The final ‘furwell’

Journalist s.e. smith is perhaps best known for their writing on disability and politics. However, over the course of nearly two decades working in media, they have also developed a body of work focused on what—on the surface—may seem niche: pet loss.  

In stories for publications such as Longreads, smith has grappled with the complexities of losing a beloved animal—work that has deeply resonated with readers. Over the years, they received a slew of messages from people about their dead pets. These exchanges confirmed to smith how difficult it often feels for people to mourn animals amid global pandemics, genocide, and other events of mass death among humans.

While reporting a 2020 feature for Bitch Magazine about the expiration date society often places on mourning, smith began to connect the dots between why Western society has cultural baggage around death and how grief is pathologized under capitalism. This body of work inspired their debut memoir, “All My Dead Cats and Other Losses: Practicing Good Grief in a Culture That Fears Mourning.”

“All My Dead Cats” will be released by Harper One on July 28. To promote the book, smith is speaking in California at the Mill Valley Public Library on Aug. 6. 

The author recently spoke to Prism about how capitalism impacts our ability to grieve, the intersections of labor and grief, and the importance of proactive death planning.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Adryan Corcione: Prior to writing this book on grief, you extensively reported on death and dying. What inspired you to turn this canon of work into a reported memoir?

s.e. smith: As a journalist, whenever I write about grief, death, and dying, especially pet loss, I get an outpouring of emails in response with people telling me about their beloved pets; telling me they don’t feel seen, heard, or respected; that they have difficulty with these conversations; and sometimes they’ve been holding on to this kind of thing for years. That sparked an interest in how we relate to pet death specifically, but then more broadly, why we’re so uncomfortable with death and loss in general.

I started working on a feature for Bitch about complicated grief. In the course of researching, I connected dots of why we struggle so much with conversations about mourning and how it tends to be pathologized, especially when it comes to anything that affects your value under capitalism. Any time grief or mourning disrupts your ability to work, or disrupts economic activity in general, it leads us to question the ways in which capitalism harms us and the ways in which grief and loss intersect with capitalism’s harms. Western society searches for ways to marginalize that grief to make it less important, to get people to not express it.

Any time grief or mourning disrupts your ability to work, or disrupts economic activity in general, it leads us to question the ways in which capitalism harms us and the ways in which grief and loss intersect with capitalism’s harms.

Corcione: In the first chapter, you write about the death of your first childhood cat. You use this memory to explore how children are denied grief. How does this experience often shape our cultural norms around grief?

smith: Anything that happens to us in childhood shapes both who we are as people and, by extension, the society that we live in. Children are learning from a young age that grief should be hidden. It should have some kind of expiration date and timeline. Grief is somehow dangerous or threatening. They’re going to carry that into their life as adults, and it’s going to affect the way that they talk to the people about these topics.

That is core to the conversation in this book: How do you talk about grief and loss when from such an early stage of your life you’re told these things are bad? That highlights some cultural differences around these conversations. In interviews with Latinx families, I had people talk about death all the time. One of my interviewees told me that her grandma is always talking about the dress that she wants at her funeral, the music she wants played, the food she wants eaten. 

Discomfort around death is a very specific product of white, particularly Christian, culture in the United States. This culture influences so much of how we interact with the world more broadly, even if you are not from the Christian background, you’re still internalizing this messaging about keeping things quiet, not engaging with these things.

Corcione: It feels colonial.

smith: Exactly.

Corcione: Over the course of your career, you’ve also reported extensively on labor. Does labor intersect with grief? 

smith: In the U.S., a theme is the sense of being entitled to people, entitled to their bodies, entitled to their work, entitled to their lives. When people are in workplaces that are extremely dangerous or traumatic, there is very much an assumption that they’re just supposed to deal with it or that this is just a cost of doing business. That shows up also in conversations around bereavement leave. Very few companies offer bereavement leave. Very few states offer protections for bereavement leave, and it’s usually for first-degree relatives, and it’s very limited.

Another thing that comes up is that loss doesn’t have to be about death. If you are an astronaut who’s worked your entire life to be an astronaut, and you are blinded in astronaut training, that’s a huge loss and form of grief that we don’t acknowledge culturally. 

Corcione: In your book, you discuss the harsh working conditions experienced by animal shelter workers, who you write are more likely to develop PTSD than the general population. You also draw upon your experience as an animal shelter volunteer. This is likely not something many people have thought about. What do you want readers to know about shelter workers and grief? 

smith: Again, it’s this topic of disrespect for labor and entitlement to people’s work. Animal shelter workers fall into a category of “cause work,” a term from Sarah Jaffe’s book, “Work Won’t Love You Back.” The idea is you are working for a good cause. That means that you aren’t entitled to labor protections; that complaining about your working conditions is saying you don’t care about the cause. There’s also the fact that animal sheltering inherently has bad outcomes, no matter what kind of shelter you’re working in. It is obviously emotional to have any kind of connection with a living being who dies, but sometimes these bad outcomes also come from sad stories.

You’re often seeing not just animals at low stages in their lives, but also people. You have people who come in, for example, because they are involved in intimate partner violence, and the only way they can get their pet to safety is to surrender them to a shelter. Or you have people who are being evicted or can’t afford medical costs. All of these people are heartbroken to be surrendering their pets; that’s a lot to deal with.

Corcione: More broadly, what do you hope readers take away from your book?

smith: Grief manifests in different ways. What other people do with their grief might look different than yours, and that doesn’t mean they’re doing it wrong. It also means that you should support other people in the varied stages of their grief, even if you think it’s wrong, or you don’t like the way that it manifests. Reflect on what it means for your own grief. You shouldn’t feel bad if your sibling died after two years of grueling cancer treatment, and you feel relieved or even happy, right? Society really views that poorly.

Be gentle to yourself in your own grief. Question what grief looks like and what it means under colonialism and capitalism: Why are some kinds of grief more acceptable? Who is allowed to mourn and how?

Corcione: Given people’s aversion to grief and the shame around pet loss, did you have any reluctance writing this book? 

smith: Given the title of the book, I think people are going to [assume], “This is a pet loss book.” Pet loss is what I’ve been referring to as my “gateway drug” because it’s something more relatable and less scary for readers. Each chapter does start with a personal narrative about death and expands to talk about the implications for humans.

In the disenfranchised grief chapter, I talk about people who have experienced pet death who feel they can’t talk about it, that it’s not appropriate in the middle of a mass death like a pandemic. If you can relate to this, can you extend it to other people? Can you think about what that might mean for people facing losses that are marginalized? Maybe it’s a pregnancy loss, for example. Can you also use that to expand out, like, what if grief is about more than death? What might that look like? I try to give readers something relatable to open with instead of just plunging right into it, which I think makes people more receptive to these conversations.

Corcione: After spending so much of your career writing about loss and grief, what advice related to death would you offer to readers?

smith: It’s really important for people to plan ahead for death. I urge people to think about advanced directives, where you’re making medical decisions, which can include conversations about when to withdraw life support or how much intervention you want in the case of a serious, potentially lethal diagnosis.

If you have concerns about whether you want to be buried, cremated, or composted— also what name you want associated with your remains—you need to fill out that paperwork. Do some research. Download a sample will off the internet, fill it out, and get two witnesses on it. Always double-check your state laws. I encourage people to have those conversations before the crisis point. Even for people who don’t have property, this isn’t just about planning for physical objects. What do you want from your end of life? What kind of care do you want? Who do you want to be there?

Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor