Why Pet Loss Can Sometimes Be The Hardest Loss To Bear

TRIGGER WARNING: A head’s up we discuss an incident of abuse in this episode.

OPENING: Some people define their life by the places they’ve lived or the people they’ve met. For Annette McGivney it’s been the dogs she’s owned. From a young age Annette has relied on the comfort of dogs. 

ANNETTE: Since childhood, I have been drawn to dogs and my older sister had a cat Tabby and, um, I didn't have anything against Tabby. Tabby was great. But I just loved dogs and it's just an innate affection that I have always had for dogs. 

When she was a kid the family moved from the big city of Houston, Texas to the pine trees and swamps of Conroe, in rural east Texas. Their neighbors had just taken in a stray, a black and white lab mix they called Lucky. Annette bonded with him right away so the neighbors agreed to let her adopt him as her own.

Her mom who was a hypochondriac said she was allergic to dogs so Lucky had to be an outdoor dog, which meant Annette became an outdoor kid. In Houston they weren’t allowed beyond their fenced yard but here in Conroe they had space to roam.

ANNETTE: I started, uh, feeling like, you know, everything I did in this new place was connected to Lucky, like roaming around in the woods for the first time. And it's almost like Lucky kind of introduced me to that life that I started living in that rural area… Lucky, like was like kind of showing me how to venture out, you know, beyond the fence line.

Lucky was Annette’s exploring companion, as well as her trusted confidante and refuge. She says he’d see her approaching and come running.

ANNETTE: He was my companion that I could count on, you know, he, I felt this love for him. And it was just that simple, reciprocal love.

…A reciprocal love that she says she didn’t get anywhere else.

You hear these stories on the news about how a dog rescues a kid from drowning or how a dog finds a man who was lost. This story is a different type of dog rescue. 

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

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Annette’s parents were opposites. Her dad was the town doctor, gregarious and outgoing, while her mom was withdrawn and stayed locked in her room most days.

ANNETTE: I, um, was often like I, you know, idolizing my father because he was a doctor and, um, very outgoing and creative and like the life of the party. And meanwhile, my mom was chronically depressed and would literally like be in her bedroom most of the time she had chronic migraines and, and was really, you know, not present for our lives.

But behind closed doors, her dad was different. He had a violent streak… He’d come home from work in a good mood but within a few hours Annette says he was like a volcano ready to blow. He’d throw things and yell. Annette felt he was bullying the family. When he got angry, Annette’s two sisters stayed away. But Annette refused to show him her fear.

ANNETTE: I had the role of like, I guess being made to believe that I provoked his anger. So I made him angry and then I would be punished for it…

Sometimes she didn’t see it coming. His mood would switch in a split second.

ANNETTE: He would take his belt off and, uh, spank me, but then he would um almost, become stimulated by the act of hurting me and it would ramp up. And instead of like being okay, you know, like that's, you know, I've hit you five times now go to your room, he would keep going…my strongest memory about this is, is keeping myself from crying. And so as this was happening and knowing he was becoming increasingly like weirdly sickeningly stimulated by hurting me, I felt like I am not gonna give him what he wants. If he gets off on this, then I'm not gonna show that he's hurting me. And so I refused to cry. I just remember just holding in my tears and, um, and really shutting down, um, to the point where I, um, I know I left my body sometimes… looking at myself from outside the house, like through the window… I remember I am not gonna cry. I'm not gonna let him see me cry.

Finally when he’d worked himself up to the point of exhaustion, Annette was sent to her room. 

Later she would sneak outside and run to her dog for comfort.

ANNETTE: I know that my parents loved me, you know, I knew that intellectually, but I didn't feel loved, you know, I didn't feel t aken care of. I felt endangered a lot of times. So to have this other creature that was always there for me and always glad to see me and no unpredictable behavior from Lucky.

Annette put up with the abuse from the age of seven until she was about 13. Even though there were times she thought she might die, her mom rarely tried to stop him. 

Annette fantasized about running away with Lucky. 

