What It Means to Carry Them Forward After Pet Loss
Updated: Sep 29
In this video, Brett walks you through how creating a memorial is one way to make your connection to your pet more tangible.
Grief after losing a pet can feel invisible. There's nothing to point to, nothing to hold. The love was real, the loss is real, and yet the world often moves on as if it wasn't. Brett Chinn, Grief Coach and Certified Professional Coach, offers a simple practice for changing that, for making your love visible when it feels like no one can see it.
Grief Needs Somewhere to Go
The practice Brett describes is about creating something tangible: a memorial that you can return to whenever you need to feel close to your pet. It doesn't have to be elaborate. A photo. A candle. A playlist. A letter you never send, written just for them.
The point isn't the object. The point is the intention, to give your love a place to land.
Something That Grows With You
What makes this practice different from a one-time ritual is that it's ongoing. You can always add to it, change it, move things around. It grows as you grow. Some days you might visit it to cry. Other days, just to sit. Other days, to tell them something you've been thinking about.
It becomes a place to be with them for a moment, in the middle of an ordinary day.
Making the Invisible Visible
There's something important in that phrase: grief can be so invisible. The people around you may have stopped asking. The world may have moved on. But the love is still there, and it deserves a place in your physical space, something you can see and touch that says: this mattered. You mattered.
A memorial practice doesn't ask you to be finished grieving. It just asks you to honor what you had.
Where to Begin
Brett closes with a question worth sitting with: How would you like to honor them?
There's no right answer. Whatever feels like them is the right answer. And if you're not sure yet, that's okay too. Starting somewhere simple, with a single photo or a single candle, is more than enough.
Brett Chinn is a Grief Coach and Certified Professional Coach with over ten years of experience supporting people through loss.
If you're looking for a place to share what you're creating or find others doing the same, Jasper's community holds space for all of it.
