Welcoming Them Home
The Beautiful and Painful Experience of Remembering a Pet We’ve Lost
By C. Arden
In this article
Tonight, We Leave a Little Light On
In homes across Mexico tonight, someone will put a bowl of water on a low table beside a photograph of a dog. Someone else will set out a cat’s favorite blanket, a few kibbles, a candle. Then they will do something that most of us have only ever done in our heads. They will say, out loud, come home.
October 27 has become, in recent years, the night many Mexican families welcome back the pets they have lost, in the days before Día de Muertos, the Day of the Dead. It is a young custom inside a very old one, and we will come to its history. What matters first is the idea at its center, because it names something almost everyone who has lost a pet already knows.
You cannot bring them back. But you can make room for them.
If you have lost a dog or a cat, you already know that remembering them is not a simple thing. A photo you have not opened since the day they died can bring the whole afternoon back: the beach, the wet sand they carried into the car, the way they looked at you with a stick that was far too big. For a second, it is the best feeling in the world. Then it is the worst, because the photo is all that is left of that afternoon.
This article is about that double experience: a tradition built around welcoming the dead home for one evening, what bereavement research can and cannot tell us about meaningful dates and rituals, and why the same memory can comfort you one day and flatten you the next. It ends with practical ways to remember a pet at your own pace, including on the days you do not feel ready.
There are no instructions here for how you should feel. There is a candle, left on, in case you want to sit near it.
The Beautiful Mexican Tradition of Welcoming Them Home
Día de Muertos, which readers in the United States will often see written as Día de los Muertos, is observed in Mexico on November 1 and 2. UNESCO, which recognized it as part of humanity’s intangible cultural heritage in 2008, describes it as a fusion of pre-Hispanic religious rites and Catholic feasts, held as the maize harvest ends. The belief at its heart is simple and generous: for a short time each year the dead return, and the living prepare for them as they would for any guest who has traveled a long way.
The preparation is the ofrenda, an altar built at home, and its elements are a kind of hospitality. Cempasúchil marigolds, orange and strong-smelling, are laid in a path from the door so the returning soul can find the way by color and scent. Candles give light on the road. A glass of water is set out because the road is long. There is a photograph, so the right person is being called. And there is food, the dishes they loved, because what the dead take from the ofrenda is said to be the aroma of what was offered. Salt, copal incense and cut paper banners appear on many altars, with meanings that vary by family and region. There is no single correct ofrenda.
Pets were not always given a night of their own. The October 27 date is new. Mexican newspapers describe it as a popular custom that spread in the late 2010s and since, carried by social media, veterinary practices and pet businesses rather than by any church or institution, and they are careful to say it is neither official nor ancient. Many families simply place a pet’s photograph on the family altar on November 1 instead. Mexica belief did hold that a dog helps a person’s soul cross the river into the land of the dead, and some now draw a line from that idea to the modern pet altar, but the connection is poetic rather than historical.
None of this makes the pet altar less meaningful. It is something people chose because they needed it: a bowl of water, a collar, a candle, and permission to say out loud that this dog, this cat, is still family.
If you are not Mexican, you do not need to borrow the altar to borrow the thought behind it. The tradition belongs to the families who keep it. The thought, that love can set a place for someone who is gone, is open to anyone, and everything that follows is offered in that spirit.
Why Certain Days Make Us Miss Them More
Grief has a calendar of its own. An ordinary Tuesday can be fine. Then their birthday comes around, or the date they died, or the first Christmas morning when nobody tears the wrapping paper, and the loss is as fresh as the first week.
Researchers call this an anniversary reaction, and it is one of the better documented patterns in bereavement. A 2025 systematic review in the journal Death Studies drew together 58 studies and concluded that the literature supports the phenomenon: around death anniversaries, birthdays and other significant dates, bereaved people report increased grief, physical symptoms and, in some studies, psychiatric symptoms. The review covers the loss of people, not pets. In preparing this article we could not find a peer-reviewed study of anniversary reactions after the death of a pet, so what follows applies a human pattern to pet loss, and should be read that way.
