One Year After Losing a Pet

It's past 11:15 on a weeknight, and I'm on the train home from work, half-asleep against the window, surrounded by a handful of other tired commuters who all have the same blank, end-of-day look on their faces. In a couple of weeks it will be a year since I lost my lovebird. I still haven't figured out how to explain what happens to me on nights like this.

It's never the big, obvious moments that get me a year later. It's the small mechanical ones. I open the front door. I put my bag down. I kick off my shoes. And for eighteen years, that exact sequence of sounds — door, bag, shoes — meant he'd start chirping. He couldn't see me from his cage. He didn't need to. He knew the sounds of me coming home, and he'd greet them every single time, even at midnight, even half-asleep himself.

He doesn't anymore. Obviously. But some nights, coming home late after a long shift, tired in that specific bone-deep way, my body still runs the old sequence and waits for the sound that isn't coming. The house is just quiet. The bedroom is just empty. And that particular kind of quiet — not sad exactly, just hollow — sits with me for the rest of the night until I finally fall asleep from exhaustion.

The truth is, it doesn't hit as hard as it did in the first few months. That part is real and I'm grateful for it. But "not as hard" isn't the same as "gone." It's smaller now, but it's still there, waiting in specific moments — late nights, empty rooms, that particular kind of tired.

A year ago, the first few weeks looked nothing like the version of grief I expected. I didn't cry in front of people. I got up, I went to work, I went to my part-time job, I smiled at store clerks and made small talk and by every outward measure I was fine. I think part of it was not wanting to burden anyone. Part of it was not wanting to seem weak, or unstable, or like I couldn't hold it together. So I built a kind of armor — polite, functional, pleasant — and I wore it out into the world every day.

The armor came off at night. Falling asleep was hard. Waking up in the middle of the night was hard. Mornings were the worst — that first conscious moment where you remember, all over again, that something is missing. I was low energy, unfocused, going through motions.

Within the first week, I cleaned out all of his things — his cage, his toys, his food bowls — and packed them away. I've thought a lot about why I did that so fast. Part of it was grief, obviously — a way of facing the loss instead of living around it. But part of it was practical, too, and I don't think that makes it less real: clutter genuinely affects my focus and my mood, and I had an online course running at the time, plus a part-time job, and I knew a living space full of reminders wasn't something I could function around. So I packed it away partly to cope, and partly just to survive my own schedule.

It didn't work, not really. I couldn't focus on that course for over a month, and I ended up not finishing it. My regular routines — homework, exercise, the small structures I normally lean on — I tried to keep them going. Trying and doing turned out to be two very different things. My girlfriend and I would go for walks downtown, and I'd buy some small thing here or there, a little retail therapy, a little performance of being a person who was okay. It didn't fix anything. But it gave the days a shape when I didn't have one of my own.

I wanted to talk to someone — an actual counsellor — in those first weeks. I looked into it and quickly realized I couldn't afford it, and I didn't know where to find anything free or low-cost in my city. What I found instead was a grief subreddit, and strangers online, sharing their own losses, gave me more comfort than I expected. There's something in hearing "me too" from someone who owes you nothing that lands differently than reassurance from people who know you.

I think, a year out, about how differently this could have gone. He passed away in late July, and I deal with Seasonal Affective Disorder, so the fact that this anniversary lands in the middle of summer is, honestly, a bit of luck. The long days, the sunshine, the city full of people out at festivals and patios — it distracts me. It doesn't heal anything, but it gives my mind somewhere else to go. I think about how much heavier this would feel if it were January instead of July, or if I didn't have people around me at all.

I also think a lot about how grief shows up differently depending on how busy your life is. If your days are packed — work, errands, obligations — your mind doesn't get much room to sit in it. But then a quiet moment arrives, and it creeps back in anyway. That's basically been my last year in one sentence: busy enough to mostly outrun it, quiet enough, some nights, to feel it catch up.

So here I am, most of a year later, on another late train home. The door will open the same way it always has. The bag will come down. The shoes will come off. And for one more second, some old part of me will still be listening for a sound that isn't there.

It's quieter than it used to be — the ache, I mean, not just the house. Some day it might get quieter still. I'm not in a hurry to find out. For now, I've stopped expecting it to fully go away, and that's alright. Some things you don't get over. You just learn what nights they show up on, and you let them.

If you're reading this in the raw early days, or if it's been a long while like it has for me — you're not alone in this. I mean that honestly, not as a line. I know what this particular quiet feels like.

If you're struggling with grief right now, please know you don't have to carry it alone. Our grief support resources page is here for you.