Peace of Mind for Pet Parents Episode 65: Learning to Love Without Guarantees: A Conversation About Fear, Control, and Deciding with a Whole Heart

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Episode Transcript: 

Karen Wylie: Hello and welcome to Peace of Mind for Pet Parents. I'm Karen Wylie here as always with my wonderful friend Gail Pope. Today, we're going to explore something that is probably prevalent for each of us in all of our lives to some degree or another these days and that is living with uncertainty. We have so many aspects of our lives that seem to be changing, whether it's the economy wherever you are or looking at it from a global perspective.

Certainly politics isn't as usual. How we cope with our own health, the health of humans we love as well as our pets, there's a lot of changes in that part of our lives. It can feel very emotionally overwhelming when nothing or fewer things feel as predictable as they used to be. 

That's what I was thinking about recently and how that affects us in our caregiving roles with our animals, where hospice is also asking us to live with uncertainty. It really is true from all perspectives. We talk a lot about why using the phrasing of terminal diagnosis is often not used and that's because of course to use it would increase panic.

So it's not used but it creates some uncertainty about what's going on with our pet. Certainly everyone wants to have timeframes, "How long do we have?" And nobody really knows that. It's difficult when you put a veterinarian in that position because they don't really know either. 

There's so many variables but uncertainty seems to just be part and parcel of life with our senior pets. Certainly when a difficult or terminal diagnosis comes into play. 

Again, as I was thinking about how uncertainty seems to be creeping into our day-to-day lives in so many areas, I think we get emotionally overwhelmed long before our pets are actually entering the timeframe where they're going to die. I think it's just there's so little that we understand, or feel comfortable with or confident about.

So where I was going with this, is realizing that you and I, Gail, somehow found a way to cope with more day-to-day uncertainty than a lot of people do. Because I think of all your residents in the BrightHaven Sanctuary and the multi-pet household that I have had in recent years, and you have to cope differently. You have to find a way to cope. 

So that's where I want to ask you to take us first, is how you think your years caring for pets, hundreds of pets in the sanctuary changed your relationship with uncertainty, with how you may have evolved your thinking, your feeling, your coping strategies over time, to live with uncertainty literally every day?

Gail Pope: I think my first answer is that this is a fascinating topic because I was sitting here as you were talking thinking, "I've never thought about living with uncertainty. I've never thought that I was living with uncertainty." 

So I've started from here in this moment going, "Oh, my God. Everything's uncertain in my life, in our lives, in everybody's lives. Nothing's certain. So how did I get here?"

Then I look back, and you took me back to where I needed to start, to particularly all the animals over three or four decades who have actually not taught me about being uncertain or being certain, but they've taught me to live in the moment. 

Which is, I think, where everything that you said landed me in the moment, accepting what is there in the moment and working my way to or through whatever it is. 

So it brings us back to those topics that we always talk about: letting go, acceptance and living in the moment. Those are, to me, the prime lessons that animals have to teach us because we don't automatically live in the moment.

We have these brains that work a lot harder than we need them to. So our brains are actually working with the mind and we're working in the future, in the past, in the present. Oh, but now I remember this and everything's uncertain but I don't know that we look at it generally in daily life as uncertainty. 

I think we all live in an uncertain world. But the more we learn, particularly from our animals, particularly if we have a spiritual understanding of life, transition in and out of it, then that helps us because we come to a level of acceptance that every moment we're here is uncertain.

I'll pass that back to you now. I don't know anything else to say.

Karen Wylie: You're throwing a hot potato back to me.

I think you and I have, we came to it differently but we, as we often say, we ended up in much the same place.

Gail Pope: The same, yes.

Karen Wylie: Because I would say that one of the things you did for yourself to be able to cope was taking copious notes about the lives and deaths of your pets. That's how you learned from them and you were able to create stages of dying and to really understand the process. 

I think your curiosity about it— instead of just being bewildered and pushing away from it -  you knew that if you were to continue to care for them, if you're bringing in senior and end-of-life pets, you're going to lose them and have to cope with that.

You know I've always said that about that, I think what you did was extraordinary because you learned from the animals who were there in front of you, your teachers, and you let them teach you.