One of the clearest individual studies is an older one. Deborah Carr and her colleagues at the University of Michigan followed widowed older adults, most around seventy, and compared how they were doing depending on when in the year they were interviewed. Six months after the loss, those interviewed within a month of their late spouse’s birthday reported more despair, anxiety and depressive symptoms than those interviewed at other times. By eighteen months the pattern had faded. The researchers described it as a normal, time-limited response, strongest within the first year.
That study was about widowhood in Detroit in the late 1980s. It tells us nothing certain about a dog who died in March. What it does suggest is that the calendar is not imagining things. Meaningful dates arrive whether or not you are ready, and they ask you to notice the absence at exactly the moment you were most used to noticing the presence.
For a pet, the dates are often smaller and more private. Their birthday, marked with a new toy or an extra treat. The day you brought them home. The day of the diagnosis. The day of the appointment. The first walk of fall on the route you always took together. Nobody else sends a card for these. That privacy is part of what makes them hard, and part of what makes a private remembrance so valuable.
What Research Tells Us About Remembrance and Grief
If dates make grief louder, do rituals make it quieter? Sometimes, for some people, and researchers are only beginning to understand why.
The most frequently cited study on rituals and loss was run by Michael Norton and Francesca Gino at Harvard and published in 2014. They asked people to describe rituals they had performed after a death or a breakup, and most were private, ordinary acts: washing a late husband’s car every week, playing a particular song, going back to a place on the anniversary. People who described a ritual reported lower grief than those who only wrote about the loss, and in the laboratory a small scripted ritual reduced reported grief compared with simply sitting with the feeling. The researchers’ explanation, supported by their data but not the only possible one, was a restored sense of control. Doing something, rather than only feeling something, seemed to help.
Two limitations matter. The lab experiments used small, artificial losses, and the effects, while consistent, were modest. The study does not show that lighting a candle will make you feel better tonight. It suggests that a deliberate act of remembrance may give a grieving person back some sense of agency, and that this is one reason, though probably not the only one, that rituals have lasted.
A second strand of research concerns continuing bonds: the ongoing relationship people keep with someone who has died. A 2023 systematic review from Aston University gathered 79 studies on bereaved adults and found that continuing bonds bring comfort to many people, help them make sense of the loss, and let their identity carry the relationship forward. They were also, in some circumstances, associated with distress: early in grief, after sudden or traumatic deaths, and when the bond took the form of feeling the person present outside oneself rather than carried inside. The authors could not conclude that keeping a bond is better than letting go. Bonds are neither good nor bad in themselves. What matters is the kind of bond, the timing, and the circumstances of the death.
Pet research has started to catch up. A 2025 synthesis of 36 studies on continuing bonds after pet loss, published in OMEGA, found the same two-sided picture: bonds can ease grief by reducing loneliness, and they can intensify it, especially when the loss is dismissed by others. The studies it drew on repeatedly identified memorials, rituals, memories and dreams as ways people coped. A survey of 432 bereaved pet owners, published in Death Studies in 2024, found that stronger continuing bonds went with more severe grief, and that grief eased with time. People in the most pain may simply hold on hardest.
Then there is the question so many grieving owners ask in private: is it normal to grieve a pet this much? A 2026 study of 975 adults in the United Kingdom, published in PLOS ONE, found that prolonged grief, the clinical form that stays disabling for months, occurred after the death of a pet at a rate comparable to the death of a close friend, a sibling or a partner. That does not mean pet loss is worse than human loss. It means it is the same kind of loss.
The research does not hand us a method. It hands us three things. Meaningful dates raise the temperature of grief, most strongly in the first year. A deliberate act of remembrance may restore some of the control that grief takes away. And staying connected to a pet who has died is ordinary, often comforting, and occasionally painful, depending on how and when you do it. The rest of this article is about the how and the when.
When a Beautiful Memory Becomes a Painful One
Here is the moment that catches people out.
You decide to choose a photograph for a frame, or for a small remembrance on their birthday. You scroll back. There they are, two summers ago, on the beach, with the ridiculous expression they made when they were about to shake themselves dry over everyone. You laugh. You remember the sand in the car for weeks. Then, without any warning, the thought arrives: that afternoon is over, and this picture is the only piece of it left. The laugh turns in your chest.
