The Isolation of Grief in the Pandemic

Many people adopted a pet during the COVID-19 pandemic. My wife and I just lost one.

Gouda, our eight-and-a-half-year-old exotic shorthair cat, died on April 16th. We rushed him to the hospital the previous morning after he spent another night vomiting. The doctors weren’t sure what was wrong, but, over the course of 24 hours, signs pointed to fatal kidney disease. We made the difficult choice to euthanize him.

The events would have been horrible under any circumstances. But I found that the forced isolation of the pandemic made grieving...