ANNETTE: I just had this idea about how wonderful it would be to live in nature with Lucky and just be together all day long…

A part of Annette was aching to leave her dysfunctional home but she also felt obligated to stay and take care of her mother who was ill with depression. 

So she and her younger sister escaped into their treehouse and launched wars against the neighbor kids.  

ANNETTE: We were very immersed in our club. It was called the red bandit club. Running around, making ammunition for wars. It was this whole world my parents didn’t even know was going on. I got shot with a beebee gun. (laughs)

As she grew older and prepared to go to college she remembers feeling overwhelmed with sadness that she couldn’t bring Lucky with her. 

When she did go away to the University of Texas at Austin to study journalism, she and other kids from her high school had a hard time fitting in … surrounded by mostly urban kids. 

ANNETTE:  I was very worried about how I was going to make it there. A lot of the kids I went to college with dropped out and went to Texas A&M which is more rural.

Throughout her time in Austin, her parents' marriage deteriorated. She buried any memory of her dad’s abuse, locked up all of the trauma. There was a void without her dog, her best friend that she couldn’t fill.

ANNETTE:  I wanted to see Lucky, so bad, but I hated visiting my parents.

Then one day in the fall of her sophomore year, she got an unexpected call from her family – her mom, dad, and sister were all on the line when Annette picked up… They told her Lucky had died of liver failure. Annette was crushed. It was important to her to be able to give Lucky a proper burial. But she wouldn’t be able to go home for another three months…so her parents and the vet suggested freezing Lucky’s body until she could come home and help bury him.

ANNETTE: I was so upset and they thought it'd be comforting if, if they kept his body frozen in this freezer at the vet. And so, you know, it was like, I don't know the middle of the semester. And so by the time it came home, like his body had been frozen for three months. 

For the next decade, Annette tried to create a new life for herself, far removed from the abuse she had endured. She married, divorced, then remarried. She adopted more dogs and said goodbye to them when they passed away. And she became a mother at 35.

And all this time, without really realizing it, she buried everything that had happened to her… but soon it would all come flooding back.

It began when her son Austin turned seven, and they started to look for a new dog.

It was November of 2005. They were moving into a new house with a yard in Flagstaff. Austin’s dad went online and found a litter of labrador puppies. So the three of them piled in the car and drove to the small town of Dewey. When they got there the puppies were in a plastic igloo dog house trying to shelter from the cold winter winds. The owners had even plugged in a hairdryer to keep them warm.

ANNETTE: Mike had identified a chocolate lab. We thought we're gonna get a male chocolate lab. Like, that was sort of, we were, that's what we were going there to do. 

Austin sat down on the ground and one yellow lab immediately came and sat on his lap and stayed there.

ANNETTE: And, we were all just like, well, I guess we're getting a female yellow lab. 

So they took her home. On the drive to Flagstaff the puppy was chewing on a down jacket. Austin was reading “A Series of Unfortunate Events” and there was a character named Sunny, a baby who was always chewing on things. So that is what they named her. 

Life in the new house with Sunny seemed complete and idyllic for a few months.

ANNETTE: We were this family unit. Austin was one block from school. He could walk to school. 

But within the next couple of years Annette’s life seemed to crumble around her. Her parents were both diagnosed with alzheimers. Her sisters and her were trying to figure out their care. And her marriage was falling apart. She and her husband went to counseling but that didn’t help. Everytime the subject of Annette’s childhood came up she refused to talk about it. 

But through it all she had Sunny to comfort her.

ANNETTE: She and I kind of became partners in terms of, you know, um, navigating this increasingly difficult life stresses. Um, and I've started to feel her supporting me in those ways where it wasn't like, oh, now I have to take Sunny on a five mile hike, you know, after doing all these other things, it was like, I can't wait to go on a hike with Sunny.

Annette became the thing her father always wanted for himself – to be a published writer. He abandoned his career in journalism for medicine because he thought he couldn’t make a living at writing.