Nothing has gone wrong when this happens. A memory of a pet is never only a memory of a pet. It is also a memory of the version of you who was there, of the life you had, and of the fact that the life has changed. Grief researchers describe loss in terms of attachment: the bond built, over years, around a presence that was simply always there. The same photograph that activates the bond also reminds you that the presence has gone, in the same second. That is why the sweet and the unbearable so often arrive together, and why people sometimes avoid photographs for months, not because they want to forget but because they cannot yet bear to remember.
The same thing happens with objects. You go to prepare a little remembrance and realize you have reached, by reflex, for the drawer where the treats were kept. You set out their bed and find that the empty shape of it is more than you can look at. On a birthday you remember the last birthday, which was ordinary, which you did not know was the last.
For some people, the difficult memory that intrudes is not the absence but the end. The illness. The final weeks. The appointment. If your pet was euthanized, those memories can be especially sticky, because a decision was involved, and decisions invite second-guessing. A 2022 study of more than 1,500 dog and cat owners in North America and Europe found that owners worried about having decided both too early and too late, which tells you something about guilt: it attaches itself to whatever you did. A 2026 analysis of owner accounts from the Dog Aging Project found no meaningful difference in reported guilt, blame or grief between dogs who were euthanized and dogs who died without assistance. That is one study, built on what owners chose to write, and it cannot settle the question. But it offers no support for the idea that choosing euthanasia makes the end harder to remember than any other ending. What stays true, whatever a study can or cannot show, is simpler than that: the end is hard because it was the end.
When a memory of their final days barges in on a happier one, it can feel as if the illness has stolen the whole life. It has not. It has only arrived first. The practical section below has ways to let the earlier memories back in without pretending the last ones never happened.
Why Remembering Can Also Bring Comfort
Given all of that, why would anyone remember on purpose? People do, in every culture, and the reasons are practical as much as sentimental.
The first is the one Norton and Gino proposed. Grief is, among other things, a loss of control: something happened that you could not stop. A remembrance, however small, is something you can do. You decide which photograph. You choose the candle. You put the water bowl where it always was. For a few minutes you are the one deciding again.
The second reason has to do with caring. When a pet dies, the work of looking after them stops all at once. No bowl to fill, no leash to reach for, no last trip into the yard at night. The love that did all of that does not stop with it, and people often describe the strangeness of still wanting to care for someone who no longer needs anything. A remembrance gives that care a job. Preparing a space for them is, quite literally, looking after them again.
The third is connection. The research on continuing bonds suggests that many bereaved people are comforted by a sense that the relationship has changed form rather than ended, and that this is most likely to feel comforting when the bond is carried inside, as memory, habit and a kind of ongoing conversation. A remembrance is a way of carrying it. You are not trying to summon them. You are keeping their place.
And there is a fourth reason. People often feel guilty the first time they laugh at a memory, as though happiness were evidence that they are moving on. It is evidence that the relationship was happy. A remembrance made on purpose, with the beach photo and the ridiculous expression, gives you permission to feel the good part without apologizing to the sad part.
Creating a Remembrance That Feels Right for You
What follows is practical. It is not a ritual to copy, and it is not an ofrenda, which belongs to the families who build one. It is a set of ways to make room for a pet on a day when you want to, with guidance for five situations that trip people up. Where research informs a suggestion, it is noted; otherwise it is simply what has helped people.
Start smaller than you think
A survey of older adults in Canada who had lost a dog or cat found that the remembrances they rated most helpful were the simplest: photographs, keepsakes, and a donation made in the pet’s name. Formal services and social media announcements were rated far less helpful. You need very little. One photograph in a frame you like. One candle. Their collar on the shelf. The water bowl, filled, for one evening.
When photographs bring back difficult memories
Photographs are the most detailed record of a pet you own, which is exactly why they can ambush you. If scrolling through hundreds leaves you wrecked, do not force it. Choose a route in rather than a flood. Ask someone who loved them to pick three photographs for you. Or start with a single early photograph, from long before any illness, and stop there. Small, chosen doses are easier than being caught by the camera roll at a bus stop, and they let you decide which afternoon you visit today. If a photograph is too much, close it. It will still be there next month, and so will the afternoon inside it.
