Finding Coco in the Forest

by Dr. Talia Marcheggiani, ND | Jun 12, 2025 | Animals, Grief, Mental Health, Narrative Therapy, Nature, Psychology, Psychotherapy

On Pet Loss, Crossing the Rainbow Bridge, and The Places Grief Lives

My grief is tremendous, but my love is bigger.

– Cheryl Strayed

For my entire childhood, I wanted a dog. I didn’t care what kind of dog it was; I just wanted one. A sensitive child entering the world of broken promises and ruptured friendships, I craved the unconditional love of an animal. I would read to him and tell her about school: my dissociated teachers, the kids who had hurt my feelings, and my dreams and aspirations. I imagined he would sit there, forever interested, lovingly listening.

My parents promised my brother and me a puppy when I was nine and he was six. Instead, we got hamsters, gerbils, fish, and turtles.

After spending Christmas with my family in Canada, I returned to Bogota, Colombia, with my ex-boyfriend, Joe. I was 24 years old and taught English for two years out of university. I walked into our shared apartment, set down my things, looked up, and there he was! A tiny, black and tan Yorkshire terrier—Coco Loco.

I sat with him across my lap. He tucked his little head inside the crook of my elbow—lights out. His soft head and cold, wet nose tickled the inside of my arm. He and I would sit this way, my arms around his curled-up body, his head tucked—yoked together in warmth and comfort until his last day.

Small, rambunctious and mischievous, Coco was a ferocious ball of unbridled puppy joy. He chewed everything, peed everywhere, and once unravelled an entire roll of toilet paper while waiting for me to get out of the shower.

We walked everywhere in Bogota. He travelled on buses and accompanied Joe and me on long hikes through the Colombian jungles and countryside, harassing chickens and balancing on logs stretched over deep, rushing streams. He was curious and intelligent, head cocked, ears alert, always with some agenda.

When it was time for me to leave Bogota and return to Toronto to start naturopathic college, Coco flew with me. Emerging from the confines of his travels, he was soon bounding around my parents’ yard, paws touching new soil. He loved Canada: the snow, the squirrels, his family. He grew to be 16 pounds, giant for a Yorkie.

For the next 15 years, Coco was my faithful shadow. He was there throughout my four years at the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine, witnessing me studying for and passing my board exams. Coco joined me on the ride to the centre for the first round of board exams, perched on my knees. As we pulled into the parking lot, he sensed my anxiety and started shaking. He was my emotional mirror, our bodies empathically in tune.

He watched me graduate and start my clinical practice. He saw me fall in and out of love, move, try and fail, and try again, his nose nudging my tears after every heartbreak and disappointment.

My naturopathic medicine practice moved online in 2020, and I became a psychotherapist in 2024. Coco was at my feet during every patient encounter, absorbing all your stories and witnessing your humanity.

For 11 years, Coco volunteered as a St. John’s Ambulance Therapy Dog. Once a week, he would proudly wait for my dad by the door in his uniform—a bandana that read, “Please Pet Me.” They’d roam the hospital halls, bringing cheer to patients and burnt-out staff.

In a blog I kept while at the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine, I wrote many posts about how Coco taught me to live. He brought me fully into my kinship with nature. We hiked through parks in Toronto and logged hundreds of kilometres on the Bruce Trail. I remember him gliding ahead along the narrow path, light streaming through the trees, an orchestra of birds punctuating the quiet rhythm of our footsteps and breath, hearts held by the magnanimous life that was all around.

Dogs offer us a pure form of love and connection. Their unconditional love can soothe the wounds accumulated from our imperfect human attachments.

They are grounded, noses connected to the Earth. And this grounding keeps their lives in the moment, up for adventure, and free from the overthinking and neurosis that block our trust and joy.

Dogs remind us of our ancient history, when we lived in tune with nature’s frequencies, a time long forgotten but deeply missed. Dogs’ presence tells us the truth: the doors on our cages and cubicles are unlocked. We are still wild. And the earth patiently awaits our return.

Nature has guided me through pain and heartache. When I lose touch with myself, I return to the beach and the forest to find it. Coco taught me this.

He brought me to the forest, set me free, and left me there. He died on April 22, 2025. And I’ve returned many times to find him among the roots, the leaves, and the joy of other dogs living fully, who love their lives enough to lose them.

