Category: Loss of a pet

Since I’ve started working in hospice and thinking about death a lot (some might even say too much), I’ve become very struck by the different way we approach end of life care for animals and humans.

“Duuuhhh,” you may be saying to yourself.  True, my observation is not a brilliant one.  But what I find interesting about the difference between animals and humans is how ingrained our acceptance of it is.

As I mentioned earlier, we’ve said goodbye to our original batch of kitties over the past few years.  We put two “down,” and the other, Elle, died before we were able to do that.  We felt terrible about Elle.  We as a culture have so embraced euthanasia for animals that we as a family felt like we did something inhumane by not speeding her death along.  Did we force her to suffer needlessly?  We were so used to bringing our pets to the vet when it was “their time” that I kind of forgot that they could die on their own.

This, of course, is quite different for people.  In most places it is illegal to have a person “put down.”  It is illegal where I live, and every now and then I meet people who ask, sometimes sarcastically, if I can just give them a pill to end it.  I certainly meet people who would like to get death over and done with.  I usually assure them that we will be able to manage their pain, and then gently suggest that there can be growth at the end of life, that there can be beauty in the time before death, and that this time in their life has meaning.  I happen to believe all of that.  I’m not an advocate for assisted suicide.  I’m not even very well versed on the subject. But I can see its attraction.

We have a very chatty new vet, and upon learning that I work in hospice, he told me the story of his father’s death, which was not a good one (I hear a lot of stories like this.  I’ve learned that it’s better to not wear my hospice name tag out in public.)  He then told me that when his mother is reaching the end of her life, he will have no problem helping her speed it along–quietly, of course.  As a vet, he felt that he would be very comfortable with such an action.  If you’re used to putting four-legged creatures out of their misery, I can see how it would be hard to watch the two-legged woman who gave you life wait it out.

Of course, animals are very different from humans.  Or, at least we humans choose to believe that they are.  We kill animals all of the time.  I just ate several different species at dinner.  (What, exactly, was in that meatball, anyway?)  We don’t kill and eat humans, at least not without a lot of legal repercussions.  And while in this country we tend to distinguish our cute little cats and dogs from livestock and wild animals–we don’t eat dogs and cats, for example–we are allowed to kill them, and we do so quite frequently.  And they don’t have to be sick, either.  Due to lack of space, many animal shelters are forced to euthanize any animal that isn’t adopted within a certain amount of time.  And we’ve all heard about those sacks of unwanted puppies and kittens filled with rocks and put in the river.

You can euthanize for behavioral issues, too, and sometimes are required to.  I’ve had a couple of aggressive animals in the past, and could have easily had them “put down.”   I couldn’t do it, though.

Twain was my first cat.  I didn’t realize that it wasn’t normal for a cat to routinely attack you and draw blood, though it did explain why she had been brought to the shelter in the first place.  But three years later, when I found that I spent every morning fending her off with my pillow and that she had narrowly missed making off with one of my eyeballs,  I called it quits.  My vet suggested that I euthanize her, as she thought she was too dangerous to work with.  But, instead, I brought her to a no-kill shelter with a “behavioral therapy” program.  I explained the situation and strongly suggested that they never adopt her out to a family with children (or any humans at all, I added under my breath).

I did not miss Twain very much.

My luck wasn’t much better with my first dog, either.  Edy, my border collie, attacked me over a bone that I gave her for her first birthday. I took a different approach with her though, and we went through intense training.  But I was always a little afraid of her, and I never trusted her again–she could be moody and snarky.  Nine years later, when she started growling at our first child as she crawled across the floor, there was no longer room for negotiation.  Still, though, I couldn’t put her down.  I couldn’t even bring her to a shelter.  It wasn’t easy, but I managed to find a family with much older children who understood her history and issues, and said that they had always wanted a moody 10 year-old border collie with hip dysplasia. Hard to believe, but true.  I visited Edy several times over the next few years and they adored her.   She had a wonderful life with them, and I was glad that I did not have her euthanized.  Logistically, I very easily could have.   I think any vet would have agreed to do it.  But emotionally–morally?–I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

So, clearly, I am not comfortable with sentencing an animal to its death. *

But, then why do I feel that it is so necessary to euthanize our animals at the end of life?  Why did I feel guilty about not euthanizing Elle?