When remembering their final days becomes overwhelming
If the memory of the end keeps crowding out everything before it, try choosing a memory on purpose rather than waiting for one to arrive. Pick a specific ordinary day and reconstruct it in detail: the time they woke you, what they did when the mail came, which spot in the yard they claimed in the sun. Write it down if that helps. You are not denying the final days. You are reminding your memory that it holds thousands of other days, and giving it a path to them. Some people find it helps to say, plainly, “that was the last week; this is the other twelve years,” and then deliberately turn toward one of the twelve. The memories of the end will still come. Over time, for many people, they stop arriving first.
When you feel guilty about enjoying yourself
If you laugh at the memory of them stealing a whole roast chicken off the counter and then feel a jolt of guilt, you have not done anything wrong. Grief and pleasure can share the same hour, and in bereavement research the ability to move between the two, rather than staying fixed in one, is generally considered a sign of coping. Enjoying a remembrance is not the same as being over it. It is often the first time since they died that you have felt the relationship rather than only the loss.
When a remembrance becomes too painful
You are allowed to stop. If you light the candle and the empty bed beside it is unbearable, blow the candle out. Nothing has been spoiled. If a full remembrance is too much, choose the smallest possible version: say their name out loud, once. Put their photograph where you will see it in the morning. Touch their collar. Fill the bowl and leave it for an hour. These take almost nothing, and they still count. You can also postpone. Their birthday will come around again, and so will October.
When you do not share spiritual beliefs
The Mexican tradition is built on the belief that the dead return. If you do not believe that, remembrance is not closed to you. Nothing about choosing a photograph, telling a story about them, or making a small space in your home depends on their spirit arriving to see it. The comfort, as far as research can tell, has more to do with what remembering does for the person doing it than with who is watching. Some people believe their pet visits them, in dreams or in a feeling of presence. Some do not. Both can leave a little light on tonight.
When You Don’t Feel Ready to Remember
Some of you have read this far and know that you are not going to light anything tonight. Their bed may still be in the corner, where you cannot move it and cannot look at it, and the idea of making a remembrance out of it feels like being asked to hold a wound open.
That is a reasonable place to be. The research on continuing bonds is clear that early in grief, and after a sudden or traumatic loss, deliberate remembering can hurt more than it helps. Readiness is not a character trait. It is mostly a matter of time, of whether the end was gentle or brutal, and of whether the people around you have let you grieve. If you are not ready, the best remembrance is to say so and to put nothing on a shelf.
If you want to do something but almost nothing, the options above still apply. Say their name once. Tell one person one story. If you would like their name kept somewhere, Remembering Beloved Pets is open to you. Or skip the day entirely and come back to it next year, when they will be exactly as loved as they are now.
There is also a middle path: let someone else remember on your behalf. A friend who knew them can light the candle. A child can draw them. A donation to a rescue in their name can happen without you looking at a single picture. The love gets its job done, and you get to stay in the chair.
The Love That Continues After Goodbye
For many people, something changes over the first year, and it is worth knowing in advance. The memories that ambush you become, slowly, memories you can visit. The bed in the corner becomes a bed you decided to keep. The photograph you could not open becomes the one on the shelf. None of this is forgetting. It is the relationship moving inside, where it is safe, and where it can last. For some people this takes much longer than a year, and for some the difficult memories keep their edge; if that is you, nothing in this article is a deadline.
What you are left with is not nothing. It is a dog who is still the reason you look at the sea a certain way. A cat who is still the reason you leave the closet door ajar. It is the voice you still use when you talk to them, the stories that still get told at the table, the fact that you will notice every spaniel on the street for the rest of your life.
Death has changed what the relationship can be. It has not erased what it was, and it has not erased what it still is, in you.
If They Could Find Their Way Home Tonight
If they could find their way home tonight, they would not need the marigolds. They would know the way. They would come to the door the way they always did, and they would not care whether the candle was lit.
But you might. And that is the point of leaving a light on. It was never really for them. It was for the part of you that is still listening for them at the door, and that deserves, for one evening, to say their name out loud and be allowed to mean it.
You cannot bring them back. You can make room for them, in whatever way you can bear tonight, and in a different way next year, and in a different way again the year after that. The room stays theirs.
