A PROJECT FOR PET LOSS GRIEF BY THE AMARUQ FOUNDATION
grief.game is a project of the Amaruq Foundation: an early-stage Digital Therapeutic game designed to help people navigate the grief of losing a companion animal — built on a distinct point of view about why grief has become harder to move through, and what might help.
What we’re building
grief.game is an early-stage project of the Amaruq Foundation, developing a Digital Therapeutic (DTx) — a clinically-grounded, evidence-informed interactive experience designed to support people through the grief of losing a companion animal.
Our approach does three things at once:
Strengthening the neural pathways that create space between a painful stimulus and an overwhelmed response — so there is more room to feel, think, and choose, rather than simply react.
Embedding evidence-based grief practices, developed with leading grief researchers and clinicians, directly into the experience itself — not as a lecture, but as something you move through.
Using assessment tools to understand a person's current state and stage of grief, and adapting the experience accordingly — because grief is not linear, and a one-size-fits-all approach does not reflect how people actually grieve.
Why this project exists
— James Drage, founder of grief.game and co-founder of the Amaruq Foundation
I’ve spent years investing and working in businesses involved in mental and behavioural health and addiction treatment. During those years, I learned about and became fascinated by neural connections — how they form, how they break down, and how they can be rebuilt. My interest was so strong that I went back to school for a late-life doctorate in Systems Psychodynamics at the Tavistock in London. Although my research was not specifically about these connections, I thought that after 5 years learning about, thinking about and studying the unconscious and the brain, I knew a lot about how my brain worked, including the role of emotions. I thought I understood grief, at least professionally, and then I had an experience that I didn’t expect.
When my dog Amaruq (Ruq) died, I was overcome by a grief I could not reason or will my way through. For weeks, I couldn’t concentrate on work. I cried more than I ever had in my adult life. I knew, professionally, that “give it time” is not a real strategy — and I also knew I needed something more than time was giving me.
So I did what I know how to do: I dove in looking for a solution to the problem. I spent hundreds of hours reading research papers, often until 2- 3 a.m. I used my networks to tap connections, and then their connections. I went looking for the mechanism. I found a body of research on neural connections and emotional regulation that matched almost exactly what I had spent years thinking about and applying to other behavioral health conditions — just never, until then, to grief itself.
This led to the founding the Amaruq Foundation, and the projects it supports — including this one. These projects have been part of how I’ve worked through my grief. Not by moving past it, but by learning to let it exist alongside everything else, without it overwhelming everything else. I still miss Ruq. I still feel it. But I no longer feel unable to function because of it — and I believe the tools that helped me get there are worth building into something that could help other people, and their families, do the same.
WHY THIS MATTERS NOW
For many years, as a founder and investor, I’ve worked alongside teams in mental and behavioural health and addiction treatment. Through that work, I developed a simple but powerful idea: the connections in our brains — how well signals travel between the parts of us that feel, the parts of us that think, and the parts of us that decide — shape how well we handle life’s hardest moments. When those connections are strong, there’s more space between what happens to us and how we respond to it. When they’re weakened, damaged, or underdeveloped, that space collapses, and overwhelm arrives faster and stays longer.
I believe this same principle applies directly to grief — and I believe it may help explain something many people describe but rarely have language for: the sense that grief today feels harder to move through than it “should”, even when we do everything we’re told is supposed to help.
Neuroscience research on grief specifically supports part of this picture: grief engages attachment, memory, and emotion-processing circuits throughout the brain, and prolonged or complicated grief has been associated with impaired connectivity in regions responsible for emotional regulation and integrating loss into an updated sense of life going forward.
The reasons neural connections end up broken, damaged, missing, or weak in the first place are broad and complicated — far more than an introduction like this can fully cover. They likely include the chronic, low-grade stress of modern life; sleep that is chronically insufficient or disrupted; digital environments and algorithms engineered to trigger constant dopamine-driven stimulation rather than rest and recovery; the erosion of the deep, physically-present community and co-regulation humans evolved to depend on; disruptions to early childhood development; and a growing body of research pointing to environmental exposures — including microplastics, heavy metals, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, PFAS, chronic noise, and electromagnetic fields — that may affect the brain’s physical capacity for connection and regulation.
My goal here is not to convince you these are settled facts. Much of this is genuinely emerging science, not consensus. I can’t even claim a direct causal chain has been proven. My goal is to present my hypothesis honestly, and to invite you to consider it — alongside the solution that follows from it - and decide for yourself whether it matters, and whether it might help, as I believe.
If the foundations of our neural wiring are under more pressure now than they once were, our approach to processing grief must account for this — rather than assuming everyone has the same neural capacity to “work through it” that earlier generations may have had. If the reasons grief is harder to move through are rooted in the state of our neural connections, then the solution must address that directly. I believe that developing, building, repairing, and strengthening these connections is not a nice-to-have alongside grief support — it is central to genuinely healing, integrating, and living alongside grief. Thankfully, research also shows that neuroplasticity — the brain’s ability to form new connections — means our capacity to process, integrate, and accommodate grief can be improved as we build, repair, and strengthen our neural connections, with the right kind of support, repeated over time.
I also believe that “finishing” grief, or “getting over it,” without addressing what’s happening at the level of neural connection, is incomplete. It can leave people stuck, or numb, or simply relieved that the pain has faded — without ever accessing what grief, processed well, can actually offer: deeper meaning, a changed relationship with love and loss, and real personal growth. I don’t think grief is only something to survive. I think, done well, it’s something that can leave you more whole than before — and I think that outcome depends on the health of the neural connections doing the work.
