What a lion, a rabbi, and a dog taught me about grief

By Benyamin Cohen
April 30, 2025

In 1912, a Hungarian princess living at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel threw a wake for her lion cub. The animal, named Goldfleck, had been part of the Ringling brothers circus. When he died unexpectedly, the princess didn’t know what to do with his body. So she buried him in Hartsdale, a leafy patch of land north of New York City that today is the oldest pet cemetery in the United States.

More than a century later, Goldfleck rests under a marble gravestone alongside 70,000 other animals: dogs, cats, ferrets, birds, turtles, guinea pigs. There are about 900 humans interred there, too, those who couldn’t imagine eternity without their pets. The grounds are dotted with angel statues and paws carved in stone. People bring flowers. They cry. They remember.

“Unlike some human cemeteries where there’s certain sections for different religions, we don’t have that,” said Ed Martin, whose family has run Hartsdale for half a century. “So you could have a Jewish dog next to a Catholic cat.”

Grief is supposed to follow a script. Someone dies, and Jewish tradition tells us what to wear, what to say, when to mourn, when to stop. But the script doesn’t cover what happens when what you’ve lost had four legs, a tail, and no words.

This is where American grief has quietly expanded. For many, pets are not just companions; they are kin. According to Pew Research, nearly half of all U.S. households have a dog, and most say their pets are part of the family. What happens when they die is not just a logistical question, but a spiritual one.

Martin has buried his own family’s dogs there, including his childhood cocker spaniel, Ophelia. He gets it. When someone loses a pet, he said, it’s not just the emotional pain that hits. It’s the interruption of routine. “We have routines that are very ingrained into our daily life,” he told me. “And when our pet passes away, all of a sudden, that schedule is disrupted. Everything is a reminder of what we lost.”

That disruption — physical, emotional, even theological — is where Rabbi Andrea Frank comes in. A Reform rabbi-for-hire based in Westchester County, she performs funerals for animals. She once officiated a burial for her own parrot, Sparky, who lived to 44 and would ask, with uncanny timing, “Are you okay?”

Frank sees pet funerals as essential, not eccentric. “It’s a visual, comforting knowing that we are returning them back to God, because God blessed us by giving us these beautiful animals,” she said. She believes these ceremonies offer closure. A way to sanctify the bond.

And yet, she said, grief over a pet is often lonelier than grief over a person. “People say: ‘It’s been six months since your pet died. You’re not over it yet?’ Nobody would say that about a beloved grandmother.”

Some mourners, she said, whisper the Shema prayer when they miss their animals. It’s just two lines. But in the silence of loss, they become a kind of tether. A testament that remembering is, itself, a sacred act.

A dog loss, and a life lesson

I called Rabbi Frank a few days after our pug Spike died on Passover.

Packing up the Seder plate and sweeping the matzah crumbs felt like its own mourning ritual. A tuft of dog hair caught my eye near the baseboard. Spike’s? Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, I left it there. You don’t sweep away a ghost.

Every morning had begun with Spike’s slow emergence from his crate. Every night ended with me settling him back in, like a custom no prayer book had ever bothered to record. In between, he moved through the house like a second heartbeat: quiet, steady, always there.

There are many memories of Spike. But the one that clings is his quiet faith that everything would be fine. Our other pug, Fergus, is the neurotic one: barking at everything, worrying, sensing apocalypse behind every UPS truck. Spike was the opposite. He lived by a different rhythm. One that could be summarized: Nap when you can. Don’t argue with idiots. Assume the food will come.

When a neurological disorder took his back legs, we got Spike a wheelchair — a chariot, really. He wasn’t fazed by his new reality. He adapted. Maybe that’s why his loss feels so outsized. Spike’s life was a master class in what Judaism often struggles to teach us: to be here, now. To accept what you can’t change. To find holiness even in the parts that seem undignified.

There’s no kaddish for dogs. But grief still shows up, uninvited and unruly, slipping into rituals that weren’t built to hold it.

Zachor. Remember. Keep alive what matters.

Love lingers. So does the hair.

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