There is a particular kind of loneliness in grieving a pet in a culture that isn’t sure the grief is real. Fred Jandt knows it well. In his new book, A Hard Farewell: Dealing with the Loss, Grief, and End of the Sacred Bond with Our Pets, he opens not with a thesis but with a confession: standing at his desk the Monday after his cat Yoda died, he found himself hoping his coworkers wouldn’t notice he was grieving. How, he wondered, would he explain that he was mourning a cat?
That question, half shame and half genuine bewilderment, becomes the engine of the book. Jandt, a man with a demanding career and a full life of family and community obligations, had made room for one small, insistent presence, a cat who, he writes, gave him far more than he ever had time to give her. When she died in the early hours of a November Sunday, he did what many grieving people now do first. He went to his computer.
What follows in the book’s opening section is less a chronicle of stages than a real-time record of a man searching, often fruitlessly, for something to hold onto. He finds generic grief literature that describes his feelings without relieving them. He revisits a decades-old Time interview with Billy Graham, mourning his own wife, and wonders whether it’s permissible to borrow those words for a cat. He finds The Rainbow Bridge story, of uncertain origin and disputed mythology, and copies it out anyway, because it offers a shape for something that otherwise has none. He orders a book by the psychic Sylvia Browne, less because he believes in psychics, he’s careful to note, than because he wants, badly, some assurance that Yoda still exists in some form.
Jandt doesn’t resolve these searches so much as sit inside them, and that refusal to tidy up the material is what gives the book its emotional honesty. He is willing to be a little embarrassed on the page, to admit he Googled his way through grief, to admit the answers he found were mostly inadequate, to admit he kept looking anyway. Readers who have lost a pet and quietly wondered whether their grief was excessive will likely recognize themselves here immediately.
The book’s second half turns from Jandt’s search for meaning to Yoda’s actual story, how she entered his life and, in spare, unflinching detail, how she left it. He describes her final hours with the kind of precision that only comes from having relived a memory many times: her diminished weight, her stillness on a fleece pad by the glass door, the four a.m moment he woke and knew, before he fully knew, that something had changed. It is difficult material, and Jandt says so directly, warning readers before they enter it.
Interspersed throughout are blank spaces, invitations for readers to write their own stories of loss alongside his. The structure reflects Jandt’s stated aim, which is not to offer expertise on grief but companionship inside it. He raises, almost as an aside, a question that has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries, what do we actually know about the inner life of a cat, whose hearing range alone dwarfs our own, not to settle it, but to suggest that dismissing a companion animal’s inner world, and by extension the grief of losing it, may say more about human limitation than about the animal itself.
A Hard Farewell arrives without the pretense of authority. It is, instead, one man’s account of an ordinary, overwhelming loss, offered to anyone who has stood in a kitchen or an office, grieving something the people around them may not think to ask about. Proceeds and attention, Jandt notes in his dedication, are meant to support the Humane Society of the United States, the ASPCA, Alley Cat Allies, Best Friends Animal Society, and local cat rescue groups.
The book is available in print and e-book editions.