Gail Pope: That's interesting you would say that because as I look back, and I've never put it into this perspective before, but very early on as we were getting more and more animals and more and more veterinarians who were offering to work with those animals. I realized that I had to have a file for notes for every single animal. So again, as I moved into the world of classical homeopathy, it's not just the condition of their fur, this illness, that illness, when they'd had blood work, different testing. It's who are they? So it was developing really close relationships with every animal so that I could be them when I was talking to their vet.

What makes them happy, what makes them sad. So that opened it up a whole lot more, and I didn't realize at the time that I was learning other lessons - other than what I needed to do for the next appointment. 

So it was only later on when I started writing— actually, maybe it was when I started doing obituaries that I started. 

As I look at some of the obituaries now that I wrote way back, I'm astonished because I hadn't really realized the deep level that each animal had taken me into their lives. Down into the depths of who they really were. Wow, that's fascinating. We always say our animals are our teachers but maybe we don't think through quite how deeply that goes. Gosh.

Karen Wylie: Usually not. I think the fact that you and I had more animals than the average animal lover and pet parent made us curious, made learning what was happening even more important because we had others that we needed to take care of at the same time. It wasn't the next pet but everybody else who was there. I know I approached it initially with the academic training I had. That's what I was taught— how to analyze situations and problems. Where my mind can go when I'm analyzing something - too many ideas, too many strategies.

But at some point it turned emotional and it turned spiritual and soul-centered. 

Then I was looking at the complete journey, both my own as a caregiver and what was happening with all of my babies. I guess I want to talk a little bit about how hospice as a middle path, as a third path that we talk about, isn't often recommended and is not often chosen.  

I think part of it is the uncertainty of really understanding what it is and what it would be like to live with on a day-to-day basis. You wake up every day not knowing. If you have a pet with one serious condition or multiple ones, you kiss them good night and you sleep. Then the first thing when you're waking up, you're, "Where are they?"

You're assessing them right away. So you really wake up not knowing what every day is going to bring. Certainly a prolonged decline is emotionally difficult to go through.

Gail Pope: Yes, it is.

Karen Wylie: And that's why we talk a lot about self-care, understanding how to help yourself through those days and cope. We live in a culture that wants control and wants answers. Wants there to be an answer. As you were saying a little earlier, you learned to be present. That how you started living with uncertainty, was to be present. We have talked about that on other podcasts that hospice care is asking for presence with you and your pet.

It's not just what your relationship always used to be based on with your pet, and then they got sick and you don't quite know, like somehow that's different. But just being with them, that's how you always used to live with them, was to be with them. Enjoy every moment you had with them. The fact that they have something going on in their body doesn't really change it from their perspective.

Gail Pope: Yes, you just opened that up for me particularly, because I think in general daily life, we're with our animals but we're not actually being with them. We're working, we're vacuuming, we're doing whatever we're doing, and they're there. They're over there and the heart connection is there but we don't accept their presence in a way that really brings us back to the moment. They're a passing moment, as it were.

So that's very different and maybe again, it's because living with maybe 70, 80 animals at one time. There was always someone who was bringing me into their moment. So I guess that's a strange way of putting it but I guess I lived in the moment without realizing that I was living in the moment because they forced me into it.

Karen Wylie: Yes, one of them was always forcing you into it whether it was one for five minutes and the next one for just one or two minutes, and another one who—

Gail Pope: It was a loving moment because I could be, whatever I was doing, I'd be working but very aware. There would be those that might come up, I'm writing, and come up and rub against my arm, and it's, "Oh, that's such a beautiful moment."

Then there might be somebody over there who starts coughing. Oh, now I need a different moment. Gosh, I don't know how I did it all those years because it was always all about not him, not her, but them.

Karen Wylie: At some point, at least it's sounding to me like I know how you would answer this question, at some point you gave up expecting certainty. That's what it's sounding to me.

Gail Pope: I don't remember if I ever did expect it. I probably did because I think yes, I hadn't thought of it that way but life is uncertain, isn't it? But we do tend to think of what we will be doing and when we will be doing it. I think I gave that up. People often say to me, "Put it in your calendar."

But I have to live today. I still do that now even though my life isn't as full with lots of animals and that kind of a diversion but even now I have to live for the moment. I guess it's ingrained in me. I've managed to stretch it for today and I know what I have to do today. But if you ask me in the morning, "What are you going to be doing this afternoon?" I often have forgotten.