ANNETTE: I wanted to make him proud. Always I was very focused on making him proud. Doing the things he didn’t do. Becoming a writer… I loved him very much that’s always been the case. I will say though there was this emotional wall between us. 

They never discussed the abuse. But as his Alzheimers progressed her dad started to become more tender. For many years she kept a voicemail of him saying I love you. In 2007 Annette’s dad died. Her sister held the phone up to her dad’s ear so Annette could say she loved him too.

The following year Annette and Mike divorced. She was a single parent teaching college journalism classes and writing for Outside and Backpacker Magazines, struggling to take care of her mother, and Sunny was her deepest refuge. 

ANNETTE: Before making Austin’s breakfast I’d go into the ballfield outside my house and throw the frisbee for Sunny. She loved this pink frisbee.

Then after teaching classes she’d walk Sunny through the nearby forest. She talked to her and told her after Lucky she was a dream come true. She created the life for Sunny that Lucky was never allowed to have. At night the three of them would have dinner together. They often laid together on the couch and watched a show. After putting Austin to bed Annette and Sunny would sit in the backyard and look at the stars. Then Sunny got to sleep in her bed.

ANNETTE: …because there were no barriers. There were no crazy parents or angry husbands or anything. <laugh>.

Similar to her childhood dog, Sunny encouraged Annette to see the world differently.

ANNETTE: Sunny and I would go to Buffalo Park, you know, and walk at night, you know, for a hike for three miles around Buffalo park together under the full moon, you know, and, and everything would just be glowing in this blue light. You know, it was kind of like transcendence in these magical moments in nature with sunny and, um, like, you know, hiking in the snow. And it was just like these giant fat snowflakes just like swirling around us. 

It was around this time Annette was working on an article that would eventually become a book about a murder on the Havasupai reservation. She was reading the transcription of the killer's confession, the detail in which he stabbed a woman…

ANNETTE: …and just the intimate description and my, uh, relationship with that violence triggered me. And I don't know what all like, kind of coalesced at that time to open the lid of that box in my brain, but it, it didn't just like kind of crack open. It blew off <laugh> and, and all of a sudden I just started having these nightmares ,And so I just thought, oh, I'm just having nightmares about this murder. And it was always about this dark force that was attack coming to attack me <affirmative>. 

At first, Annette chalked it up to a hormonal imbalance.

ANNETTE: You know, I was 48 and I thought I was having like hormone issues. I thought it was, uh, menopause, you know, hormones, crazy hormones, thyroid problems, too much stress, you know, in my current life. 

But her unease didn’t cease. At night she couldn’t sleep and during the day she started having strange physical sensations.

ANNETTE: I would start to, um, tremble, like my, to the point where I thought, am I becoming epileptic? And I, like, my arms would start to tremble and my vision would become blurry. 

There were times when she had to walk out of the grocery store.

ANNETTE: I would be at the grocery store and I’d start to feel like I couldn’t breathe and when I thought maybe I was having a heart attack…I would wake up in the night and I’d wake up gasping for breath. And it was a horrible feeling like I’d been suffocated.

She didn’t understand it. For decades she had been the pillar of unshakeable mental health. But she had been having nightmares in which someone was looming over her, wanting to kill her. She had no escape. Night after night she had insomnia. Finally after 10 sleepless nights she collapsed at her doctor’s office. Her doctor told her to see a psychiatrist right away. So, she called a friend who took her to the guidance center. They sat on a plaid couch holding hands until a counselor entered the room.

ANNETTE: I couldn't stop crying. I was just crying, crying. And, and, uh, and so when I met with a psychiatrist at the guidance center, he asked me if I was abused as a child…And I always steered away from that. I was like, I don't want to talk about that. But I was just so desperate, you know, in that psychiatrist asked me that I just said yes.

Once Annette began to access these old memories in therapy, she was flooded with all of the emotions she hadn’t let herself feel for decades. She went from being a person who bottled everything up to someone who let herself cry often. Even in our interview, the tears flowed freely. 

As soon as she opened up about her father’s abuse, she realized her body couldn’t hold the trauma in a moment longer.

