Why Pet Loss Hurts: Grief, Love, and the Cats We Carry with s.e. smith
credit: Mikaela Oteri
s.e. smith is a Northern California-based journalist, essayist, author, and critic who explores contemporary culture and topics around labor, disability, technology, feminism, death and dying, and animal welfare. smith's cultural criticism and reported features have appeared in publications such as The Washington Post, Time, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The Verge, Esquire, and The Nation, and were recognized with a National Magazine Award in 2020 in Columns and Commentary for the “An Unquiet Mind” column in Catapult Magazine. Their forthcoming book, All My Dead Cats and Other Losses: Practicing Good Grief in a Culture That Fears Mourning (HarperOne, 2026), explores death, dying, and conversations about loss; smith’s work also appears in numerous anthologies, most recently Disability Intimacy (Vintage, 2024). smith is a cofounder and a worker-owner of The Flytrap, a feminist journalism collective.
Grief gets policed in ways we rarely admit, and pet loss is where that policing shows up fast. When someone says “it was just a cat,” they’re not only dismissing your relationship, they’re dodging the reality that love creates responsibility and loss. I’m joined by journalist and author s.e. smith to talk about their upcoming book, All My Dead Cats and Other Losses, and how pet bereavement can open the door to deeper, more honest conversations about mourning in the United States.
We dig into why our culture struggles to validate grief, why people often show up briefly and then disappear, and how capitalism pressures us to return to work and “be normal” before we’ve processed anything. s.e. breaks down the bias in how people respond to dog loss versus cat loss, how pets can represent entire eras of our lives, and what it means to treat grief as a collective project instead of a private burden you’re supposed to handle alone.
We also get practical about end-of-life care: euthanasia guilt, the myth of the peaceful “natural death,” quality-of-life tracking, and the value of planning ahead so you’re not forced into a crisis goodbye. Then we talk rituals that actually help, from memorials and viewings to altars and carrying small mementos, plus how social media can both normalize grief and complicate it with parasocial intensity.
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