E.B. Bartels on her book ‘Good Grief’

Books

“I really hoped that by writing this book people would realize that they weren’t alone in these feelings.”

Since her book “Good Grief” published in August, messages have been pouring in to E.B. Bartels, through her website and on social media, from people wanting to share stories about their pets. 

The outreach confirms what the Massachusetts-based author learned during the course of writing her work of nonfiction — that the death of our pets is a topic we really want to talk about.

Yet usually, we don’t. Even though the death of our animal companions is part of the pet ownership experience. 

“That was what was so baffling to me, looking at the statistics of how many Americans alone have pets — so many people have animals and love animals and share their lives with animals — and we just don’t talk about the really sad, hard parts of having animals in our lives very often,” Bartels told Boston.com recently. “It’s hard and sad to talk about. I can’t tell you how many interviews I did for my book that ended with the interviewee crying, me crying.”

But at the same time, there was comfort in having those conversations, she said.

Below, Bartels, who grew up in Lexington, shares more about why she was drawn to writing about the death of pets, her approach to blending her own experiences with research and reporting, and what she hopes readers will take away from her book. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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Boston.com: The holidays are often a time when grief surfaces as people get together and reflect on losses they’ve had during the year. Is that something you’re thinking about for pet owners, too? What would you say to those who may be grieving their pet companions now?

E.B. Bartels: This time of year always stirs up a lot of feelings. And I really feel strongly after researching and writing this book that grief is grief. I don’t mean to compare anything, like losing your mom is the same as losing your cat. But I think both are losses, and both really hurt. And for some people, you may be closer to your cat than you were to your mom, based on what your relationships are like. 

And yeah, I interviewed several cat owners who said they didn’t anticipate feeling so much grief — like their cat died in the spring or summer — but then putting up a Christmas tree and thinking about their cat always climbing up the tree and hiding in the ornaments. That specific thing was really hard for a couple cat people that I spoke with. …  So my advice for pet owners is just — your grief is legitimate. And to honor that this time of year and give yourself space and time to reflect and feel sad and that’s OK. … This time of year, it’s important to try to make sure you take time to just reflect and rest and cry if you need to because you miss a loved one. Whether that’s a person or a nonhuman. 

It’s clear pets and their deaths have long held an interest for you. But when did the idea for this book come to you? Why did you want to write this book?

I started an MFA program in fall 2012 in creative nonfiction. I went into it with a pretty clear idea of what I thought I wanted my thesis to be about, which was a family memoir about my mom’s side of the family and intergenerational trauma and anxiety. It was heavy material to write, so I found that when I needed a break from writing that stuff and I needed to write something different for class or workshop, I was drawn to writing about my pets. Which is sort of funny because I spent my whole life turning to pets for friendship and comfort, and I was doing that in my writing as well. 

So I started writing these personal essays about pets I’d had, and often they ended with how those animals died. I brought a couple to one of my workshops, and my friends in that workshop loved those stories and immediately wanted to tell me about the rituals they had with their family. … I hadn’t expected that response. And my friend Laura, who has a background as a journalist, said, ‘You know, I think doing some research or reporting could be really interesting to bolster one of these essays, add in some fun facts about how people have mourned pets throughout history or in different cultures.’ And I filed that away, finished my thesis. 

Then when I had moved back up to the Boston area, I was feeling lost after doing my thesis, not sure I wanted to keep working on it to send it out to agents. And I rediscovered the pet material, and I was like, ‘Oh, let me just do a little research and see.’ And I just fell into this black hole where … I was just excited to keep reading about all of these things. Pretty quickly I realized this was way more than an expanded personal essay. I really started to think about, what is the book I wish I had when I was really sad, like when my parents told me we were going to have to euthanize my childhood dog, Gus? What would I have wanted to read? I liked reading these stories about people in ancient Egypt and these indigenous cultures above the Arctic Circle who had sled dogs and all these different people who have loved their pets and have been devastated when they’ve died forever. And I thought [about] putting those together and combining them with my own personal experience to show the reader, I’ve been there, too. 

Did you have a particular reader in mind when you were writing? Were you thinking specifically of a pet owner who might have just lost their companion?

Yeah, I was thinking this could be a book that somebody who just recently lost a pet would want to read. But I also was thinking about it as a book that you could read when your animal is aging and that anticipatory grief that I know a lot of people feel, especially when your animal is really sick and suddenly you’re going to the vet a lot more. … But also, I joke that I’m going to go to dog parks and hand out my book to people with puppies. … When a person dies, there’s such a standardized checklist based on your culture or your religion that’s like, you go to the funeral home, you have a wake, you do all these different things because it helps you have this structure. 

But when pets die, we don’t really have that. We can choose to do what we want or do nothing. And my feeling is that reading a book like this and starting to think about those options long before you’re grieving is actually really helpful.

You balance sharing your own experiences with the interviews you conducted, the trips you made, and the research you conducted. Can you talk about that approach? What was the writing process like for you personally?

My way into the material, like I said, was writing these personal essays about pets I’d had first. And when I was writing those stories I started to think about, what are the things I wish I had known about then? Or even just questions I had. So I started to think about, for example, my tortoise Aristotle, who I had in middle school. He was one of my pets that I don’t actually know if he died or not. I’m guessing that he did because he ran away and never came back, and he was a warm weather species of tortoise living in New England. So I didn’t have high hopes for him in the winter. 

