Latest / Iridescent: The Grief Podcast / The surprising truth about grieving pets + breaking cultural taboo
Transcript
- Courtney: This is it. It's happening. The podcast is happening. I feel like I've been going back and forth on names, how exactly to figure out the flow, and I'm getting so bogged in the details that I can't take it anymore. So while this podcast might not have a name yet, I'm really glad to finally be getting started. And welcome. Hi, hello. My name is Courtney. I'm a holistic pet grief guide and I use tools like astrology, herbalism, and gentle movement to help you move through grief in a way that's unlike anything you thought possible. You probably weren't taught how to grieve with intention. And like you might even be thinking, what is that? What do you mean grieve with intention? And in that case, I'm really glad you're here. Or you might be someone who lost a pet. or has an aging or dying pet. And none of the current structures really fit your version of spirituality. Maybe the Rainbow Bridge is really not for you. Makes you kind of want to scream every time you hear about it. You go to look up support, and it's always something that has to do with organized religion, and that's not really your jam. And in that case, that was a lot like my own experience. When I lost my soul cat in 2025, I feel like my life kind of unraveled. I've talked a little bit about this. On my page, but the anticipatory grief I had for him started the day I brought him home. The day I brought him home 16 years ago. I sort of panicked about how it would feel when he wasn't around anymore. Which is kind of terrifying to grieve somebody for 15 years. And I don't say that lightly. I know there's a lot of y'all that have been through that. I don't have any in, you know, quote unquote wasting time, but I sometimes feel like I wasted time grieving him and panicking about something that, yes, it was going to come. But I didn't have a way to really do it that was heart led, that really gave me a feeling of control over the situation that wasn't based in like love and light jargon. I needed something concrete to be able to walk myself through this. And I didn't realize that astrology could be that for me until he had already passed. That's what helped me navigate a way forward. That's what helped me really integrate his loss. And astrology showed me where my life was supposed to go. When I lost him, it felt like I lost a limb and I just really didn't have a way forward. I really, I really didn't think I would survive it. And I know to some people that sounds dramatic, but to me that's my truth. He was somebody that was there for me when I feel like no one else really was. I had family that was there for me. When I was going through really dark time in my 20s. But even still, I felt so alone. I couldn't hold a relationship. I couldn't hold friends. And yet he was there for me every day. Day in, day out. Would wait for me when I came home, would wake me up in the mornings. He was everything. And because of him, I stayed. You might think it's really silly to. Say that a cat saved your life, but odds are if you're here, you probably feel at least a little similar to that. So that does bring me a lot of joy knowing that in my work and in sharing about this, that so many of y'all have been able to say you feel the same way. And that's, I feel like, the biggest hurdle in grieving a pet is feeling like you're so alone, like no one else gets it, and it's just so isolating, disenfranchised grief. Is so hard to work through, especially alone. So if you're here and if any of this resonates, make sure you subscribe, follow me on Instagram. Let's connect on threads and get to know one another and talk about these things that are bothering us because the more we talk about this and the more that we destigmatize grieving a pet, The better off we are as a society in general. And to let you know a little bit more about me. I feel like it's so hard to get to know someone on the internet sometimes because I just have so much to say. I am someone who has an Aquarian stellium. I'm a little bit airy. I'm a little bit all over the place, but in the best way possible. I feel like for me, ⁓ it's that I have less shame about the older I get. I'm like, yeah. I'm kind of doing a lot of things, but I love that. I love that I get to wear a bunch of different hats. I love that I'm working on different projects. I love that my life is full and creative and I have this natural ability to bounce around. So yeah, on the surface you might see a A witchy astrologer talking about her dead cat. But there's things that you don't know about me behind the scenes. I'm talking things like my life's path, my spirituality, my music tastes, how I move through the world in my own way, my joys, things that make me cry, and I cry a lot, y'all. I have a cancer moon. It's kind of my whole shtick. It's crying. And it used to make me so self-conscious. I feel like I really tried in my late teens and early twenties to kind of be this ice queen to ice everyone out. When in reality I should have and could have been a lot more compassionate with myself, people around me and opened up