On loving something small

On Sunday we lost Frank, our 15-pound Chihuahua rescue. I’ll be honest: I haven’t been able to think about much else this week, so this newsletter is going to reflect that.

He was only six. His death — from an aggressive form of vestibular disease — was sudden.

A little about Frank: he had a specific and longstanding grievance against the neighbor’s husky, was a huge fan of blanket forts, and had genuine enthusiasm for any sidewalk where lizards might be lurking. He was the center of our family in the way that only a small dog can be. My stepdaughter wrote him an annoyingly memorable theme song. My daughter cast him as the villain in her satirical comic book about naughty dogs. We gave him somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand nicknames, and he responded to every single one, if he felt like it.
The cultural story about grief is that it’s a process of letting go. Stages, timelines, the promise of closure, all pointing toward the same destination: a loosening of the bond until the loss becomes something you can manage.

In 1996, Klass, Silverman, and Nickman challenged that model in their book Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. Their argument was that the goal of grief isn’t to sever your connection to who or what you’ve lost. It’s to find a new way to carry it. Subsequent research has described continuing bonds as a regulating and adaptive process, something that moderates grief rather than deepens it.

There’s also a specific term in the bereavement literature for what many pet owners experience: disenfranchised grief, meaning loss that isn’t openly acknowledged or socially supported.
Research finds that grief following a pet’s death can be comparable in intensity to losing a human family member, and yet the cultural permission to grieve a pet fully is still unevenly given.

So: Frank was here, and he mattered, and we are telling his stories. The people and animals we’ve loved are not behind us. They’re still part of how we move through the world.