This is the founding hypothesis behind grief.game: that many people navigating pet loss grief may benefit from something more deliberate and more personalized than “give it time” — and that a well-designed Digital Therapeutic, grounded in both neuroscience and clinical grief expertise, can help rebuild that capacity directly, so that grief can do what it’s actually capable of doing.
THE PAUSE
Scroll to widen the pause.
Grief often arrives as a wave — a memory, a smell, an empty space where your dog used to be — and the response can feel instant and overwhelming, with no room to breathe in between.
Our approach is built around widening that space. Not eliminating the pain, and not rushing past it — just creating enough room, moment by moment, to feel what’s real without being swept away by it.
That’s the pause we’re building toward. It’s a skill, and like any skill, it can be trained.
Part of a larger conversation
grief.game is one part of a small ecosystem of connected work, each with a distinct focus — related by mission and founder, but separately produced.
Parent organization
The Canadian not-for-profit that backs grief.game as one of its program-related initiatives — alongside work in canine longevity, veterinary oncology, dog rescue, and mission-led children's publishing, connected by a single founding story and a shared belief in venture and collaborative philanthropy.
Visit the Amaruq FoundationSister project · Podcast
A podcast produced by Exponential Ventures — a separate venture capital fund also founded by James Drage — currently producing a mini-series exploring grief as a civilization-scale issue. A sister project, connected by shared founders and subject matter, but independently produced. In production.
Visit Exponential PromiseLooking ahead
Our initial and current focus is entirely on building a Digital Therapeutic for pet loss grief — a distinct, underserved form of grief that deserves dedicated attention, not an afterthought bolted onto a general grief product.
Looking further ahead, we believe the same underlying approach — strengthening the neural pathways involved in emotional regulation, teaching evidence-based grief practices, and personalizing support to a person’s individual state — could eventually extend to other forms of grief: the loss of a person, anticipatory grief, and other experiences of loss that are equally underserved. This is a direction we’re thinking about for the future, not a committed roadmap or product timeline. For now, our full focus is on building the pet loss experience well.
Who we’re building this for
grief.game is being designed primarily for older children, teens, and adults navigating the loss of a companion animal — whether that loss has already happened or is anticipated. For younger children specifically, the Amaruq Foundation is separately developing a children’s book and companion materials, including discussion guides, a companion app and more, designed to meet that different developmental need.
Our commitmentgrief.game will be made available free of charge to anyone experiencing the loss, or anticipated loss, of a pet. This is not a monetized consumer product. We intend to fund it through partnerships, sponsorship, and the Amaruq Foundation’s venture philanthropy model — NEVER through fees charged to grieving individuals and families.
How we’re building this
Our team has prior experience developing Digital Therapeutic games in other behavioral health areas, including depression, anger management, and broader mental health applications. We understand the discipline required to build something that is genuinely playable and genuinely therapeutic — and we understand how to work with clinical experts, design for real outcomes, and navigate the regulatory and development landscape of Digital Therapeutics.
Grief — and specifically the grief of losing a companion animal — is new territory, even for us. The emotional landscape is distinct, and the clinical literature on pet loss specifically is still developing. We are approaching this project with real ambition and real humility in equal measure. We are encouraged that we are not alone: a small but growing number of thoughtful projects — including narrative games designed to help young people process loss — have shown that games can be a credible medium for grief support.
We are early. We are also serious, well-resourced by the Amaruq Foundation’s venture philanthropy model, and building with the same rigor we’ve applied to other Digital Therapeutic projects.
Where we are right now
Common questions
grief.game is an early-stage Digital Therapeutic project of the Amaruq Foundation, designed to help people navigate the grief of losing a companion animal through an interactive experience grounded in neuroscience and clinical grief expertise.
Not yet. grief.game is currently in the design and development planning stage. We are building the game design document, evaluating development partners, and building a clinical and scientific advisory board.
No. grief.game will be made available free of charge to anyone experiencing the loss, or anticipated loss, of a pet.
grief.game is being designed primarily for older children, teens, and adults. A separate children's book project from the Amaruq Foundation is being developed to support younger children specifically.
Our approach is grounded in the idea that emotional regulation — including how we process grief — depends heavily on neural pathways that create space between a painful trigger and an overwhelmed response. We believe strengthening those pathways may help people move through grief with more capacity and less overwhelm. This is an emerging area of focus for us, informed by existing research, not a settled clinical claim.
Yes, indirectly. Exponential Promise, a podcast produced by Exponential Ventures, is currently producing a mini-series on grief as a civilization-scale issue. It's a sister project connected by shared founders and mission, but it is a separate, independently produced series — not part of grief.game or the Amaruq Foundation.
Our current focus is entirely on pet loss grief. We believe the underlying approach could eventually extend to other forms of grief, but that is a longer-term direction for our thinking, not a committed near-term plan.
We're currently seeking development partners, clinical collaborators, and organizations interested in supporting this work. Please reach out through our contact section.
Backed by
grief.game is a project of the Amaruq Foundation, a Canadian not-for-profit applying venture and collaborative philanthropy to animal health, welfare, and the human-animal bond. The Foundation was created by James and Elisabeth Drage in memory of Amaruq (Ruq) — a husky-wolf rescue from Salluit, Québec, who died of osteosarcoma on November 3, 2025.
Learn more about the Amaruq FoundationGet involved
For organizations, studios & clinical partners
If you represent a game studio, a clinical or research organization, an animal health or pet-related business or a company interested in supporting this project as it develops, we’d like to hear from you.
Get in touchFor individuals
If you’ve lost a pet, or are anticipating that loss, and want to know when grief.game becomes available — or want to share your experience to help us build something that truly reflects what people need — join our list.