But I was curious — why did that loss feel so weird and hard in a different way than when my dogs died? That was sad, but it felt different. And I used those questions as a jumping off point. … So I really used my personal stories to figure out different aspects that I would be interested in researching. 

And I also then, of course, every time I interviewed somebody, I asked them who they thought I should talk to and that was how I met so many people. … So it was this really beautiful web of people who were all connected through pet loss. 

I knew right away that I wanted to have both the personal and the research in the book. But it was really hard to find the right tone to move back and forth between the two. My first draft, it felt like the sections were much more separate. … Finding a way to move between those things smoothly so it didn’t feel jarring to a reader was something that took a lot of revising and reworking. … I really wanted the book to feel like [if] your pet just died and you can pull up a chair and it’s me and you and we’re sitting at a table talking. 

As you note in your book, there is something so universal about pet ownership and pet loss. Yet, you use the phrase that pet grief is “disenfranchised” grief. Can you talk a little bit about why you think those discussions about these experiences aren’t more out in the open? Do you hope your book will fill a gap or encourage more sharing of these experiences?

Yeah, so I think that people don’t mean to do this, but people are very quick to rank or compare types of loss and grief. And I don’t know if that’s a way to try and make yourself feel better or to help just wrap your head around something that’s very hard. … But I think that people are hesitant to talk about [pet grief] because there is so much messaging where it’s like, ‘Well, it’s just an animal. You should just go get another one.’ And I think especially just because legally even pets are property. I learned this in my research — you can’t leave belongings in your will, for example, to your dog because your dog is technically one of your belongings, too. There are workarounds. People will set up a trust that provides funds to take care of their pets after they die. 

But I think just that fact makes people feel awkward, not sure how to express these feelings even though, again, it’s something that so many people have in common. … So I really hoped that by writing this book people would realize that they weren’t alone in these feelings. A lot of people feel this way and that we really should just talk more openly about these things because we can provide a lot of comfort for each other that I feel like we’re missing out on. 

In your research, was there any one bit of advice or moment that really changed the way you think about your own pet grief personally that you would want to emphasize or want other pet owners to remember? 

There are a couple things. One thing is that I learned a lot about why pet owners should not feel guilty when their pets die. Something that sticks with me a lot is thinking about how animals evolved to hide pain and sickness because in the wild, that would make them prey. So many people I talked to, would beat themselves up and say, ‘Oh, I should have noticed that he wasn’t doing well or I should have realized she was so sick.’ Cats are really, really good at hiding when they are ill. And so often by the time you notice that your animal is sick, it’s fatal, basically, because that’s the only time they’re going to let it get to that point. 

So that was a really comforting thing that several vets brought up to me because I think people want to do everything they can for their animals and they feel really bad if they feel like they missed something. But honestly, if we miss something, in a way, it’s because our pets are doing what they’re supposed to do. 

So that made me feel better. And then also just thinking about grief is grief, and also, grief is all wrapped up in every other loss you’ve felt before in your life. A couple different books by psychologists and psychiatrists that I read pointed out the fact that when you experience a loss or really any trauma, it reminds you of every previous trauma and loss you’ve experienced in your life before. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a pet death or a human’s death, it just triggers all those previous losses. 

So that to me made a lot of sense as well. … In some ways it feels like as you get older, these losses get harder because you’ve experienced so many more of them. I thought when I was younger it would get easier because you get used to it. But maybe you just get more comfortable with having those losses and accepting that they’re part of the really wonderful, joyful part of having a pet.  

What was the hardest thing about writing the book?

The hardest thing about the writing part was actually writing some of my harder pet loss stories. The last chapter that’s about dogs — I put off writing that chapter a very, very long time. I wrote it in the weeks before my first draft of the book was due. Because it was hard and I didn’t want to deal with that. And my first draft, too, my editor told me I needed to dig more deeply into the emotions I felt because I was holding everything at arms-length because it was hard and sad. 

Then also just figuring out what to include and what to cut. I interviewed probably over 150 people for this book, and I wanted to include every single person’s pet loss story who I talked to. And it was just impossible.

What was the most joyful part of writing the book?

Just learning about people’s pets. I loved doing interviews and having people then email me photos, or if I got to do in-person ones, people bringing collars and artifacts that they’ve kept for their pets. I did a few Zoom interviews, and people did little tours showing me their pet shrines. I just really loved hearing those stories. Because when our pets die, they’re not really gone, they live on in our memories. And I loved getting to hear about the funny, weird quirks of what their dogs would or wouldn’t do, or eat or wouldn’t eat. I loved hearing those things. That was the most joyful part. And when I would get sad about the harder parts about the book, I would remember, ‘But this is why we have pets in the first place.’ Because they make us so happy.

Anything else you want to say or want readers to know?

I think the one thing would be that if readers are hesitant to read this book because they think it’s going to be a real bummer, a lot of people have told me they think it’s very funny. I tried to bring humor into the book because to me, owning pets is hilarious and absurd. Like, let me get this creature and totally fall in love with it just to devastate myself. The fact that we do this over and over and over to ourselves is sort of hilarious. And I hope that readers can see the humor and joy along with the grief and loss as well.