From a story on lithub.com by Sara Bader headlined “How Famous Writers Mourned the Death of Their Beloved Pets”:

In the fall of 2012, I said goodbye to my thirteen-year-old cat, Snowflake. The grief was breathtaking, in a literal sense: it took the wind out of me. I had tried to brace myself, but I’ve since learned that it’s impossible to prepare. In the days and weeks that followed, I couldn’t focus and barely ate. I missed her reassuring presence beside me when I fell asleep at night and dreaded waking up to the awful reality that she was no longer here. Snowflake’s absence had created, in Steinbeck’s words, a “jagged hole” in my life.