my emotions and probably would have had a very different life path. However, I'm grateful to where it brought me. I love the path that I'm on. I love the way my life looks now. So, this is a little get to know me. That way, I just feel like you need to know who your spiritual practitioner is. Astrology is deeply spiritual. Everything about my work is spiritual. And not in like a love and light way or toxic positivity way or even a religious way. I encourage everyone to develop their own unique relationship. With the world around them, my spirituality just happens to be tied very deep to nature. I got into astrology in twenty twenty. What a time. And it was because I felt my life kind of shifting. I'd identified as a bisexual for a really long time. And in 2020, I kind of realized there were some discrepancies of sorts of how I wanted to move through life and the kind of life partner I wanted to have. And then I met a woman. And the first day I met her, I said, I'm gonna marry her. And I remember going home to my mom and telling her. And that was it. And I did marry her a year later. And we live in the mountains of Western North Carolina and absolutely love it. And when when I got into astrology, I saw that my Saturn return was happening and I'd read a little bit about online and I was like, you know, ⁓ maybe I should dig more into this because the more I look at this, the more it resonates. And then I started digging in and I was like, wow, this is something that I kind of can't ignore anymore. I need to see where these patterns are and I need to go deeper. I need to go deeper. I need to go deeper. And I fell in love with it. ⁓ Nothing had ever made as much sense to me ⁓ as astrology did. And it's not a spiritual path for everyone, but for me it was. And for me it is, because I get so much insight and connection from the stars, the patterns that they're showing in front of me, how to move in my life and how I flow through patterns and paths is all guided by the stars. I consult my chart all the time. And I do want to say too, it's important to not consult your chart. There are times where I I don't do that on purpose because for me, I don't want everything to be faded. I like a little bit of free will. I like a little bit of spontaneity, which I'll definitely talk about. Spontaneity is huge because ⁓ we spontaneously decided to move to a totally different state where we didn't even know anybody. So once we moved here, it was in the middle, so middle of Saturn return, middle of this huge life shift. A positive one, might I add you. Saturn returns aren't negative. Mine was beautiful and deep and an experience that I'll think about for the rest of my life. But when we moved here, I felt so much more connected to Earth. You have all the seasons, you have all the different cycles of life and death and rebirth right outside your window, day in and day out. So when I was here, I was already in my year-long intensive astrology study. And being here, I was able to connect nature with astrology and be able to cultivate my own herbs, get to know ones by foraging and ones that grow locally. And not to say that doesn't happen in Florida, but it really is totally different. Florida wasn't for me as far as herbalism and connecting with nature goes. Here in the mountains and these little rainforesty, smoking mountains, I feel so connected. So there's been so many ups and downs throughout my entire experience here and how this came to be. But something that's been so true throughout my whole life is just following my whims. Yes, I'm a whimsy person. I feel like a lot of ⁓ Aquarius ruled folks are pretty whimsy. We can be a little bit tense and a little bit dark, but we do love to just roll with it as long as it's beating to our own drum. And we came here on a girls trip. And then we moved here in twenty twenty two, I think that was. And it has just been this deeply incredible experience to be able to do that. And since losing my cat in 2025, I'm now someone who really can't do surface level conversations. I used to be able to they irritated me a little bit before, but now I'm someone that I ask you how you're doing, I want to know how you're doing. I don't want the canned PR response. I really want to know how the hell you're doing. Really, how are you doing? Because for me I I really needed connection. And I feel like that's something a lot of us are missing is that deep, deep connection. I wanna know what keeps you up at night, your biggest fears, your heartbreaks. I wanna know I wanna know people, really know them. I feel like that's something that is so treasured within my work is because we skip all of the platitudes of just how are you? What are you doing? How has your day been? What do you do for work? When you're reading someone's chart, it is it goes from zero to a hundred, and I love that. Of course there's clients that take a little bit to warm up. And I appreciate that too. I think it's really endearing. But when you're able to really go deep and talk about, you know, your upbringing or a transformative life experience, a near death experience, that's the shit that I love. I love that. Because for me, I'm someone that