When it comes to euthanasia and pet loss, making the decision when to say goodbye can add a heavy, lingering weight to your grief. More often than not, planning your pet’s passing was an anguished experience. One that can stay with you long after they’ve left. Replaying moments and wondering if you chose the “right” time is both entirely normal and deeply torturous.
This part of loving pet family members, is a decision made with the utmost love, from the softest part of your heart, that can still be very painful.
Why Does Euthanasia Complicate Grief?
The Timing is Yours to Decide
Unlike many other goodbyes we experience in life, euthanasia places the responsibility of choosing the moment in your hands. This can be both a blessing and a burden.
It’s a surreal experience attempting to balance your pet’s comfort, quality of life, and potential suffering with your own desire to keep them here and fight for them. Even when you believe you chose the best possible time, the mixed emotions leading up to and after, can be unbearable.
They Couldn’t Tell You What They Wanted
Pets can’t use words to share how they feel or what they want. That leaves you trying to read their cues, trust your instincts, and make choices on their behalf.
Ironically, you spend their entire life with you making choices for them with no struggles or lingering doubt. When decisions are made to enrich their lives they come easy and smooth. But the euthanasia decision can be the opposite – unclear and rocky.
As amazing as it is to have such a wonderful connection and relationship with someone who doesn’t speak, at the end of life, a few minutes of words sure would help.
The “Right Time” May Never Feel Certain
You’ll know when the time is right is something people love to say. But I don’t think it’s always that easy. There’s not always a sign or that “look”, like we’re led to believe. Sometimes there is a big, murky gray area where euthanasia would make sense, but it’s also not crystal clear. And sometimes it’s completely unexpected with no opportunity for options.
You might feel like you decided too soon and stole precious time, or waited too long and were met with needless suffering. Remind yourself of this one thing – it might have always felt too soon until it felt too late.
The Final Moments Stay With You
Being there for your pet’s farewell can be a close, loving moment, but it can also leave a vivid memory that’s both comforting and gut-wrenching. Being present with someone as they transition is always hard.
You might be holding onto lasting images you wish you weren’t. You may wonder if they knew what was happening or if you said I Love You enough for them to know, without question. There is so much finality in those moments, culminating with a hard fall into grief.
It’s not unusual for these final moments to occupy so much of your mind that it’s tough to see past them.
How Can You Help Yourself Out of the Spiral?
You deserve not to be fully trapped in the vortex of decision-making replay, guilt, and what-ifs. True love deserves to see past the last moments and feel all the other moments of love and connection that led up to making goodbye so tough.
Winnie the Pooh said it best, “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” But, in the devastating time after making end-of-life choices, it’s not easy to remember feeling lucky. Grief has a way of focusing on the hardest parts first.
Recall Your Intentions
You made the decision out of love. In the toughest times, you proved your loyalty as your pet’s guardian and advocate by protecting them from any suffering, physical or mental, that wasn’t controllable. That is a clear act of devotion by putting their quality of life first.
Grief can give you time to re-think everything and trace your steps with a fine-toothed comb. But that is not the same headspace you were in when faced with the euthanasia decision.
Typically it’s much more chaotic, with information overload and sadness that fogs up your mind. Even in the weeds of decision making, you had the strength to reach into the most loving part of your heart to say “I will take on pain as grief, to ensure that you don’t have any.”
Acknowledge That It Could’ve Never Felt Easy
We hear so many obligatory end of life phrases when it comes to pets – better a day too soon than a minute too late, euthanasia is a gift, their last day doesn’t have to be their worst day.
Those phrases are valid and sometimes they do lift you up and give you strength to make the call. But other times these phrases just make you feel worse. They don’t account for the fear of the future or the moments when your pet seems to rally. Those bounce-backs that keep you on edge, holding out hope that “tomorrow might be a better day.”
Even reassuring sayings can’t oversimplify this experience and how hard it is to live through.
Ground Yourself In Truths
In times where your mind is being relentlessly tough on you, it can help to pause and remind yourself of certain unshakable truths. Not opinions or silver-linings, just the facts, no matter how loud guilt, doubt or reply may get. Holding onto these truths can help give your heart some room to breathe.
- It could never have been long enough together.
- Your pet always knew they were loved.
- Choosing euthanasia is an act of protection, not betrayal.
- When you say “I would have done anything for them”, remember that you did, even when it was heartbreaking.
- Loving unconditionally sometimes means making the hard choices that are right for someone else.
- Whether you were in a vet ER, clinic room, your home, or their favorite spot outside, what matters the most is that they were loved and cherished in that moment and every moment you ever spent together.
Euthanasia is a decision that blends love, fears, doubts, and care in more ways than words could explain. Made within your heart, with all the information you had, having done everything you could, and with the hope you still held, the choice is almost always agonizing.
Euthanasia and pet loss can feel traumatizing and take up a lot of room in your mind and memory. One compassionate reminder that we can all reflect on – “Don’t spend too much time remembering only their death. Remember their life the most.”
