Dear Marty ~ How Long Should You Wait to Replace A Pet Who Has Died?
Q & A by Bereavement Counselor Marty Tousley

Question: We have purchased one of your online courses and are looking forward to starting it. One question... how long should you wait to replace your pet? My daughter recently lost Jasmine (her 13 year companion Siamese cat). It has been three weeks and she says she would like to start looking for a new pet (she had to put Jasmine down). What do you think?

Answer: I'm so sorry to learn of your daughter's loss of her beloved Siamese cat Jasmine, who was her loyal companion for so many years, and I can only imagine how empty your daughter's home and heart must feel without that cherished little one beside her. You don't say how old your daughter is, so I'm not sure whether she is a teen or an adult, but I want to commend you for caring enough to learn as much as you can about how best to handle this difficult time in your daughter's life. As parents we all want to protect our children from pain, but death is a normal part of living! Death comes to every living thing, and it is part of the normal cycle of life. We do our children no favors when we don't teach them how to deal with loss. How the loss of a cherished pet is managed - how children's feelings and questions are handled and what they observe in the actions of adults around them - can prepare them to face and deal effectively with life's many losses and disappointments in the future. In that sense, the death of a pet becomes for parents a valuable opportunity to teach their children some of life's most important lessons.

You've asked my thoughts about your daughter wanting to begin looking for a new pet so soon after losing Jasmine. Of course you know your daughter better than I do, so you are in a much better position to judge her readiness to reinvest feelings of attachment in another pet. Keep in mind that grief is not a pathological condition; rather it is a normal response to the loss of someone we love. How your daughter reacts to the loss of her cat depends on how attached she was to Jasmine, on her relationship with her, and on the role this little one played in her life. It's only natural that, when we lose that which we love the most, we feel the overwhelming pain of loss. No matter who or what we love, the greater the love, the worse the pain feels when we lose the object of our love.

It's also important to consider whether your daughter and the rest of your family have taken the time needed to grieve the loss of this cat. Grief takes an enormous amount of energy, and you may not have a lot of emotional energy left over right now to place onto another kitty. For most of us, the fear is not so much that we will become very attached to another pet. Rather our fear is that we will have to go through all this pain again when we love and lose another pet at some future point. I can tell you that the one sure way to avoid repeating the pain you're feeling now is to decide never to love like that again. Yet you know (in your head, if not your heart) that whenever we take a companion animal into our lives, sooner or later we are going to lose that animal, simply because their life span is so much shorter than our own. We like to think our animals will be with us forever, but deep down we know that cannot be. This reality is very hard for us to accept when we are confronted with the death of our cherished animals; far better that we acknowledge that harsh reality when we opt to bring an animal into our lives in the first place.

What often stands in the way of our loving another pet is our sense of loyalty to the one who died. We confuse loving our other animals with "replacing" the one we've lost, and you may think no one could replace your daughter's precious Jasmine. It feels like an act of disloyalty, a violation of her cat's memory, an intrusion. After all, no other cat could be like the one she lost. No other cat will have her unique qualities, nor should you expect it to. Instead of viewing your daughter's next pet as a "replacement", try to think of him or her as making a new friend, one that you all will learn about and come to love over time. Think about what your daughter's cat wanted from life, and what she would want for you and your daughter now.

One of the most endearing things about our animals is that they just want us to be happy. If death takes them away from us, once we've expressed and worked through our sorrow over losing them, wouldn't they want us to be happy once again, and to open our hearts to other animals in need of all our love? Some folks are so full of love that they can always find another chamber in their hearts to accommodate another precious animal. Others could never do that - and still others discover that it's not so much that they go looking for another animal, but another animal just seems to find them. There is no right or wrong answer here, and so I suggest that you let your daughter's heart - and your own hearts - be your guide.

I hope this information is helpful to you, my friend. In the meantime, please know that I am thinking of you and your daughter, and holding you in my heart.

Wishing you peace and healing,
Marty Tousley, Bereavement Counselor

Marty Tousley is the creator and instructor of these Self-Healing Expressions courses. Click these links to learn more about Marty and her grief-healing courses.
A Different Grief: Coping with Pet Loss
A Different Grief: Helping You and Your Children with Pet Loss
The First Year of Grief: Help for the Journey


Copyright © 2005 Marty Tousley. All rights reserved. If you are interested in publishing this article, please email .