And if that’s the way I feel, why am I not gung-ho about the assisted suicide movement?

I don’t know the answers to these questions.  I can accept that we treat animals differently than humans, and that we have different standards for them.  Maybe it’s because animals are completely dependent on us, and that it is hard to imagine that they will experience “growth” at the end of life.  Maybe that’s why I feel like we need to speed things along for them, so that they don’t suffer.  We try not to let humans suffer, either, but I’m not comfortable speeding things along.  I’m guessing that society has a lot to do with it, too.  The sociologist in me assumes that these differences are, at least in part, socially constructed–i.e., that they aren’t inherent.  In any case, these beliefs are very ingrained in our culture.  So ingrained that I really can’t figure out why I feel the way that I do.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on this, though.  Any insights into my conflicting beliefs?  What are your beliefs?  Are they as contradictory as mine?  Leave a comment under the link below.

And, as always, thanks for reading.

*Unless I plan on eating it.  I know this is another moral contradiction.  But as it is I can’t eat wheat or corn so I’m just going to close my eyes and pretend that I’m not a hypocrite and make my life easier and eat the damn burger.  Without the bun.

I recently re-watched the first episode of the Sopranos.  I loved that show, and not just for the wonderful acting and writing.  Despite being (partly) Italian, it greatly expanded my knowledge of Italian comfort foods (I think I asked my husband what Gabagool was during every episode).  As you might remember, in that very first episode the late, great James Gandolfini’s character Tony is fixated on some ducks who hang out in his swimming pool.  He loves these ducks.  Tony, of course, is a violent mobster who has a lot of blood on his hands.  He doesn’t seem to place too high a value on human life.  But he has a soft spot for animals: the ducks, his racehorse, his nephew’s dog–those losses touch him in a way that the human carnage left in his wake rarely does.

I’m not exactly Tony Soprano, but I admit that animals can sometimes get under my skin more easily than people can, especially in film or books.  The scene where Tony’s nephew Christopher kills his girlfriend’s dog by obviously sitting on it hit me harder than all of those other grisly deaths.  I never finished watching Benji in the theatre as a kid because I cried so hard when he got lost that my mom agreed to take me home.  When the guy who boarded our dog lost his mom, I offered condolences.  He accepted them, but then said that he was actually more upset about the death of his dog, which had happened shortly after his mom had died.  His mom was a difficult person to love.  His dog was not.

Loving a pet is generally a very safe thing to do.  You are usually not worried about getting screwed over by your dog.  (Cats, as we all know, are a little sneaker.  Kidding!  (Mostly) just kidding!)  I think our grief about losing a beloved pet is so easy to access because it is so uncomplicated and so close to the surface.  In contrast, relationships with our fellow humans are often quite complicated.  We have to work hard to get them right, and we aren’t always able to do that.  Our feelings about our human loved ones may be buried deep; they can be difficult to access as they are often infused with all sorts of challenging emotions.  But for a beloved pet, all we generally feel is love.  We might get frustrated at times (trust me, I know), but in the end we generally feel that our animals are innocent, incapable of ulterior motives, and so our love for them remains pure.  When we lose a friend or a family member, we may have to grapple with lots of unresolved issues, complicating our grief and opening a floodgate of complicated emotions.

When a pet dies, we usually just feel sad.  So very sad.

Or guilty. Sometimes we feel really guilty.

We are responsible for our animals–they are actually considered our property, and by their very definition domesticated animals cannot take care of themselves.  Froma Walsh, who is an expert on dying and grief–and a huge dog lover–has written about the loss of a pet (Walsh, F., Family Processes 48:481-99, 2009).  She talks about the difficulties involved in the accidental loss of a pet, such as running one over, leaving a dog in the car on a hot day, etc.  The blame and guilt associated with such losses can be overwhelmingly debilitating.   It’s often made worse when the responsible party fails to understand, or at least acknowledge, how big the loss really was:  to some people, it’s “just an animal.”

