Ambiguous Loss + Grieving Someone Still Here
Ambiguous loss is considered a type of loss without closure. It can cause profound grief, ongoing confusion, and emotional distress. I am in this space right now with my dog, Piper, and it is unfamiliar territory for me - though it shouldn’t be.
If I am really being honest, I navigated this season and used the term estrangement to make sense of it. Ambiguous loss touches on concepts related to estrangement quite closely. It feels especially appropriate given the season we are all in - that tender, complicated stretch between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, which is emotionally already layered for me - and now the chapter I entered just under a month ago, after learning that Piper has the beginning stages of degenerative heart disease.
It’s funny because before I learned this update, I had just written about my unhealthy attachment to Piper. So quickly thereafter, I find myself in a new season of understanding how much she has mirrored my own healing journey these seven years since I first fostered her. As I return to a more balanced existence, her health and aging are illuminating areas where I still carry wounding around attachment and abandonment.
It feels, in some strange way, like she knows she has gotten me to where I needed to go. That is not to say she doesn’t have 6 more years in her, or maybe only one. That ambiguity is part of the point. How do you grieve the loss of a personality and identity that hasn’t disappeared yet, but is slowly shifting? The version of Piper I brought home 7 years ago has been gently fading into someone new. I keep trying to honor whoever she is at every stage. Candidly, this past month is testing me in ways that I am not entirely proud of.
I can feel myself cycling through anticipatory grief. During the echocardiogram and my first meeting with P’s cardiologist, I felt immediately at ease. When she walked in with the results, though I don’t remember the exact words of her first sentence, they were so emotionally appropriate that I told her that before she even broke the news. My vet is the best I’ve ever had for Piper, and called me the day after the cardiologist just to check in. I am deeply grateful to have these two women alongside me as I navigate this next season. It doesn’t hurt that they both have pets named Piper which somehow exponentially increases my respect for them. In the week after her diagnosis was confirmed - Stage B1 of mitral valve disease, I was in denial. I just didn’t recognize it yet.
The few people I shared the news with heard me say, it’s the best possible outcome of bad news. This is true. What is also true is that Piper has always been deeply affected by sun and heat, even as a puppy. The summer of 2024, when we lived in Chicago, I bought a dog razor and shaved her coats down to give her relief. I had been doing that to my own hair for 4 years at that point, why couldn’t I offer her the same? I definitely should have learned more about double-coated dogs and the protective role that fur plays. I know that now.
Here in Colorado, the days are already in the eighties and the sun is strong. She is slowing down. Now that I know that she also has a heart condition, I am trying to learn how to be the one to set the limits. To set clear boundaries. To honor her pace - a pace so slow it is causing asymmetry in my gait. That, coupled with stress, is causing my chronic pain to flare.
As denial slowly faded, I found myself entering the second stage of grief: anger. I want to name that the stages of grief are not linear; you can cycle in, out, and through various stages at whatever pace your body requires. But anger is where I am right now. Anger at myself. Anger at her. Anger at others.
I was coached last week on ambiguous loss, and somehow that session took me to a place of imagining Piper dying that day and envisioning myself two years post-loss. Not helpful. A friend, when I told her, casually told me not to worry and mentioned that her dog - who has since passed - also had heart disease, but that it wasn’t what killed him. Also not helpful. Someone else offered that heart disease took their last pup. I genuinely cannot understand why people feel I need to hear about what happened to their dogs, or why I should imagine mine dying today when her heart hasn’t enlarged at all at this stage of the disease.
The moments of anger at her are where I am struggling the most. The guilt of that hurts my own heart. I know this is all new and trust that I will move toward acceptance, but in this moment, I am facing the hard reality of how she is activating old wounds of abandonment. The awareness that my needs have taken a backseat to hers for seven years. That her priorities have consistently outranked mine. Somehow it is still Piper, in her aging, who is teaching me how to prioritize myself. I am angry that I poured seven years into her and have no idea who I am without her. Angry that I have to navigate this season seemingly alone.
Piper is the first dog I’ve had into older age. I had a dog Sandy as a kid for 5 days - she taught me how to sleep in the dark. I had a dog I named Bella, after the daughter I always imagined having. But during the early days with Piper and my IVF journey, it became clear that motherhood wasn’t in my cards. I gave Bella to my ex during the breakup. After a couple years of volunteering at shelters and then fostering, Piper came into my life exactly when I needed her to.
I feel like I owe her everything and like I am failing her when I do even the smallest of things for myself. I have poured all of my love, warmth, nurturance, and tenderness into her. As she slows down, she is showing me I have to find another outlet for all of that. I am in a season with her where I am learning, for the first time, to make my own needs a priority while not letting her feel abandoned in any way. We are so bonded after seven tumultuous years of just the two of us.
So here I am in my own next season of healing. Trying to find my identity while she is still beside me. Trying to leave her for longer and more frequently without the crushing guilt that I am abandoning her. Planning trips I have genuinely missed taking and trusting that she understands I need to find joy for myself, too. It is a hard season to be in. I don’t know how long we’ll be here, or how it will unfold.
What I know is that there are tears on my face as I write this. And that the tears have been coming quite a bit this past week. Anticipatory grief, and the ambiguous loss of a living creature I accidentally called human to a friend last week; because Piper is, in every way that matters, the only being who has been alongside me for seven years of tumult. Who has seen every version of me and accepted all of it, without judgment.
The truth is, right now, I don’t know who I am without Piper. And she is tenderly pushing me to start finding that out while her presence is very much still beside me.
