I’m super excited to share this paper written by my daughter, Maren McIntosh BA (Hons). She has focused on the important topic of grief when we lose one of our animals – and the role stories can play in this process. Thank you Maren for being willing to share your work with us!

Grief should not be experienced alone. In its broadest sense of narrating experience and emotion, storytelling is one way to overcome the isolation of losing a loved one. What kinds of narratives are available for the loss of animal companions? In normative Western contexts, animals are often framed as less worthy of mourning than humans, yet their lives and deaths have a profound influence on our lives. Graeco-Roman culture recognized the power of human-animal relationships and told stories of their loss. Storytellers today continue this practice across genres. Sue McIntosh, an equine-assisted therapist and my mother, writes children’s stories that uplift human-equine relationships and commemorate the loss of horses. Rich Furman uses poetry to express the sadness ensuing from the death of a family dog. To explore the place of story in processing animal loss, I will first contextualize these three distinct forms of storytelling and then tie each narrative to Judith Butler’s work on grievability. In doing so, I argue that stories help us recognize the importance of mourning our animal companions.

By refusing to see animal lives as deserving of mourning, normative perspectives commit a violence against both animal companions and those who are emotionally implicated in their loss. In “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” Butler identifies that certain lives are seen as “more grievable than others” (19). While Butler addresses human contexts, I contend that animal deaths, too, are wrongly disregarded. Butler reflects that if certain deaths are not considered important enough to warrant pain, “what and where is the loss, and how does mourning take place?” (21). If we identify animal companions’ lives as insignificant, we make their loss invisible. We also deny ourselves the right to mourn them. Breanna Spain argues that “many bereaved pet owners experience disenfranchised grief,” wherein the pet owner’s pain is delegitimized because the value of their animal’s life is disregarded (555). If animal companions are judged as ungrievable, the pain of the bereaved is disenfranchised. By honouring the lives of animal companions, we can recognize their loss and create a safe space for mourners.

Figures in Graeco-Roman culture used narrative and story to mourn animal companions. This historical recognition of storytelling as a legitimate expression of loss suggests that the same approach can help us value and mourn animal companions in the present. Thorsten Fögen writes that in the context of Graeco-Roman antiquity, “humans often had special bonds with dogs and horses” (85). An epitaph from the second century A.D. reads, “behold the tomb of Aeolis, the cheerful little dog, whose loss to fleeting fate pained me beyond measure” (Fögen 87). The emotion in this epitaph suggests that Graeco-Romans valued their relationships with animal companions and were emotionally affected by their losses. Fögen also highlights how in Homer’s The Odyssey, the death of Odysseus’ dog Argus constitutes “a miniature tragedy which appeals to the reader’s emotions” (84). Homer recognizes Argus as a grievable life by depicting Odysseus’ misery over his death. By narrating their mourning, Graeco-Romans legitimized and honoured the loss of their animal companions.

Graeco-Roman culture’s use of storytelling to process animal companions’ death exemplifies Butler’s argument that grievability is affirmed and constituted through narrative. Butler writes that an ungrievable life “does not qualify as a life and is not worth a note” (Butler 23). If a life is worth a note, then, it qualifies as a life and is grievable. To insist that animal companions’ lives are worth mourning, we must make note of them: we must tell their stories. Butler discusses the obituary as a story which recognizes that a life deserves remembrance (23). The epitaphs and Argus’ death narrative constitute story-obituaries which insist on the real and valuable lives of animal companions. If figures from antiquity processed the loss of animal companions through narrative, storytelling can help us honour animal lives and deaths in the present.

Hearing stories that made space for emotional responses to animal death helped me accept and process my own pain for the animals I have lost. As a child in rural Alberta, most of my friends had four legs. My first horse, Cutie, was a tiny black Shetland pony who resembled more dust-bunny than equine. I snuck him table scraps and rode him in a pink tutu, and he politely, but repeatedly, taught me how to fall off. Cutie died when I was ten. It was the first loss that I remember. While others moved on around me, my mother held space for my sadness, and she did so through storytelling. Her three stories of animal death—Holding On, One More Day, and What Would Skye Say?—model and legitimize complex responses to losing animals. These stories affirm the impact of relationships with animal companions and allow space for mourning them.