just like I've said, and I'll continue says, I love connection. I was, I don't want to say a strange kid. I'm an only child, so that comes with its own strangeness, but I want to say more alternative. I was really bullied in elementary school. I was listening to like corn-stained Lincoln Park. POD in elementary school, nine-inch nails. And everyone else was not, and they made that really clear. And it impacted me. It was something that, you know, in the early 2000s to be different like that at a young age, it was it was tough. But I feel like that molded me to like just want to get to know people. I feel like I came out of the womb not wanting to know surface level stuff. And then after my cat died, I was like, y'all, I really don't, I don't give a shit about you know, how the weather is. But like tell me like, how have you been doing? What have you been dreaming about? Have you been bird watching? Have you eaten anything cool lately? Are you trying anything new? And just get weird with it. I just want to get weird every time. And even I was working as a veterinary technician, being able to ⁓ to people about their pets that they loved so deeply was something that I loved. Created all room for. A lot of really cool conversations with folks. I remember this one woman came in when her pet had passed and she brought a baby book. And it was like Polaroids of her German Shepherd's life. You know, first time at the park, first time learning sit. It was incredible. And it it made me realize at that point, I was like, these are my people. This is what I love. It's so I feel like almost counterculture. At least back then it definitely was in like the 2010s to not want kids. And that's something that I talk about a little bit too, but I have been child free by choice pretty much my whole life. always just viewed my pets as kind of my kids. even then I was like, ⁓ okay, this is something that ⁓ I my pets a lot, and there's other people that do too. There's other people that view them as, you know, animal companions, not just a pet, not just something you own, but something that's integrated into your life. So when I lost my cat and I blended what I knew through my time as a vet tech. And that's something I've been doing for over 10 years. I've been in animal medicine, pet rescue, and I've been an animal advocate since was around nine. A lot of folks don't know, but when I was nine, I went vegetarian. And then when I was around thirteen or fourteen, I went vegan. And I was vegan for until my late twenties, I believe until I was around twenty nine. right now I'm thirty three ⁓ I am a pescatarian now. And this isn't to say that one cider is better than the other, but I do believe that you know what's best for you and that there's ways to do things that make sense for you. And that's everybody's life choice. But all this to say that I've had this overwhelming sense of grief my whole life, whether it was being bullied or kind of being the lone wolf, only child, or losing my friend group in my early twenties when I stopped partying, or when I moved to Western North Carolina didn't know a single soul. Grief has been something that's been all around me and that I've gotten to know well. And I don't shy away from it. It's something I welcome in, talk to like an old friend, get to know because I am going to experience grief over and over again. I've seen throughout my life that it is something that can be like a family curse sometimes. And what I mean by that is you're not taught how to grieve with intention. Your parents grieve the way their parents did, and their parents did, and their parents did, and their parents did. Do you see what I mean? And until you have someone that breaks that cycle, you don't know what grieving with intention looks like. In your family, compartmentalization might be totally normal. And like if you do anything else but that, it's considered too much or too emotional, or you need to just get over it. But how different would it look if it was something that was talked about? Something that you checked in with, something that you were able to cultivate prolonged conversations about. What does that look like? What does it look like to have conversations with your partner about how you want to have a funeral for your dog and for them to know that's what you want so you don't have to feel weird about explaining it or be lost on how you want that to look? That's why I created a a grief guide, an anticipatory grief guide, a workbook. It's so you can share it with your partner. It's a Google Doc. And that way when that day comes, they know what flowers you want, they know what crystals you want, they know what sounds you want, what playlists, what music, what instruments, whatever it is that you feel like you need to honor your loved one in that moment, your partner has access to. It could be a romantic partner, it could be family, it could be a sister, a friend, because you don't have to do this alone. I have spent so much time alone as an only child and a lone wolf and as someone who quote unquote didn't need anybody. Spoiler alert, I did. I needed a lot of people. And I really realized that when I experienced