The statement “it’s just an animal” gets at what Walsh describes “disenfranchised grief,”: when the loss of a pet is “unacknowledged, trivialized, or pathologized,” (p. 487).  It’s hard to know how to react to the death of your best four-legged friend if the people around you can’t understand what all the fuss is about.  As I mentioned last week, we really don’t have a good way of handling the loss of a pet in our culture.  Other pet lovers might understand, but in general we just try to move on quickly, which can often further complicate our grief.  We need to be able to find a healthy way to grieve.

Last week I mentioned that the day after one of our kitties died, we went out and adopted a younger version.  That’s true, but I’m not proud of it.  Actually, if I were the type of person to keep score, I might add that I strongly advised against it, but was overruled.  Obviously, I’m not that type of person 😉  As someone fairly well versed on death and grief, I really felt that we should take some time to mourn poor Spencer, who had been part of our family since before we had ever been a family.  Pets are not just objects that can be replaced with a swipe of a credit card, and I didn’t want our children to think that they could be.

But, Petco was next door to the grocery store, and they just happened to be having an adoption event.  And we just happened to go in there.  And there just happened to be an adorable little kitty that looked just like Spencer, just 17 years younger.  And my older daughter, who had sat with me while the vet put Spencer down, and who had been very much in touch with her grief both before and after his death, begged me.  And then my other daughter begged me.  And my husband begged me.  And against my better judgement, I caved.

And you know, aside from the fact that he had a highly contagious case of ringworm that he spread to our other cat, our dog, and the anonymous person writing this post, it actually turned out pretty well.  (Ringworm isn’t quite as gross as it sounds–it’s basically just athlete’s foot.)  The kids didn’t ignore their feelings for Spencer–they still mourned him, but in the mean time they had a lot of fun playing with the new kitty (at least until we discovered his ringworm–a little late, obviously–and had to isolate him for a while).

But still, though, as a professional I would not suggest rushing out to get another pet right away.  Instead, find some way to memorialize your pet, perhaps with some sort of ceremony or tribute.   I would also suggest that you find people to talk to who are sympathetic to you loss.  Many places offer pet loss support groups, or there are also pet-loss hotlines.  The Humane Society offers these tips and suggestions on dealing with the loss of your pet.

Whatever you end up doing, I think the key is to find an honest way to express your grief.  You need to feel like your pain is legitimate.  Disenfranchised grief is bad news.  If you bury your sorrow, it will eventually manifest itself in other ways, and none of them are good (Tony Soprano, for example, tended to bash people’s heads in).  Of course, that goes for all grief.  But even if we as a society don’t do a good job of acknowledging how much is lost when a pet dies, it doesn’t mean that the loss is not a profound one.  Find a shoulder to cry on.  You deserve it.

Next week: pets and euthanasia

 

 

If you look on the “about me” tab on this blog, you’ll see that I describe myself as having “too many pets.”  We currently have 2 dogs and 3 cats.  Four of the five pets are part of a relatively new crop, joining the family in just the past year. We’ve been having some problems integrating everybody, so it’s been a bit…messy.  There has been a constant stream of unpleasant surprises, and the phrase “too many pets” has been running through my mind quite a bit lately.

Although these surprises have added a great deal of stress to our home (a.k.a. “the house of excrement,”), we do love our furry friends.  We’ve clearly acquired too many, too quickly, and may have over-extended ourselves.  It happened as a result of our having to say goodbye to one, then another, and then finally the last of our “starter” kitties, all of whom were acquired in the previous century.  Apparently, we wanted to make sure we had an adequate supply of fur and love.

That’s the thing about animals.  They bring so much to your life.  And then they die.