ANNETTE: I had become a master of stuffing, all that trauma when you're a child and no one is acknowledging what's happening. There's no one to like hug you and say, that was really crazy, but you're okay. Now all you can do is just like stuff it away, you know, and then go to school the next day and pretend like it didn't happen….

The psychiatrist diagnosed her with complex post traumatic stress disorder.

ANNETTE: I started having flashbacks. Like, they would just like, come up, like, just like the stomach flu, like you're sitting there. And all of a sudden it's like, oh my God, I think I'm gonna throw up. It was just like an emotional, you know, um, upheaval… 

After a couple years of therapy Annette had another nightmare where the dark figure loomed over her again. By now she realized the figure was her father. 

ANNETTE: I had this dream where my dad was approaching me like it always happened. And all of a sudden I yelled at my dad, ‘that’s not ok’ (laughs) and he shrunk to be three inches tall. (laughs) And I just kept on yelling at him. And I have never knock on wood I’ve never had a dream since where I was being terrorized by him…I woke up and I was like these flashbacks are not in control of me. It’s not a threat anymore. It makes me feel a lot safer.

She learned that a child that’s subjected to extreme trauma on a regular basis can become psychologically split, where one part of the psyche can shut down in order to protect the other part of the psyche that’s in pain. 

Annette started to go to meetings for adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families (even though her parents weren’t alcoholics). 

ANNETTE:  …and that was a life saver for me because I thought I was gonna die. You know, it just felt like, how can I survive this? And, you know, then all of a sudden I found myself sitting in a room with all these other people that were like, you're not gonna die. It's okay. This is normal. This is good. You're finally, you know, taking your first step towards healing. 

The meetings were once a week but Sunny was with her day in and day out. Annette says Sunny was like a handrail along the edge of a thousand-foot cliff. Navigating life’s challenges seemed doable because she knew she could hold on to her if needed.

ANNETTE: But once I started to realize it was about my childhood And how deep that was and how it was affecting my body in ways that I didn't fully understand or could control. I started to realize how being around sunny was like critical to me, feeling safe and calm and being able to feel like my nervous system could, um, kind of equalize, you know, and not be so ramped up. 

Sunny would come with Annette to therapy.

ANNETTE: I started really relying on sunny to help me as I sought out real, mostly body based therapies to try and go in to where the trauma was being held.

Annette couldn’t imagine a life without Sunny. The faithful yellow lab had become her rock. When Sunny turned 15 her health started to decline. Her back legs gave out and she couldn’t stand anymore.

Annette was terrified of losing her lifeline but it was clear Sunny was suffering. 

So she called Austin who was now in his 20s living in LA to come home and give Sunny a proper send off. They bought all of Sunny’s favorite foods: sausage, hamburgers, even chocolate. They took her to the Dolores River and waded out with her where she loved to swim.

After three days of feasting they called the veterinarian who came to their house and gave Sunny an injection in her leg.

ANNETTE: I've never experienced a life leaving a body. When my parents died. I wasn't there. And so It was so intense and I just like laid over her. And I feel like her spirit went through me. 

The vet checked her heartbeat and Sunny was gone.

ANNETTE: The vet left and I just freaked out. Like I have never wailed And like shrieked And just released so much sorrow as in that moment. And even Austin, I think he was like, Terrified by how I was acting. He was just like, get a grip. I was just, it was just uncontrollable. And we were out outside, like maybe someone thought there was a murder. 

Annette says she cries for Sunny every day.

ANNETTE: The way I grew up and the way I, you know, could control my emotions when I was a child and you know, my, the way I kind of pushed through trauma and you know, certainly PTSD is something I'll also always live with for the rest of my life. The symptoms of that. It's not something you get over either, but I, I didn't know I could become so upset. You know, I didn't know, even though I had the capacity to cry so much… I just never was a person to cry. I mean, at movies or anything, like I just not a crier And I have never, I truly have more tear ducts or something in my eyes. Like water just flows out of my eyes, like a faucet in a way it never did before Sunny's death.

