Narrative Reflections on Losing a Companion Animal

Abstract

This article uses personal narrative and embodied experiences as autoethnographic strategies to explore the grief of losing a companion animal. It draws on my experiences as a disabled academic who continues to teach and navigate the terrain of writing. Losing my dog, Flake, has left me unable to voice the trauma. Throughout, I draw on various scholars’ interpretations of writing, loss, trauma, and nonhuman relationships, and emerge with a tribute to our significant relationships to others: friends, students, nonhuman animals.