in surprising ways.

Take Denial, for instance. For a grieving pet owner, denial doesn’t always look like pretending the pet didn’t die. More often, it’s subtle emotional numbness, an inability to fully accept that their daily companion is truly gone.

Some clients might keep hearing their pet’s paws on the floor or instinctively reach for the leash at walk time. These are not signs of being “in denial” in a dramatic sense. They’re part of how the brain copes with loss, it protects us from the full weight of grief, at least for a while. Then comes Anger, which can be complicated. It might be directed at themselves: “I should’ve noticed the symptoms sooner.” Or at the vet team: “Why didn’t that treatment work?” Or even at the world in general at the unfairness of it all. As professionals, it’s not our job to fix that anger, but to recognize it for what it is: pain that’s trying to find a voice. Bargaining often shows up as a mental loop of “what ifs.” What if they’d gotten a second opinion? What if they hadn’t gone on that trip? It’s a way of trying to rewrite the ending, to find a version of the story where the outcome is different.

Depression is perhaps the most expected stage of grief, but it doesn’t always look like lying in bed crying. It might be a quiet withdrawal. A sense of meaninglessness. An inability to enjoy things that once brought joy. For pet owners who spent every morning feeding their cat or every evening walking their dog, life without that routine can feel disorienting and hollow.

And eventually, there’s Acceptance. Not in the sense of being “okay” with the loss, but more in the sense of learning to live with it. Acceptance is the moment someone can say, “I miss them every day… and I’m still standing.” It’s not about moving on it’s about moving forward, carrying the love without being weighed down by the pain. As a veterinary clinic or pet crematorium, understanding these stages doesn’t mean you have to diagnose grief. But it does mean that you can create a space that recognizes grief in all its forms. You can validate it. You can let clients know their emotions are normal. And that makes all the difference.