Understanding grief over loss of any life, including a pet's

When I was perhaps eight or 10 years old, our old family dog -- a Siberian husky named Sitka -- died after a brief illness that I remember as cancer.

What I recall most distinctly was that all six of us -- my three sisters and I plus our parents -- sat around the old kitchen table and cried together. Even my father. It was, to my recollection, the first time I had ever seen him cry. I'm guessing that he cried when his mother, my Grandpa Tammeus, died, also of cancer -- far too young -- a few years before Sitka left us. But I have no memory of him doing so.

This kind of grief over the death of a pet is quite common, but often it's passed over quickly by people who see their friends experiencing it and who tell those friends to get over it. It was, after all, just a dog. Or just a cat.

Barbara Allen, author of Broken Heart, Shared Heart, Healing Heart: Navigating the Loss of Your Pet, wants to tell people who are dismissive of grief over the death of an animal to understand more fully how real and painful such grief can be.

This small book (176 pages) makes that case with lots of stories and advice from a woman who serves as a chaplain at an animal hospital. Do animals need a chaplain? Not so much. The chaplain is there for the owners of the pets, owners who often feel lost and deep in grief.

And if you, like me, had given little thought to the need for such chaplains, we're not alone. The chaplaincy work with which I'm most familiar has to do with providing comfort and guidance for people in various situations unrelated to the loss of pets. I've written about such chaplaincy here and here and here.

Allen makes a persuasive case for taking grief over a pet's death seriously: "We grieve because we love," she writes (more than once).

And in the process, she offers a helpful review (and update) of the work on grief done in the 1970s by researcher Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who became well known for describing, initially, five stages of grief, which later got updated to seven. Many people came to assume that the stages Kübler-Ross described happened sequentially.

But, as Allen writes, "people are not expected to experience all the stages while grieving, or even in a particular order."

Allen's book also tells intriguing stories of pets owned, loved or written about by well-known people such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Billy Graham and others.

In the end, Allen writes to assure people they aren't out of their minds to feel grief over the death of the animals they've loved and cared for. And that the love and care they offered deepened the meaning and richness of their own lives.

I think even my father, at Sitka's death, understood that.

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A TEN COMMANDMENTS CHALLENGE

It should come as no surprise to anyone that some folks have filed a lawsuit against Louisiana’s new law mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools. There's a clear case to be made that the law is an unconstitutional way to allow the government to favor one religion over another. That doesn't mean the Ten Commandments are useless today. Indeed, just imagine what a wonderful and peaceful world we'd live in if every human being kept the rules laid out in the Decalogue. But they are, in the original, rules God gave to the Jewish people. Later, Christianity made them part of its scriptural canon. Public school students of other faith traditions can learn about the Ten Commandments in classes that teach how religion has helped to shape the U.S. and its policies and practices. But putting them on school walls is a way of saying to the students that these rules should hold sway over their lives, which means they are being used to teach a particular type of religion. So let the courts consider all this and, I hope, do the correct and constitutional thing.