Over a year ago, Coco stopped eating. As the vet was running tests, my stomach turned over with anguish. He was diagnosed with an inflammatory bowel disease, and his prognosis was poor. But, despite their size and teddy bear appearance, terriers are persistent, tenacious fighters. After a few days of steroids, antibiotics, and a special diet, Coco miraculously bounced back. Still, the vet cautioned that he would likely need to be on prednisone and his condition closely monitored for the rest of his life.

Over the next year, Coco stoically trudged on. He kept up his fighting spirit until his last day—terriers never give up. Although duller and more easily fatigued, he motored along Great Lakes beaches and hiked in Nova Scotia. When he could no longer walk much, he rolled around in his dog stroller or rode on my back. When he was too tired to lift his head, I sometimes walked alone.

The prednisone thinned his fur, whithered his muscles, and messed with his sleep. I had to carry him up and downstairs, help him stand, and carry him outside. Each night, at two, three, four in the morning, sometimes several times a night, I would haul myself out of bed, nauseous with exhaustion, to take him out. I would fumble for my keys and coat in the darkness, and we would stand outside, wordlessly shivering with cold. I would wait for him, watching the snow blow in the glow of the street lamps, my body begging to return to the warmth of my bed.

Other nights, I was too late and calmly cleaned his mess while he watched me, confused and ashamed.

Eventually, the vet confirmed his kidneys were failing. He stopped keeping his food down. He began coughing and struggling to breathe. His heart was failing.

When referring to putting down a pet, people will tell you you’ll know the right time. They will tell you a dog won’t get up, or they’ll stop eating. Or, the vet will confirm it, waking you from your indecision and denial. Sometimes old dogs will pass peacefully in their sleep. Most likely, however, you will have to decide when, where, and how to end your best friend’s life.

Euthanasia is an impossible choice, like cutting off a part of yourself to spare the whole. Coco couldn’t tell me in words what he wanted, but if he could, how could one choose a road unseen, with the destination unknown? When pets die, the poem goes, they cross the Rainbow Bridge. Beyond the bridge lies a lush, sunlit meadow, where animals run free with old friends, and rest in warmth and comfort, nourished and unhurt. It’s an image that’s brought comfort to many pet owners. I don’t know if the Rainbow Bridge exists, but I knew he was suffering here.

My heart cracked under the weight of it all, and I made the call: I would lovingly release him from this life and guide him to the bridge. It was time.

There is a saying in veterinary medicine, “Better a month too early than a day too late,” and I let that steady my hand as I made the arrangement for a hospice vet to come to our house on April 22nd at 4:00 p.m.

When the vet came and eventually took Coco away, she left a pamphlet that contained this poem, called The Last Battle, author unknown, that reads,

If it should be that I grow frail and weak

And pain should keep me from my sleep,

Then will you do what must be done,

For this — the last battle — can’t be won.

You will be sad I understand,

But don’t let grief then stay your hand,

For on this day, more than the rest,

Your love and friendship must stand the test.

We have had so many happy years,

You wouldn’t want me to suffer so.

When the time comes, please let me go.

Many pet owners wrestle with the idea that we shouldn’t have the power to end our companions’ lives. Yet we’ve made every other choice for them: what they eat, where they sleep, when they go out. “Euthanasia” means “good death.” Offering this to Coco felt like a final act of stewardship: a responsibility to our bond and a firm expression of my love. When the time comes, please let me go.

It is hard to describe those final days, as we both hung between worlds, at the threshold of the Rainbow Bridge. Time slowed down. Every breath and moment hung heavy before evaporating into the ethers of the past. Soon, the past was all we’d have.

Anxiety, fear, and doubt swirling around, I found the eye of the hurricane on those last days. We walked to the lake on our final night together to watch the sunset. A thick mist fell, and we settled on Muskoka chairs, Coco’s head tucked, our breathing in sync. I could feel his last few heartbeats against my thigh.

On April 22nd, I gave him a Perfect Last Day. We went to the Pet Store, ate cheeseburgers, wheeled through High Park, and took our last hike together, the sun warming our faces. Something in the air must have revealed the gravity of the moment, the brevity of our time and the impending goodbye, because people lingered around us.

Two older women walking in the park smiled as they passed, “He looks so comfortable in his stroller,” one said. When I told them it was his last day, they both embraced me as I sobbed. One of them took a picture of us together.

After saying goodbye to her beloved 19-year-old dog, my friend and her husband went to the lake. A lady snapped a photo of them, saying they looked beautiful watching the sunrise together. “Sometimes people can sense when a stranger needs a beautiful moment to hold on to,” she said. Grief can soften our walls and invite others in.

