When to Commission a Portrait After a Pet's Loss

Some people order a memorial portrait the week their pet dies. Some order it two years later, after the anniversary has come around once or twice and they finally feel steady enough to look at the photos again. Both groups sometimes worry they got the timing wrong: too soon, as though grief hadn’t been given its due, or too late, as though the moment for honoring the animal had somehow passed. Neither worry has support in the actual research on grief and timing.

The worry itself is understandable. Grief has a folk calendar attached to it, an unspoken sense that there’s a decent interval to observe before you’re allowed to act, and a separate unspoken sense that waiting too long means you’ve let the moment slip. Neither half of that folk calendar comes from clinical research on how grief actually works. It comes from etiquette assumed rather than studied, and it doesn’t hold up once you look at what the field that actually studies bereavement has found.

The old model, and why it was replaced

For most of the twentieth century, the dominant clinical theory held that healthy mourning meant breaking the bond with the deceased and, eventually, letting go. Continuing to feel attached was treated as a sign that grieving wasn’t finished, a kind of stalled process rather than a normal one. In 1996, three researchers, Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman, and Steven Nickman, published Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief, and it challenged that model directly. Their argument, based on close observation of how grieving people actually behave rather than how theory said they should, was that maintaining an ongoing connection to the dead, through memory, ritual, or objects, is a normal and adaptive part of living with a loss, not a failure to complete one.

That single reframe does most of the work here. If continuing a bond is normal, there’s no clock running on when it’s acceptable to act on that bond. A portrait commissioned the week of the loss isn’t jumping ahead of some proper mourning period. A portrait commissioned two years later isn’t evidence someone got stuck.

It’s worth sitting with how significant that shift was inside the field itself, not just for pet owners reading about it decades later. Klass, Silverman, and Nickman weren’t proposing a minor adjustment to existing theory. They were arguing that a widely accepted clinical goal, severing the bond, had been treating a healthy, common behavior as a symptom. That’s the kind of correction that takes a field years to absorb, and grief support around pet loss specifically is still catching up to it in practice, even where the research itself has moved on.

The theory grew up too

A decade after the original book, Klass revisited the idea in a 2006 article in Death Studies and pushed back on an oversimplified reading that had grown up around his own framework: “the hypothesis that continuing bonds either help or hinder grief adjustment [is] too simple to account for the evidence.” That’s a researcher correcting his own field’s shorthand, which is worth noting on its own. The theory isn’t a slogan that continuing bonds are always good. It’s a more careful claim that continuing bonds are normal, and their effect depends on the person and the specific way the bond is maintained.

That distinction matters for anyone using this research to make a personal decision rather than read a journal. It means nobody, including the person who literally co-founded the theory, is claiming that any act of continuing a bond automatically helps simply because continuing bonds in general are healthy. What’s supported is narrower and more useful: that acting on the bond isn’t itself the problem, at any point after the loss, which removes timing from the list of things worth worrying about.

What the pet-specific research actually found

A 2024 study in Death Studies, following 496 participants, examined continuing bonds specifically after companion animal death and found that maintaining a bond partially moderates the relationship between attachment anxiety and grief severity. The same authors argued for reconsidering pet exclusions from prolonged grief disorder classifications entirely, which tells you something about where the clinical conversation is heading: toward taking pet grief as seriously, diagnostically, as human grief, not as a lesser category by default.

A 2025 systematic narrative synthesis in Omega, reviewing the pet-specific continuing-bonds literature, found genuinely mixed results. Continuing bonds “can sometimes aggravate and intensify grief experiences, particularly when pet grief is perceived as disenfranchised grief,” while for other people, in other contexts, those same bonds moderated grief and supported healing. That mix is the honest answer, and it’s a more useful one than a tidy rule would be. There is no single correct emotional trajectory a memorial has to fit, and no timeline that makes it right or wrong.

Notice what the mixed finding rules out, specifically. It rules out the claim that commissioning something right away means a person hasn’t really grieved yet, and it equally rules out the claim that waiting years means someone is stuck in grief and needs to move on. Both are common enough as things people say to each other, gently or not, and neither survives the actual data. What predicts whether a continuing bond helps or strains someone seems to be the person and the context, not the calendar.

A 2014 study in Omega, comparing bereaved pet owners in the US and French Canada, found that pet loss was often disenfranchised grief in both populations, and separately found something smaller but telling: simply being asked about the loss, through a research survey, had measurable therapeutic value for the people answering it. Engaging with the memory of the pet, even in a modest, structured way, wasn’t a setback. It helped.

That last finding is a useful analogy for commissioning a portrait specifically, since the two acts share a basic shape. Choosing photos, describing the animal’s personality to an artist, looking closely at what made them recognizable, is a structured way of engaging with the memory rather than avoiding it. If simply answering survey questions about a loss carried measurable benefit in a controlled study, there’s no reason to assume that a more involved, personal act of the same kind, done whenever someone chooses to do it, would carry any less.

So when is right

Whenever it feels right. That sounds like a dodge, but it’s the actual finding. Don’t wait because you think enough time hasn’t passed. Don’t rush because you think waiting looks like you didn’t care enough to act right away. Neither framing survives contact with the research. A portrait commissioned in the first raw week can be exactly the concrete, doable thing a person needs when everything else about the loss feels shapeless. A portrait commissioned after years of only being able to glance at the photos can be exactly as meaningful, arriving at the moment someone finally has the steadiness to look closely at what they lost and choose how to remember it.

The practical side is simple by comparison. A digital portrait starts at $24.99, a canvas from $49.99, and either way you get a proof in 2 to 3 business days with unlimited revisions before you approve anything final. None of that changes based on how long it’s been. The order form doesn’t ask how much time has passed, and it wouldn’t know what to do with the answer if it did.

The only real question is whether you’re ready to look at the photo, not whether enough calendar time has elapsed since the day you lost them.

Sources

• Klass, D., Silverman, P.R., & Nickman, S.L. (Eds.). Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. Taylor & Francis, 1996. DOI
• Klass, D. “Continuing conversation about continuing bonds.” Death Studies, 30(9), 843-858, 2006. DOI
• Lykins, A.D., McGreevy, P.D., Bennett, B., Paul, N.K., & Gotsis, N. “Attachment styles, continuing bonds, and grief following companion animal death.” Death Studies, 48(7), 698-705, 2024. DOI
• Hughes, B., & Lewis Harkin, B. “The Impact of Continuing Bonds Between Pet Owners and Their Pets Following the Death of Their Pet: A Systematic Narrative Synthesis.” Omega (Westport), 90(4), 1666-1684, 2025. DOI
• Packman, W., Carmack, B.J., Katz, R., Carlos, F., Field, N.P., & Landers, C. “Online survey as empathic bridging for the disenfranchised grief of pet loss.” Omega (Westport), 69(4), 333-356, 2014. DOI