Living with pets sadly means losing them too. There won’t be a dry eye in the house (in a good way) at this event.
By Zazie Todd PhD
Loving and Losing Pets: E.B. Bartels, Rev Sarah Bowen, Karen Fine DVM
Loving pets means thinking of them both in life and after their loss. In the poignant and personal Good Grief: On Loving Pets, Here and Hereafter, E.B. Bartels takes us on a global tour of how we love and mourn our pets. Sarah Bowen shares her deep insights on the lives and loss of all animals—pets and wildlife—in Sacred Sendoffs: An Animal Chaplain’s Advice for Surviving Animal Loss, Making Life Meaningful, and Trying to Heal the Planet. And Karen Fine DVM’s heartwarming memoir about becoming a veterinarian, The Other Family Doctor: A Veterinarian Explores What Animals Can Teach Us About Love, Life, and Mortality, is full of tales about what we can learn from the animals in our lives.
Tuesday 24th September 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern / 6pm UK time.
Register here.
The event is hosted by Zazie Todd and Kristi Benson.
A recording will be available to all those who register. It will be sent out 72 hours after the live event ends.
This page contains affiliate links which means I may earn a commission on qualifying purchases at no cost to you
Attendees at the live event will have the chance to win a copy of Good Grief: On Loving Pets, Here and Hereafter by E.B. Bartels, Sacred Sendoffs: An Animal Chaplain’s Advice for Surviving Animal Loss, Making Life Meaningful, and Trying to Heal the Planet by Sarah A. Bowen, The Other Family Doctor: A Veterinarian Explores What Animals Can Teach Us About Love, Life, and Mortality by Karen Fine DVM, and of Zazie Todd PhD’s new book Bark! The Science of Helping Your Anxious, Fearful, or Reactive Dog.
About the books
Good Grief: On Loving Pets, Here and Hereafter by E.B. Bartels, published by Mariner Books.
An unexpected, poignant, and personal account of loving and losing pets, exploring the singular bonds we have with our companion animals, and how to grieve them once they’ve passed.
E.B. Bartels has had a lot of pets—dogs, birds, fish, tortoises. As varied a bunch as they are, they’ve taught her one universal truth: to own a pet is to love a pet, and to own a pet is also—with rare exception—to lose that pet in time.
But while we have codified traditions to mark the passing of our fellow humans, most cultures don’t have the same for pets. Bartels takes us from Massachusetts to Japan, from ancient Egypt to the modern era, in search of the good pet death. We meet veterinarians, archaeologists, ministers, and more, offering an idiosyncratic, inspiring array of rituals—from the traditional (scattering ashes, commissioning a portrait), to the grand (funereal processions, mausoleums), to the unexpected (taxidermy, cloning). The central lesson: there is no best practice when it comes to mourning your pet, except to care for them in death as you did in life, and find the space to participate in their end as fully as you can.
Punctuated by wry, bighearted accounts of Bartels’s own pets and their deaths, Good Grief is a cathartic companion through loving and losing our animal family.
Sacred Sendoffs: An Animal Chaplain’s Advice for Surviving Animal Loss,
Making Life Meaningful, and Healing the Planet by Rev. Sarah A. Bowen,
published by Monkfish Book Publishing.
2023 IPPY Gold Award Winner | Animals/Pets
An elegant manifesto for improving life―and death―for all beings on sacred Mother Earth
Combining humorous anecdotes and thought-provoking research, Sacred Sendoffs explores human relationships with beloved pets, wild creatures, animal astronauts, marine life, farmed animals, and other sentient beings. Along the way, animal chaplain Sarah Bowen shares insights for sustaining their lives, honoring deaths, and managing the emotions that arise when we lose an animal we love. While many books focus exclusively on pet loss, animal welfare, or environmental issues, Bowen’s ever curious and playful style takes on all three, revealing their unavoidable entanglement. Sacred Sendoffs helps animal lovers uncover practical actions and everyday opportunities for helping the more-than-human world thrive.
The Other Family Doctor: A Veterinarian Explores What Animals Can Teach
Us About Love, Life, and Mortality by Karen Fine DVM, published by Anchor.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Calling all animal lovers! A heartwarming memoir about one woman’s career as a vet and the unique role pets play in our lives
A tribute to our furry, feathery, scaley, and wet family members, All Creatures Great and Small meets Being Mortal in this compelling memoir of one woman’s dream to become a veterinarian.
Karen Fine always knew that she wanted to be a vet and wasn’t going to let anything stop her: not her allergy to cats, and not the fact that in the ’80s veterinary medicine was still a mostly male profession. Inspired by her grandfather, a compassionate doctor who paid house calls to all his (human) patients, Dr. Fine persevered, and brought her Oupa’s principles into her own practice, which emphasizes the need to understand her patients’ stories to provide the best possible care.