We went home and sat together that last hour, waiting for the vet. He lay on my chest. The sun was beautiful. I saw the shape of Yorkies in the clouds.

His last moments were peaceful; he never left my arms. “He’s gone,” said the hospice vet, gently. She gathered her things as I sat with him. Then she wrapped him up, and they were gone.

The mantle of loneliness wrapped me tightly. Now it was just my grief and I.

The word “grief” comes from the Latin “gravis,” which means “heavy” or “serious.” Related words are “grave,” “gravity,” and even “gravitas.”

As a society, we squirm away from grief. We fumble with the words to comfort and wrestle away from the stronghold of sorrow. We numb, distract, try to move on, and forget. But life’s truth is harsh: we will lose everything we love. Grief comes for us all; it is the work of the living to hold and process it.

Psychoanalyst Francis Weller says, “Grief is much more than an emotion. It is one of the central faculties of being human.

“Grief is a core capacity that allows us to digest the most bitter experiences into something meaningful, perhaps beautiful, something vital and alive.”

So often, depression is not depression at all, but oppression, unprocessed grief that accumulates around the heart like a sediment, blocking us from our vitality and the joy of our being (Weller, 2015). To chip away at this hardened sludge, we must learn to sit with grief, invite it in, name it, and give it space to release, thus becoming “skilled in the art of loss.” Grief work keeps the heart fluid and soft.

And so, I wade into the dark waters, welcomed by the other bereaved. When we dive into the blackness, we join the collective pool of human suffering. This community expands the heart’s container, deepening its wells of compassion. Grief work is soul work. It is necessary work.

Poet Rainer Maria Rilke says, “Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.”

We live in a culture of lightness, upward mobility, positivity, and optimism. We fear the descent into blackness. But my God is dark. We were gestated in the darkness of our mothers’ wombs. Our hearts beat in darkness. Seeds grow below the dark depths of the earth. Sometimes, we must enter the shadows, the depths of despair, to bring the riches back up to the light. Alchemical Psychology calls this descent “the nigredo.”

In the nigredo of grief, the ego softens. The rigid self we once hid behind begins to dissolve (Barn Life Recovery, 2020). We lose our usual sense of who we are, yet somehow become more fully ourselves. As we feel the pain of losing what we loved, we also feel love in its purest form. This is soul work because in the end, the soul remains.

Terry Tempest Williams says, “Grief dares us to love once more.”

What if we approach our grief experience not with resistance but hands together and head bowed in reverence?

According to Francis Weller, when we hold gratitude in one hand and grief in the other, and bring them together, we are now in the prayer of life. Oscar Wilde says, “Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.”

In The Smell of Rain on Dust, Martín Prechtel writes that grief work is not only about expressing sorrow but transforming pain into beauty using the gifts given by the spirits. Grief requires a container and release. We must keep it warm through writing, poetry, meditation, contemplation, and art. Through creating, we weave the memories of those we’ve lost into the fabric of life and unravel the cycles of trauma born from unexpressed grief.

The morning after Coco died, I leapt out of the shower in a panic. I grabbed my phone and texted the hospice vet, asking them to change the urn I requested. I got back in the shower, calmer. Wait, was I crazy? I settled for a second, then threw open the shower curtain, suds flying, and texted back, “Sorry, no wait, the original decision stands, sorry, I changed my mind…again.” Was I insane?

Before Coco died, they had talked about the ashes. Did I want a private cremation? What did I wish for the ashes? The details had felt irrelevant, far away. I just wanted my dog. In Scandinavia, an individual would spend a sacred season in the ashes of their loss, occupying a parallel world of mourning, from which they would emerge changed (Weller, 2015). Ashes carry the gravity of what we’ve lost. My soul, too, knew it wanted to walk with the ashes. What would be reborn there?

In my closet now sits a memory box containing some of Coco’s things: his sweater, a collar, and a cherry twig, with buds, which I picked up the day of our last hike in a moment frozen in late April before the cherries blossomed. Martin Pretchel reminds us that grief is praise. It is a natural way to honour what one misses.

Many people offered comforting words, reminding me that Coco had a “Good Life.” In his book Going Home: Finding Peace When Pets Die, John Katz (2012) discusses the idea of the “Good Life.” He says, “When you clear away all of the emotional confusion, there is this: all we can give our pets is a Good Life. We can’t do more than that. We miss them because that life was good, loving, and joyful. Too often, this truth is lost in our grieving.”