The death of a pet brings up some interesting issues: Their lifespans are so much shorter than ours (unless you have a parrot), that chances are you will have to suffer their passing.  Though, of course, sometimes pets outlive their owners, which is another issue.  For many children, the death of a pet is often their first major loss, and can color their perspective on death for the rest of their lives.  Our relationships with pets are often uncomplicated ones, which can make us feel their deaths all that much more.  Yet I think a lot of us feel uncomfortable grieving in the same way that we do for humans–our society isn’t really set up to handle the death of a pet the same way it handles the death of a family member.    And, of course, while euthanasia is a very sticky issue in the human world, it’s the norm in the animal one.  And while that affords us much more control, it also forces us to literally decide when our loved one is going to die.

And so for the next couple of weeks or so I’m going to write about some of  these issues.  Thanks to those of you on Facebook who suggested this (if you go to my page here, you can see a picture of Otto, our pug.  Handsome, isn’t he?).

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To get us started, if you’ll indulge me, I will share one of my own experiences:

I adopted my first cat when I was in college, and have had a steady stream of cats and dogs ever since.  Lucy, though, was my favorite.  She was a little shy and skittish around other people, but she would always come and curl up to snuggle when I most needed her to.  I felt we could commune with our eyes, and that we loved each other unconditionally.

Several years back, as part of a fellowship in Medical Ethics,  I participated in an activity led by the “death-and-dying lady.”  Our task was to list all of the living beings we loved (including animals).  We then had select one to be taken away from us. And then another, and another, until they were all taken.  (Figuratively, of course.)

I didn’t yet have a child to put on the list, but I did have a spouse and all of my family to put on there.  What makes that exercise memorable for me is where I put Lucy on it.   I am fortunate to still have all of my immediate family living, and I am fairly certain that they make up most of my readership (and I don’t come from a large family).  So I won’t go into details.  But I will say that I kept Lucy with me until pretty close to the end.

I now have children, and my love for them has eclipsed my love for any four-legged creature that has been, is, or will be in my life.  I can’t really describe the love that I have for my girls–it is so deep and far-reaching that at times I find it staggering.  And perhaps because they are young, it is uncomplicated and incredibly fulfilling. (That isn’t to say that it won’t continue to be, but I have heard a story or two about the pre-teen years and beyond.)

Regardless,  I was a mother of two when Lucy’s time was drawing to an end–much earlier than I had her slated to be taken on my little list–and I did not have an easy time of it.  For a couple of years I had convinced my husband to foot the bills for constant vet visits and managed to master the art (to an extent) of giving her sub-cutaneous fluids.  She hated them, but she still seemed to enjoy life more than she hated getting the fluids, so we kept going.  But then, finally, it wasn’t working any more, and she was clearly at the end.  I couldn’t stop crying as she let me hold her little emaciated body through that last night.  The next day I dropped my older daughter off at preschool and arranged for a friend to pick her up. I walked into the vet’s office with my infant daughter’s car carrier in one hand and Lucy’s crate in the other.  The vet was kind and gentle, and Lucy was barely alive.  She was gone within seconds of the injection.  My daughter’s little head soaked up my tears as I held her close for support.  I was pretty devastated by Lucy’s death.  But, I had a child to pick up and lunch to make and laundry to do.  It’s not like the world suddenly gives you space to indulge in your grief.  You don’t even have a funeral to plan.  You might call a few people or send an email out, but then you have to get on with it.

Lucy has been gone five years and I still miss her.  I can imagine resting my head on her soft little body, listening to her purr.  I lost someone who understood me completely, who brought me nothing but joy.  It’s a little hole that will probably never be filled.

We’ve said goodbye to several more pets since then.  My older daughter actually came with me to put our last cat down.  As sad as it was, the whole experience really went a long way in helping her process her grief, and I think it removed some of the fear surrounding death for her.

Of course, wandering into Petco the next day and adopting a younger lookalike (and his accompanying case of ringworm) helped a lot, too.  You can’t really do that when people die.

So, next week I’ll write more about some of these issues that surround the death of a beloved pet.  If you have a comment or suggestion or story that you want to share, please do so in in the link below this post.  And, as always, thanks for reading.