Annette discovered a lot of support for pet loss. She joined a group that met on zoom that helped her feel less alone. 

But she was still curious about the level of grief she was experiencing. So Annette dealt with Sunny’s death as only a journalist could through research. 

ANNETTE: So I started Googling it like attachment- human attachment theory with pets, and it turned out there had been research, you know, not - it’s kind of like an obscure corner of attachment theory research, but it's a thing. And, and I looked into it more and, and, you know, I talked to this, uh, uh, person who has done research around that - Sam Carr - and, and done studies that showed children that were in foster, um, were much more easily attaching to dogs than to humans. And, and that that can affect the development of your brain if that's a pattern that you have in childhood. 

While Annette knew she could never replace Sunny, she wanted a companion. She hung out with friends and even tried going on a few dates.

ANNETTE:  While I love my friends, I have like you know, like amazing friends, like

forming another relationship with a man feels kind of threatening to me. You know, it's just, I haven't had a lot, a lot of positive experiences in that department where I've had my positive experiences for emotional support have been with dogs. 

In her research she talked to different grief therapists about when it was appropriate to get another dog. 

ANNETTE: This one amazing grief counselor. Robert Neemyers said, you know, When it comes to the loss of a pet that you love so much, one of the greatest ways you can honor them is to bring another pet into your life, you know, and give that love to another creature that needs it.

A couple months had passed since Sunny’s death. She thought it was probably too soon to get another dog but maybe in a year.

ANNETTE: So I had reached out to some lab rescue organizations and stuff, and <affirmative>, you know, in may, and then by early June, this urgent situation with this female yellow lab came up and, um, I got this picture of this sweet yellow lab looking at me from behind a cage. And she had a really sad story where her owner had dementia and he wasn't taking good care of her. And the neighbors didn't know if she was being fed or she was never let out of the cage. He wasn't walking her… and I thought, you know, I'm just a couple months away from having lost my soulmate. You know, how could I bring another dog into my life right now? But all of a sudden it was like, there's this dog. And, and she needs me. 

She drove from Cortez Colorado where she lived six hours across the state to the town of Pueblo. When she got out of the car the neighbors warned her. 

ANNETTE: The neighbors were like, watch out, you know, she's just wild. And if you, you don't let her get loose. And, you know, like she was just trouble for everyone in the neighborhood. Trudy was, you know, because she would get out of the run and they couldn't catch her. …And so when I first saw her, it was just like, I had already decided, I wasn't like, oh, well, we'll see if this is gonna work or not. I had decided I'm gonna do this. …I was just like, no matter what, I'm gonna take this dog and I'm gonna give her a good life life.

Trudy was challenging to train. The original owner had never taken her on walks.

ANNETTE: She like pulled with all her might on the leash and I sprained my knee. You know, she like would headbutt me all the time in the face. And it was just this like crazy, like, uh, 65 pound, three week old puppy, you know who, and, and, and so it was, it was very challenging and I just was determined. Like we're gonna, you know, out of my love for sunny, I'm gonna like figure this out.

LAUREL: It sounds like Trudy had PTSD too.

ANNETTE: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I knew all still like her, she knows I'm talking about her. <laugh> um, Definitely has all that, you know, hyper vigilance symptoms of like overreacting to potential threats. And she has, uh, like all the PTSD markers that I know. Well, and so I've been working with her on that.

Annette has discovered just as Sunny was there for Annette, she could be there for Trudy.

ANNETTE: You know, it’s like Sunny took care of me. Sunny was this calming force that was like… You know when I would feel triggered, freaking out, Sunny was the one that was like “It’s okay. You’re ok”. And now the roles have reversed. And I know how to be ok. Partly because of Sunny. And I am helping Trudy to know she’s ok.

Annette says Trudy doesn’t have to be afraid anymore. She’s safe.

As we wrap up our interview Trudy who has been napping on the couch behind her comes over to Annette to be let out.

ANNETTE: Trudy loves my attention 

SFX: Squeaky toy

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.