When a family's pet is in decline, the hardest part often isn't the clinical moment at the end. It's the weeks before, when no one seems to know what to say, and the weeks after, when life keeps moving while grief stays put.

A recent piece in AAHA Trends by Kristen Green Seymour highlights something most vet professionals already feel but rarely have time to address: pet loss grief is profound, often underestimated, and frequently isolating. A survey of 975 UK adults found that 7.5% of people who lost a pet met criteria for prolonged grief disorder, a rate nearly equivalent to that seen after the death of a human sibling. And among people who had lost both a pet and a human, 21% said the pet's death was more distressing.

For families who rely on at-home veterinary care, this grief looks a little different: the caregiver isn't a stranger in a clinic, they're someone who's been in the house for months.

The Home Setting Changes Everything

When a pet passes in a familiar space rather than in a clinic, the family's relationship to that grief shifts. The home is where routines lived. The bed, the yard, the couch where the dog always napped. As Dr. Tyler Carmack, director of hospice and palliative care at Caring Pathways, explained in the AAHA piece:

Many people share that this loss is harder than that of a human loved one. Closely tied to that is the loss of unconditional love and companionship.
Dr. Tyler Carmack

For vet tech caregivers making in-home visits, you're not just seeing the patient. You're inside the environment where that relationship lives. You see the food bowl by the door, the worn-out toy in the corner, the spot on the rug where the cat always slept. That context gives you something a clinic visit rarely offers: a fuller picture of what this family is navigating.

It also creates responsibility. Families who receive at-home care may form a different kind of bond with the caregiver, one built on repeated visits in a personal space. When end of life approaches, the expectation of support, whether verbalized or not, comes with that relationship.

What Preparatory Conversations Actually Do

The AAHA Trends piece makes a strong case that grief support should begin well before the final appointment. Dr. Monica Tarantino, MBA, cofounder of Senior Dog Veterinary Society, noted that "one of the most significant gaps in our training" is the lack of a roadmap for guiding families through what aging actually looks like for their pet.

This is especially true in at-home settings, where the caregiver sees progressive decline visit by visit. A family managing a senior dog's mobility issues, or a cat's kidney disease, benefits enormously from a caregiver who can name what they're seeing and contextualize it, not just clinically, but emotionally.

That doesn't mean adding "counselor" to anyone's job description. It means using the access you already have. Asking how the family is doing. Naming the hard thing. Recommending quality-of-life scales like Lap of Love's or Caring Pathways' Pathway to Care Assessment. Normalizing the fact that anticipatory grief, grieving a loss before it happens, is real and valid.

What This Means for Practices and Caregivers

  • Build grief into your standard workflow, not as a specialty add-on. The data is clear: practices that support clients through end-of-life care retain them at significantly higher rates. Clients who felt their team responded to their emotional needs grieved less intensely and returned more often.
  • Recognize that at-home visits carry a different weight. When a vet tech makes the same in-home visit six times over a year, they're not just treating a patient. They're building a relationship with a family. Being explicit with caregivers that this relationship includes an emotional dimension, and giving them the language and resources to navigate it, is part of preparing a great at-home team.
  • Use the resources that exist. Families benefit from knowing where to turn when the clinical relationship ends. Having a curated list ready, resources like Love, Baxter, the Cornell Pet Loss Support page, or Lap of Love's Pet Loss Resource Center, allows you to extend care past the appointment without extending your team's bandwidth indefinitely.

The simplest thing, though, is often the most meaningful.

One of the most powerful things we can do is look someone in the eye and say: this is a real loss, your grief makes complete sense, and there is nothing wrong with how much this hurts. That permission alone can be profoundly relieving.
Dr. Tyler Carmack

At-home veterinary care brings the relationship closer. That's its strength. Leaning into the emotional dimension of that relationship, especially at the end of life, is what separates good care from great care.