And in The Other Family Doctor, Dr. Fine shares all these touching, joyful, heartbreaking, and life-affirming tales that make up her career as a vet. There’s:
- The feral cat who becomes a creature out of a fable when he puts his trust in a young vet to heal his injured paw
- The pot-bellied pig who grows too big to fit in the car but remains a cherished part of her family
- The surprising colony of perfectly behaved ferrets
- The beloved aging pet who gives her people the gift of accompanying them on one final family vacation
- The dog who saves his owner’s life in a most unexpected way
Woven into Dr. Fine’s story are, of course, also the stories of her own pets: the birds, cats, and dogs who have taught her the most valuable lessons—how caring for the animals in our lives can teach us to better care for ourselves, especially when life seems precarious.
About the authors
E.B. Bartels
 |
| Photo of E.B. Bartels by Small Circle Studio |
E.B. Bartels is a nonfiction writer, a former Newtonville Books bookseller, and a GrubStreet instructor, with a BA in Russian from Wellesley College and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia University.
Her work has appeared in Salon, Slate, WBUR, Literary Hub, Catapult, Electric Literature, The Believer, The Rumpus, The Millions, The Toast, The Butter, and the anthology The Places We’ve Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35, among others. For Fiction Advocate, she writes the monthly columns Non-Fiction by Non-Men, in which she interviews women, trans, and non-binary people who write nonfiction, and Non-Fiction about Non-Humans, in which she interviews people who write nonfiction about animals.
Good Grief: On Loving Pets, Here and Hereafter, E.B.’s debut narrative nonfiction book about the world of loving and losing animals, exploring the singular nature of our bonds with our companion animals, and how best to grieve for them once they’ve passed away, was published by Mariner Books (an imprint of HarperCollins) on August 2, 2022.
In addition to writing, E.B. also works as a freelance editor, a manuscript consultant, a writing coach, a tutor, and a senior editorial writer in the communications and public affairs department at Wellesley College. She lives outside Boston with her husband, Richie, and their a chihuahua-pitbull mix (Seymour), a pair of red-footed tortoises (Terrence and Twyla), a small flock of pigeons (Bert, Lieutenant Dan, George, and Lucille), and a dozen fish (all named Milton).
Sarah A. Bowen
 |
| Photo of Sarah A. Bowen by Francesco Mastalia |
Sarah A. Bowen is co-founder of Compassion Consortium―the first interfaith, interspiritual, and interspecies community for Vegans and other people who care about and advocate for beloved, exploited, and endangered animals. The Consortium is a diverse community of people exploring spiritual, philosophical, and religious approaches to animal ethics. It offers a vegan meditation group, animal loss support group, book talks, and Sunday services featuring pioneers and innovators in animal activism. Sarah is also the executive director of the Consortium’s Animal Chaplaincy Training program where she teaches evidence-based techniques which support people struggling with animal care or animal protection challenges such as grief, compassion fatigue, moral injury, and burnout.
She is a columnist on animal/human relationships for Spirituality & Health magazine and the award-winning author of Sacred Sendoffs: An Animal Chaplain’s Advice for Surviving Animal Loss, Making Life Meaningful, & Trying to Heal the Planet. Her work has also appeared in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, The Associated Press, Psychology Today, Animal Culture Magazine, and a wide range of online, newspaper, television, and radio media. She is a delegate at the Oxford Center for Animal Ethics and has presented at the Humane Society Animal Care Expo, United Nations World Interfaith Harmony Week, Parliament of the World’s Religions, Spiritual Forum’s Vegan Retreat, Compassion Arts Festival, and Best Friends National Conference. Sarah holds a BA in Human Ecology from Michigan State University, MA in Religious Studies from Chicago Theological Seminary, studied Anthrozoology at Canisius University, and is joyfully engaged in doctoral research blazing the field of animal chaplaincy education.
Website: https://www.sacredsendoffs.com/
Follow Sarah on Instagram
Karen Fine DVM
Dr. Karen Fine (she/her/hers) is a holistic veterinarian who writes about the human-animal bond, holistic veterinary medicine, pet loss, grief, and narrative medicine. She owned and operated her own house call practice, Fine Veterinary House Calls, for twenty-five years.
Her New York Times bestselling memoir, The Other Family Doctor: A Veterinarian Explores What Animals Can Teach Us About Love, Life and Mortality, explores her experiences as a pet owner and veterinarian. It was published in March 2023 by Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House.
Dr. Fine’s veterinary textbook, Narrative Medicine in Veterinary Practice: Improving Client Communication, Patient Care, and Veterinary Well-Being, was published in October 2021 through CRC Press. Her articles and essays have been published in the New York Times, Time magazine, the Brevity blog, Bark Magazine and Inside Your Cat’s Mind, among others. She has been interviewed by NPR’s Fresh Air, CNN, and Psychology Today. She also co-edits Reflections, an online journal on Veterinary Narrative Medicine. Narrative Medicine is a growing field in human medicine that can help veterinarians improve care by viewing patients and clients in the context of their larger story.
She is a proud graduate of the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University and Brandeis University, and is certified in veterinary acupuncture through the International Veterinary Acupuncture Society.
Dr. Fine currently practices small animal medicine in Central Massachusetts, where she lives with her family including an assortment of rescues. She enjoys walking her dogs, eating chocolate, reading, writing, and horseback riding.
Website: https://karenfinedvm.com/
Follow Dr. Karen Fine on Facebook, Instagram.