Narrative Reflections on Losing a Companion Animal

Abstract

This article uses personal narrative and embodied experiences as autoethnographic strategies to explore the grief of losing a companion animal. It draws on my experiences as a disabled academic who continues to teach and navigate the terrain of writing. Losing my dog, Flake, has left me unable to voice the trauma. Throughout, I draw on various scholars’ interpretations of writing, loss, trauma, and nonhuman relationships, and emerge with a tribute to our significant relationships to others: friends, students, nonhuman animals.

Out of the blue and into it: Autoethnography, emotions and complicated grief

“…Autoethnography therefore seemed like an appropriate choice of method. It had been used in previous accounts of loss and grief (see Ellis, 1993Ellis, , 1995Jago, 2002;Adams, 2006;Campesino, 2007;Reilly, 2011;Patti, 2012;Letherby, 2015;Alshammari, 2020) and even traumatic bereavement (Kottenstette, 2020;McKenzie, 2015;Tilley-Lubbs, 2011) but had not yet been applied to understanding social processes of informal emotion work.…”