What happens after your pet, a social media sensation, dies?

 

Isabel Klee poses with her dog, Simon, whose death was announced July 25.

Isabel Klee

For several days, millions of people watched Simon — a 7-year-old Jindo-skewing mix — journey toward taking his final breath.

The internet-famous dog, described by Isabel Klee as her “soulmate,” died the way he lived, surrounded by love and attention. Known for being right by Klee’s side as she fostered dogs, Simon was seen by his followers as a patient, steady figure for the frightened animals who sometimes came into their home. After Klee announced his death on July 25, tributes flowed on social media for the little dog whose cancer diagnosis was revealed in May.

Some followers reflected on how influential Simon and Klee’s journey had been on their own lives. One person posted about being moved to also start fostering, while another pointed out that animals like Simon teach those who care for them “how to be a grownup.”

Klee was scheduled to speak with CNN for this story before Simon’s health took a turn for the worse. She announced on social media the next day that she and her fiancé, Jacob Zerhusen, had decided to let their beloved pup go.

Pet influencers bring a lot of joy to the internet, but Klee and Simon’s story is a reminder that this joy has its limits. Even famous animals don’t live nearly as long as their humans and the millions who adore them from afar wish they would.

Yet their deaths help bring their community of followers together, while making them more fluent in the devastating language of pet grief.

‘You’re not guaranteed much time’

For the humans behind pet influencer accounts, grief is not a private experience, but one that is shared by their followers, most of whom never got to meet the object of their affection in real life, but experience the loss like it is their own.

Noodle, who was adopted by Graziano when he was 7, shot to fame years later in 2021, thanks to a series of TikTok videos where the pug would decide whether he was going to get out of bed in the morning. In those videos, Graziano would ask Noodle if it was a “bones or no bones day.”

Graziano walked a similar path to the one Klee and Zerhusen did when they decided to end their dog’s suffering.

Noodle was a social media star until he died in 2022. Here, he's seen on a "bones day."

Jonathan Graziano/@jongraz

“That was a wild experience,” Graziano said, adding that he got “everything he wanted” when it came to letting Noodle go peacefully. “It was the combination of having to do the whole end-of-life experience with Noodle, go through that and come to terms with that on my own as just someone who loved him and took care of him.”

His friend, Thomas Shapiro, also knows exactly what Klee is going through. He and his husband, Louis, are already on the other side of it.