There is a particular kind of silence that follows the loss of a pet. It is not loud or dramatic, not even especially visible to the outside world. It is the absence of small, constant things: the sound of paws on the floor, the shadow that follows you into the kitchen, the expectant nudge at the same time every evening. The quiet companionship that neither asked questions nor needed answers.
Losing a pet you have cared for and loved is hard enough on its own terms. It is personal, contained, and deeply physical. You notice it in routines first: No longer having to let them out first thing, the empty bowl, the lead still hanging by the door. The space on the floor where their bed used to be. Not having to go to the stables… These are not grand gestures of grief., but they are repetitive reminders that something living has gone.
What has now changed is not the grief itself, but the environment it now exists in. Grief used to sit with you, now it follows you. It arrives in your inbox under the subject line of “Have You Run Out of Wolf of the Wilderness”, a polite nudge from a company that has noticed a change in your purchasing habits. It is wrapped in language that is meant to comfort but instead feels procedural. There is a structure to it, a system, a sense that loss has been processed into a category.
Then there are the memories; my phone, which has quietly documented years of my pets, begins to resurface kindly collating moments I didn’t ask to revisit. A photo from three years ago appears without warning, a short video played automatically; this morning a notification telling me it has put together memories “just for me” – I can see a video of Lucy, a horse that had to be euthanised because of someone’s “life choice”.
My phone isn’t doing this deliberately, it doesn’t know I get a lump in my throat each time it does this (at least once daily). There is no malice in it, but the programming of the algorithm has no awareness either. The images appears in perfect clarity; Lucy waiting for me to bring her in. She is alive, moving, kicking the gate, present in a way that no longer exists. For a second, there is a collision between what is on the screen and the reality. Then it resolves in my head, and the absence returns; the old wound is reopened and my eyes tear up. Our technology is efficient, precise and completely indifferent to our grief.
The result is a kind of emotional ambush; constant and unpredictable. I can be in a video call and suddenly there they are again, framed, filtered, preserved. The system calls it a memory, in reality, it is a reminder that the present has changed, and not in a good way…
People might say that having these images is a comfort. That may well be true, time does alter how these moments land. But in the aftermath, there is no distance and the repeated reminders do not allow for healing. There is only a stark contrast : then versus now alive versus gone – and that gap is where the pain sits.
I can turn off notifications when I eventually find out how to do this; I can adjust preferences to try and control what appears and when. Yes I have tried using AI, but it’s giving me instructions based on some version of Google Photos that I can’t find on my phone.
Why should I have to email a company to say stop sending me reminders about buying dog treats because my dog is dead! Even the vet’s main office somewhere sent me a letter in the post saying my pet’s annual vaccine was overdue…
The underlying system remains the same: it is designed to surface, to remind, to bring things back into view and even worse, when it does an update, to forget all your preferences…
Grief, on the other hand, does not follow that pattern. It does not organise itself into highlights. It does not select its moments. It moves unevenly. It lingers in places that do not make sense and disappears when you expect it to stay.
The conflict between those two systems is where much of the strain now sits. I cared for pets and animals that depended on me, built a routine around that responsibility. I’ve done this for over 30 years and it’s became something else entirely; familiar, automatic, embedded. The loss of that is not abstract, it’s specific and lived.
In the end, the emails will stop. quent. But the images still exist, and will, no doubt, carrry on turning up uninvited in the same way. No algorithm has been built to interpret grief, so it will keep replaying cute puppy videos that look like my Lab on social medie, showing me pictures of pet food suppliers when all I want to do is unwind and watch a film and making “galloping memories” from my stored photos…
