Good Grief: new episode out on pet grief with author E.B. Bartels!
This month I speak with nonfiction author E.B. Bartels on her journey through her profound connection with animals and the grief that accompanies the loss of a pet, motherhood, and healing rituals.
There is a man in my building who often greets me with “Hello young lady,” and each time I force a smile. It’s not worth the confrontation, I reason. Telling him to stop. I’ll see him day after day, and isn’t it better to have him feel a paternal force towards me than something more sinister?
But isn’t it? To constantly bring forward a woman’s appearance, and the presumption of her naivety or innocence due to a perceived age? The desire to do so reveals more about his own desire to find value in his own age, whatever discomfort it is my presence stirs in him. This often happens at work, getting confused for a student rather than professor. Or on jobs I’ve been hired for, or for opportunities I’ve won. How old are you? How old are you? AKA, why do you have the right to be here?
Youth is something many cling to—the undying trend of ranking artists under 40 or shutting down conversations on death and dying with forced positivity. Ours is a death-phobic culture, reflected not just in the embarrassingly short bereavement leaves, but the lack of public rituals for mourning.
Grief, too, is often seen as a process reserved for the loss of other humans. While I’ve learned my grief journey for the loss of my father is lifelong, there is no end date, I often felt strange about the intense pain I felt, a similar one, when a childhood pet passed. I’ve learned over time that grief is something we experience for not only our family, pets, and the grotesque loss of animal life through farming, but for dreams. For relationships, past lives. Promises and wishes. What we’ve attached to leaves an absence when it feels as though that attachment has been broken whether through death, betrayal, breakup, or other means of separation.
“We can really learn a lot from them about the here and now,” author E.B. Bartels replies when I ask what we can learn from other animals on how best to live our lives with the knowledge of its impermenance.
This month, I speak with E.B. about her memoir Good Grief: On Loving Pets Here and Hereafter (HarperCollins), and in our conversation she shares with me her thoughts on motherhood, communal grieving, pet families, and interspecies friendships.
“There’s no right or wrong way to grieve,” she says. “Grieve in whatever way you need to grieve.”
E.B. Bartels. (HarperCollins)
E.B. Bartels is a nonfiction writer, a former Newtonville Books bookseller, and a GrubStreet instructor, with a BA in Russian from Wellesley College and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia University.
Her work has appeared in Salon, Slate, WBUR, Literary Hub, Catapult, Electric Literature, The Believer, The Rumpus, The Millions, The Toast, The Butter, and the anthology The Places We’ve Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35, among others. For Fiction Advocate, she writes the monthly columns Non-Fiction by Non-Men, in which she interviews women, trans, and non-binary people who write nonfiction, and Non-Fiction about Non-Humans, in which she interviews people who write nonfiction about animals.
In addition to writing, E.B. also works as a freelance editor, a manuscript consultant, a writing coach, a tutor, and a senior editorial writer in the communications and public affairs department at Wellesley College. She lives outside Boston with her husband, Richie, and their a chihuahua-pitbull mix (Seymour), a pair of red-footed tortoises (Terrence and Twyla), a small flock of pigeons (Bert, Lieutenant Dan, George, and Lucille), and a dozen fish (all named Milton).
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Stay present. Stay well.
With love,
Juliana