PetArc
Not a grief journal. Not a meditation app with a pet-loss skin. Built specifically for the guilt loops, the social invalidation, the dates you can see coming, and the empty spots in the house.
The problem
Someone will say "it was just a dog" and you'll freeze. You'll wonder if you waited too long, or gave up too soon, or whether the relief you felt for one second makes you a bad person. Their birthday is in nine days. The route you used to walk together still bends past their favourite tree. The collar still jingles when the door moves.
Pet-loss grief is what researchers call disenfranchised grief — real grief that society has decided in advance shouldn't count. There's no bereavement leave for it, no funeral most people will attend, and a constant low-grade pressure to "move on already." The result is that the hardest grief of your year is also the one you're expected to do quietly, alone, and on a schedule that doesn't exist.
Euthanasia decisions, the moments you missed, the relief you weren't expecting — pet-loss guilt has its own specific shape, and most generic grief content doesn't touch it. It just loops, especially at 11pm.
The 90-day course is twelve structured modules built for exactly this. Seven of them are just on guilt — the decision, the timing, the relief, the comparing yourself to other people's pets — because that's where most people get stuck. Module one is called "Your grief is real." That's where it starts.
The hardest conversations after pet loss are the ones you didn't see coming — the coworker, the in-law, the friend who means well. Most people freeze. Some snap and feel worse. Either way, you walk away with the invalidation sitting on top of the grief.
Scripts gives you the words ahead of time. Pre-written, kind, short — what to say to the coworker who said "it was just a dog," the parent who keeps asking when you'll get another, the partner who thinks two weeks should be enough. So next time you're ambushed, you have language ready.
The dates are quietly worse than the random days. The first holiday without them. The anniversary of the diagnosis. The first vet visit for a new pet. Most apps wait for you to journal about it afterwards. By then it's already happened.
Playbooks let you mark the date in advance — the birthday, the anniversary, the first empty Christmas, the first vet appointment. Three days before, something arrives in the app to soften the run-up. The day of, there's something for that. The days after, there's a check-in. So you're not ambushed by your own calendar.
Most of the day you can function. Then someone leaves the room and the silence shows up. The collar is still on the hook. The food bowl is still in the corner because you can't make yourself move it yet. The grief doesn't fit into a journaling prompt at that moment.
Today + 31 peer voices is the part of the app for when the wave hits. A 60-second anchor that doesn't ask you to breathe and count. A daily check-in measured in mood squares, not scores. And thirty-one short voices from people in the exact situation you're in — not general grief quotes, real messages from someone who's been through "their ashes just arrived" or "my other pets are grieving too." Over weeks, the squares become a record. Not a score. A record.
Daily check-in measured in mood chips, not paragraphs. Fast enough on the days you can't write a sentence.
Not a meditation app with a pet-loss skin. Every module, script, and playbook is written for what pet bereavement actually feels like.
Everything stays on this device. No account, no server, no leaderboard, no "share your grief journey" prompts.
PetArc is for the empty spot on the couch at 8pm. For the run-up to the birthday. For the moment at work when someone said the thing and you didn't have words. It's quiet, private, and built for the grief no one warns you about.