Camus echoes the sentiment in saying, “The deeper the sorrow, the greater the joy.”

The box contains a framed picture of us at a lake in Quebec, watching the sunset—one beautiful moment among many of a life well-lived.

One thing people have said is that Coco will always be with me. I want to believe this, but as the distance from our last day grows, I feel him fading. I haven’t forgotten, but his presence feels quieter, harder to reach.

In his beautiful poem, For Grief, John O’Donahue writes,

Gradually, you will learn acquaintance 
With the invisible form of your departed; 
And, when the work of grief is done, 
The wound of loss will heal 
And you will have learned 
To wean your eyes 
From that gap in the air 
And be able to enter the hearth 
In your soul where your loved one 
Has awaited your return 
All the time.

Cheryl Strayed (2021) describes how her mother wanted her tombstone to say, I am always with you. “But I want you actually with me!” She protested. Coco and I will never make new memories again. He is another ghost gone into the gap in the air.

On the 30th anniversary of her mother’s death, Strayed writes, “Thirty years gone and my mother is always with me. Thirty years gone, and I still ache for her every day. Thirty years gone, and my sorrow has sweetened into gratitude.

“How lucky I am to have been her daughter. To still be. To feel her shimmering in my bones with every step.”

Sweet, little Coco, you will always be my dog.

Last week, I had my brother’s dog, Toby, with me. He is a 4-year-old mini golden doodle with nowhere to go while my brother and sister-in-law work, so I take him out sometimes. That day, he bounded around the beach, wild with joy, with a newfound freedom that must have felt like a dream.

I watched him with a heart that wanted to meet him in his happiness, but my heart still feels lost in the nigredo. When the work of grief is done, and the sediment is cleared, I’m not sure what I will find in my soul’s hearth, on the other side of sorrow’s edge. Maybe it will be Toby’s wild doggy grin, inviting me to play and dance among the dunes.

The poem I Walk With You (Author Unknown) goes,

I stood by your bed last night, I came to have a peep.
I could see that you were crying, You found it hard to sleep.

I whined to you softly as you brushed away a tear,
“It’s me, I haven’t left you, I’m well, I’m fine, I’m here.”

I was close to you at breakfast, I watched you pour the tea,
You were thinking of the many times, your hands reached down to me.

I was with you at the shops today, Your arms were getting sore.
I longed to take your parcels, I wish I could do more.

I was with you at my grave today, You tend it with such care.
I want to reassure you, that I’m not lying there.

I walked with you towards the house, as you fumbled for your key.
I gently put my paw on you, I smiled and said “it’s me.”

You looked so very tired, and sank into a chair.
I tried so hard to let you know, that I was standing there.

It’s possible for me, to be so near you everyday.
To say to you with certainty, “I never went away.”

You sat there very quietly, then smiled, I think you knew …
In the stillness of that evening, I was very close to you.

The day is over and I smile and watch you yawning
And say “goodnight, God bless, I’ll see you in the morning.”

And when the time is right for you to cross the brief divide,
I’ll rush across to greet you and we’ll stand, side by side.

I have so many things to show you, there is so much for you to see.
Be patient, live your journey out, then come home to be with me.

Last year, Nonna passed away, a few weeks before her 97th birthday. We must carry her with us, telling the “Nonna Stories” that capture her witty mind and fierce heart.

I took Toby to the woods where Coco and I used to walk. Young and free, he tore through the trees. “He doesn’t hike like Coco,” I told my mom. “He runs around in circles and doesn’t listen.”

“He’ll learn,” She said.

Last week, we found a quiet rhythm as we walked; Toby was a few paces ahead. He stopped, turned, and waited for me. Birdsong carried through the stillness. Something in the way he cocked his head reminded me of Coco. My heart still feels empty and full of missing him, but maybe, in the quiet hearth of my soul, head tilted, ears listening, he waits, too,

For my return,

all the time.

References:

Barn Life Recovery. (2020, June 9). A deeper look at the nigredo. https://barnliferecovery.com/a-deeper-look-at-the-nigredo/

Katz, J. (2012). Going home: Finding peace when pets die. Random House Trade Paperbacks.

Prechtel, M. (2015). The smell of rain on dust: Grief and praise. North Atlantic Books.

Strayed, C. (2021, March 18). Our stories survive us.

Strayed, C. (2022). Tiny beautiful things. Atlantic Books.

Weller, F. (2015). The wild edge of sorrow: Rituals of renewal and the sacred work of grief (3rd ed.). North Atlantic Books.