grief in the summer of 2025, I needed people. I reached out to people like I have never reached out before and said, I need help. I feel like I'm drowning. And my community showed up. And in that I learned how important it was to show up for community. You can't just say, My community will be there for me. It's something that you need to you need to pour into for them to pour back into you. Like does that does that resonate with you that you feel like you know you want that, but you don't know the steps to take? You don't know how to really cultivate it to, especially if you're someone who's maybe a little bit shy. I'm someone who's a little bit of an introvert. I know it seems a little shocking, but it's something I'm actively trying to get better at because this experience. I saw how important it was to have people around me and to be able to talk and I'll get into my story of The weeks that followed after Armin passed, even the days where I felt so connected to people because I wasn't hiding my grief. I literally was like, I don't care. I'm gonna talk about my dead cat to people. And if it's too much for them, that's too much for them. It's not too much for me. It's not that my floodgates were totally open and I was like bawling to people. This something we'll get into, but if someone mentioned how are you doing, I told them how I was doing. I told them I was grieving. I told them I was struggling with losing my cat. And then they would tell me about how they s really struggled losing their dog or how their mom is really going through a hard time losing her cat. And then it just it reminds you how live we are all are, how connected we all are. So I wanted to get some of this started, to get the conversation going, to tell you a little bit about me. This is gonna be a space where we can really talk about grief in a way that isn't really talked about. Having intentional rituals around it, spellcraft, bringing astrology into it, herbalism, and making this a body-led practice, not something that you have three days in your bereavement policy to get over, and then that's it. There is no getting over grief. That is at the core of my work. There is no getting over it. If you are expecting to get over your grief in one of my programs, it's not it. We're not getting over anything. We're integrating. We're getting to know it instead of getting over it. We're learning about it. We're seeing what it has to teach us. We're seeing where the message is. And not in a way where it has everything, you know, grief can teach you anything you want it to. Grief has a lesson in it. Yes and no. Yes. Sometimes the lesson can just be, this sucks. Sometimes the lesson can also be that we need to let go of control. Sometimes it can also be that we were. Capable of loving something when we kind of thought we weren't. Maybe the lesson is that we do have maternal instincts when we are told our whole lives that we don't. What matters is how we move through the world when we experience this loss, that we stop making ourselves feel small and we stop making ourselves feel like it's too much or it's a burden or and judging yourself. Stop judging yourself. Don't have guilt over this. Guilt can come at old age. It can come at illnesses, behavioral euthanasia. guilt does not have to consume you in this. Guilt is natural to feel, but do not let the guilt be all-consuming. Do not let it make you feel alone because you are not alone in this. So I'm excited to dive in. I'm excited to tell you my story. Tell you Armin's story and his impact. I have a little bit about it on my page. It's my pin post, but his story and how he how he showed me about life and how connected we all are is something that I'll I'll never shut up about. So thank you for coming to my unnamed podcast. By the time this is up, there'll be a name. I promise. But know that you're not alone. Know that if you feel like you want to have a different kind of grief, that you want to honor your pet and your animal companion a different way, different ways exist. You don't need to do it the way that your family's done it, or that you think you need to do it. If you're having a ping that you want to do something different, and odds are if you've gotten this far in this podcast, you know that you want to do something different. You know that you have to. So thanks for coming. I hope that this is a space where you feel connected, you feel like you're part of this bigger ecosystem because that's how grief has made me feel. Yes, at times it feels so isolating, but other times, wow, I have never felt so alive. Truly. I've never felt so alive as I did when I was grieving. I could feel my heart physically breaking. So if your heart is breaking too, know that you're not alone. Know that here. Well we're all, you know, walking that same path together. Maybe paths look a little different, but we're all going to the same place. We're all trying to meet our future selves with more compassion and more grace and learning that we can grieve in public and still be the most powerful person in the room. It doesn't have to make you feel small. So thanks for hanging out. My name is Courtney and I'll talk to you soon.