Grief Is Healing, Grief Is Love, Grief Is Remembering

When the time with our furry friends unfortunately comes to an end, it’s important to remember that grief is a necessary part of healing. Grief is not just sadness; it is remembrance, love and connection.

While there’s not a right way to grieve, there are methods and activities that support positive healing. Rachel Augusta, medical intuitive and grief specialist, created the Broken Hearted Pawrents Oracle Deck for that purpose.

Augusta started this work after her late cat, Holly, got sick, and the veterinarian did not treat the situation with compassion. Her cat lived years longer than the vet had told her, but the lack of compassion emphasized the way grief for pets is valued less than that of a human. Through her animal medical intuitive work, she has helped many pets and people navigate the healing process, as well as those who have experienced the loss of their furbaby.

“The deck was born out of thousands of conversations,” Augusta says. “It’s everything I needed to hear, it’s everything they’ve needed to hear, and what it does is it creates a bridge to connection.”

There’s a lot of stigma around loss and grief that often encourages people to repress feelings or not hold space for healing. The prompts in this 54-card deck help with processing the loss, remind people to take care of themselves, and help them remember their pet and feel connected to them.

Some prompts are as simple as “drink water” or “take a walk,” while others encourage activities like talking about your experience with a friend or family member, building an altar or planting a tree.

“I have learned that when people grieve deeply, they grieve cleanly, and people are afraid of grief, they’re afraid of losing their animals and oftentimes very afraid of this deck,” Augusta says. “This deck doesn’t make people feel worse. It makes you feel more connected to the animal that you lived with, like it’s a bridge back to them, it’s a bridge to connect to them and it’s a bridge to remember the wonderful things without it making you spin out and crash and burn.”

Helping Others

Most of the time, people don’t know how to talk to someone who is grieving, often fearing that it will make them feel sad, Augusta says. The truth is that people are already sad and thinking about their lost animal, and they want to talk about it.

It’s especially important for parents to help children cope with the loss of a pet and process the grief in a safe space, and the prompts in the deck can also help with reflection and connection for the child. She says some people have told her they never got another pet after losing a pet when they were younger because they didn’t know how to cope with that loss.

“It’s like your first loss, and how your parents support you through that will kind of make or break how you become an adult in the world that knows how to bring love into their life,” Augusta says. “If you can sit with your kid and just have a real conversation about love, that’s a really beautiful way of holding them and loss.”

In addition to the deck, Augusta created an app called EmPAWer that has meditations for grieving a pet and ones specific for kids and teenagers, as well as various other meditations and resources for rescue animals or sick animals.

Normalize Grief

Our furry friends are with us through many life changes, especially as queer people. We emphasize the importance of chosen family, and they are part of our chosen family, too, Augusta says. One of the first steps to normalizing this grief is changing the way we view the relationship.

“When you’re in the queer community, people are gonna dismiss you and your life on a constant basis, and they’re going to dismiss your relationships that you have with other humans. Do not dismiss that relationship as well,” Augusta says. “I think that it is pivotal in this, that they are not just your pet, they’re your life coach. Like that little individual, you might speak a different language, but they’re actually your ride or die, they’re your companion.”

It’s important we acknowledge them as our family and honor them in life and death. Augusta also says we need to talk about this grief and ask for what we need. Have conversations about your grief, put boundaries around what is safe and what isn’t, and these conversations will become more normalized the more we have them.

“If we are unwilling to have conversations about grief, no one is going to know how to support us,” Augusta says. “Setting boundaries around what you need and being able to have these conversations is what’s going to create the ripple, just like in every other movement.”

Grief is a journey that’s different for everyone. There are ups and downs, but it never goes away and we’ll always miss them, Augusta says.

“Someone explained this to me years ago when she lost her daughter, and it’s never left me. She said that grief for her is a hole that sometimes she remembers to walk around and sometimes she still accidentally falls in,” Augusta says. “I just feel like that’s such a great reminder that there’s not a timeline on it.”

Learn more about the Broken Hearted Pawrents Oracle Deck at brokenheartedpawrents.com.