Each of my mother’s stories take animal companions’ deaths seriously and affirm their grievability through narrative. To Butler’s questions of what “is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade?” (22), her stories answer that animal companions’ lives are real and worthy of remembering. In Holding On, our horses reminisce over their adventures with Cutie and find similarities between him and themselves. Our pony Teddy says, “I remember when the neighbour’s horse got hurt and I thought it was all my fault. Cutie never stopped believing in me” (McIntosh, Holding On 16). Through story, Teddy recognizes the impact Cutie had on his life and mourns him by narrating a memory of him. My mother’s one-step-removed counselling approach means there are no humans in this story, but the narrative nevertheless taught ten-year-old me that my sadness over Cutie’s death was not only normal, but also healthy. A similar process occurs in One More Day, which addresses the loss of another horse, Skye. One pony says to another, “You and Skye are both a part of all these memories” (McIntosh, One More Day 26). They take comfort in being “connected to Skye forever” (29) through the stories they tell. My mother’s work enacts Butler’s call to remake reality, and pushes towards a world which honours bereavement for animal companions.

When used as an avenue of storytelling animal loss, poetry insists that human-animal relationships and losses be taken seriously. Rich Furman explores “the meaning of the loss of a pet through the use of autoethnographic poetry” along with narrative reflections about the death of his dog, Belinda (24). He recognizes the unequal significance granted to human versus animal loss, and uses poetry and narrative to rectify this inequality for himself and Belinda. He recognizes that only he will mourn Belinda as deeply as she deserves, writing in one poem, “many have left / she too will leave / and nobody will care but I” (30). By storytelling his relationship with Belinda, Furman resists the normative forces that render her loss invisible. Poetry as a channel of storytelling puts the loss of animal companions on an equal footing with the loss of human loved ones.

Stories which honour lost animal companions’ lives are unstable and recognize the bereaved’s entanglement with the lost animal. Furman’s work puts into practice Butler’s insistence that in order to recognize the grievability of all lives, we must acknowledge that “[w]e’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something” (13). Furman allows himself to be undone by Belinda’s loss in the poem “Prehumous,” where he writes, “There is more than this. / You cellular thing, / you have invaded all” (30). He acknowledges the porous boundary between himself and his animal companion, along with how they affect one another. Butler writes, “I tell a story about the relations I choose, only to expose, somewhere along the way, the way I am gripped and undone by these very relations. My narrative falters, as it must” (13). Furman’s narrative falters in a way that acknowledges how his life is intertwined with Belinda’s: after her death, he says, “there is nothing left to write now” (33). Despite this void, he continues to tell stories about his dog’s life and loss. He recognizes the wavers and gaps in his narrative, but pushes forward and voices Belinda’s story anyway. In doing so, he insists that she is worthy of note and of grief. Through poems and reflections, Furman invites an undoing of the self which honours the life and death of his animal companion.

Conclusion

By telling stories, we recognize animal lives as worthy of mourning, and insist that our grief be taken seriously. We refuse to be complicit in animal companions’ erasure, and we insist on their worthiness. The emotional reverberations of any death deserve to be made note of. Each loss is accompanied by a myriad of faltering, hesitant, yet persistent stories that emerge through us and our relations with others. These stories both demand and comfort our pain. Through them, we undo one another and remake a reality that insists on the grievable lives of all beings.

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. “Violence, Mourning, Politics.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality, vol. 4 no. 1, 2003, pp. 9-37. doi: 10.1080/15240650409349213.

Fögen, Thorsten. “Death and Emotion: Deceased Dogs in Graeco-Roman Antiquity.” Croatian Journal Of Ethnology and Folklore Research, vol. 60 no. 2, 2023, pp. 81-99.

Furman, Rich. “Autoethnographic Poems and Narrative Reflections: A Qualitative Study on the Death of a Companion Animal.” Journal of Family Social Work, vol. 9 no. 4, 2005, pp. 23-38. doi: 10.1300/J039v09n04_03.

McIntosh, Sue. Holding On. Healing Hooves, 2022.

—. One More Day. Healing Hooves, 2022.

—. What Would Skye Say? Healing Hooves, 2022.

Spain, Breeanna. “Pet Loss: Understanding Disenfranchised Grief, Memorial Use, and Posttraumatic Growth.” Anthrozoös, vol. 32, no. 4, 2019, pp. 555-568. doi: 10.1080/08927936.2019.1621545.