If the dates keep coming
Remembrance is one evening. The year is longer. The First Year Without You is a month-by-month companion for the first twelve months after a pet dies, written for the person who is weeks or months in and wondering why it still hurts this much. It follows the year as it happens: the empty routines, the photographs and belongings, the questions about what happened, the first birthday and holiday without them, and the choice of how to meet the anniversary. Each month has a short practice, a page for a hard day, and space for memories, so you can open it on the date you are dreading rather than reading it cover to cover. You can start at whichever month you are in.
References
Peer-reviewed research
Brown, C., Brown, F., Wallace, J., Carr, E., Gross, D., Miciak, M., Wilson, D., and McCabe, E. (2023). Older adults and companion animal death: A survey of bereavement and disenfranchised grief. Human-Animal Interactions, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1079/hai.2023.0017
Carr, D., Sonnega, J., Nesse, R. M., and House, J. S. (2014). Do special occasions trigger psychological distress among older bereaved spouses? An empirical assessment of clinical wisdom. The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 69(1), 113 to 122. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbt061
Hewson, H., Galbraith, N., Jones, C., and Heath, G. (2023). The impact of continuing bonds following bereavement: A systematic review. Death Studies, advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2023.2223593
Hughes, B., and Lewis Harkin, B. (2025). The impact of continuing bonds between pet owners and their pets following the death of their pet: A systematic narrative synthesis. OMEGA: Journal of Death and Dying, 90(4), 1666 to 1684. https://doi.org/10.1177/00302228221125955
Hyland, P. (2026). No pets allowed: Evidence that prolonged grief disorder can occur following the death of a pet. PLOS ONE, 21(1), e0339213. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0339213
Leaune, E., Lau-Taï, P., and Pitman, A. (2025). The phenomenon of bereavement anniversary reactions: An integrative systematic review. Death Studies, 50(9). https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2025.2513997
Lykins, A. D., McGreevy, P. D., Bennett, B., Paul, N. K., and Gotsis, N. (2024). Attachment styles, continuing bonds, and grief following companion animal death. Death Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2023.2265868
Norton, M. I., and Gino, F. (2014). Rituals alleviate grieving for loved ones, lovers, and lotteries. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(1), 266 to 272. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0031772
Ryave, J., Kutrybala, I., O’Brien, J., Ruple, A., Wilkins, V., Schmid, S. M., et al. (2026). Owner-reported experiences are similar for dogs experiencing euthanasia or unassisted death: Evaluation of the Dog Aging Project’s End of Life Survey free-text responses. Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association. https://doi.org/10.2460/javma.25.07.0464
Vonk, J., Bouma, E. M. C., and Dijkstra, A. (2022). A time to say goodbye: Empathy and emotion regulation predict timing of end-of-life decisions by pet owners. Human-Animal Interactions, 10(1), 146 to 165. https://doi.org/10.1079/hai.2022.0013
Cultural and institutional sources
UNESCO. Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead (Mexico). Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, inscribed 2008. https://ich.unesco.org/en/lists?RL=00054
Gobierno de la Ciudad de México. Day of the Dead ofrendas. https://mexicocity.cdmx.gob.mx/day-of-the-dead-ofrendas/
Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino. The meaning of the altar. https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-meaning-of-the-altar/_QUBc67lRPvBIQ
Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (2023). Boletín 739: La tradición de Día de Muertos llega a museos y zonas arqueológicas del INAH. https://www.inah.gob.mx/images/boletines/2023/739/Boletin%20739.pdf
Crónica (2024). Cuándo llegan las mascotas por el Día de Muertos y qué se pone en la ofrenda. https://www.cronica.com.mx/cultura/2024/10/25/cuando-llegan-las-mascotas-por-el-dia-de-muertos-y-que-se-pone-en-la-ofrenda/
El Universal. ¿Cuál es el origen de la ofrenda de Día de Muertos para mascotas? https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/tendencias/cual-es-el-origen-de-la-ofrenda-de-dia-de-muertos-para-mascotas/
Expansión (2025). Por qué los mexicas creían que un perro te guía al Mictlán. https://expansion.mx/tendencias/2025/10/20/por-que-mexicas-creian-perro-te-guia-mictlan-despues-morir