That to me is awful and it's terrible but when I look at it on a different level, now I think that's living in the moment. I'm not living for the fact that I'm going to be doing X, Y, or Z at 4:00. That's there. My calendar's got that. I've got a "secretary". It's called a Mac.

Karen Wylie: That's right. If you have something that's in your calendar for the afternoon, you know about it and you work around it.

Gail Pope: I know it.

Karen Wylie: But you let it go. Like everything about the whole day changes because of that one commitment or meeting with a client or whatever it is that we're doing.

Gail Pope: I was just going back to where you were talking about the hospice period, and thinking how I learned to accept. I didn't learn very well to control my fears because those are the things we always have when someone we love is “possibly”, and that's a good word to use, possibly approaching the end of life.

We never know for sure if or when that may occur or if this may just be something that they get over and continue. So there is so much fear that travels with us when we're caring for an animal. So our mind lives in the future and it's difficult to bring it back to the present and “be” with our animals. 

I know we all strive to do that when we're dealing with one or just a few animals. I guess that's something else that I've learned a little bit how to do because although I was very focused on one who may be approaching the end of life, I'd also got a lot of others to focus on, too. So maybe, although it remained very clear and very important, it was shared.

I guess maybe there's an old saying, "A trouble shared is a trouble halved." Oh, and that's where the animal doulas would come in. I would be worried about having to do all my daily tasks because one may be approaching the end of life but there may be six other animals surrounding them and being with them to make me feel better as well. Ah, I hadn't looked at it that way. So yes, bless the doulas!

Karen Wylie: Bless the doulas. Because you could trust that care was being given even if you didn't have to be the only one providing it. And yet you weren't expecting the situation to be fixed, the problem to be solved. You couldn't control when death was going to occur.

Gail Pope: Correct.

Karen Wylie: You had extended life with all the wonderful things that you always did through diet and a happy environment and the love that was given. But somehow you were able to stay emotionally present without controlling everything because that uncertainty is so exhausting. I think when we look at and certainly any of the human caregiver responses I see on Facebook or books that we read, the caregiver fatigue, the emotional fatigue is truly overwhelming.

Gail Pope: Maybe that's why it didn't become quite so overwhelming for me because the care, the love was stretched. There was always comfort coming to me for a heart that was breaking in this direction, but there'd be love approaching from another.

Karen Wylie: Yes, you didn't have to build in self-care activities into your life because you were being cared for by the other beings in your life.

Gail Pope: Yes, exactly. We were all so busy at our work as well and it all just rolled and blended in together.

Karen Wylie: Life wasn't static anymore.

Gail Pope: I guess we thought we were working with and for the animals, and the animals were there thinking, "Okay, I've got them under control today!"

Karen Wylie: That's right. That's right. "We've got a lot of work to do for them today." We got to keep them going. Based on what you learned in providing hospice, what do you think hospice asks emotionally from people that perhaps they never have learned at any other time?

Gail Pope: The first thing that comes to mind is be kind to yourself because if you can't be kind to yourself, then that changes your energy field which is so important to your animal or animals. I think perhaps we're not aware of being kind to ourselves sometimes. I think naturally we are kind to ourselves to a degree.

If we have a couple or more late nights or sleepless nights, we generally will choose to go to bed early the next night to help relieve things. The little things that we can do to help ourselves feel better, even as simple as, "Oh, I've got to go and make a cup of tea," or a, "I've got to eat that donut that I saw someone leave in the kitchen."

It's just the little things that can uplift you in a day that's difficult. The most uplifting thing is obviously to take your worry, your concern to your animal and be with them— might need to do, should do, and you're worried about, you're fearful about. Just go and relax and be with them and let it go for a while. That's being kind, I think, to yourself.

Karen Wylie: Very much so, and that's something positive that can come out of caring for animals or humans in a hospice capacity.

Gail Pope: It brings us back again to that saying that I'm so fond of, "Living in the moment." It brings you back to the moment - which is where your animals are. They are in that moment naturally, waiting for you to join them. There we are in our heads and doing all our laundry and this, that, and the other, but we're not in that moment. It's such a precious place to be.

Karen Wylie: Yes, especially knowing that time becomes a factor in those situations.

Gail Pope: Yes, "acceptance" is the other big word.

Karen Wylie: Yes.

Gail Pope: And that's really hard to accept that the bottom line is whatever we do, whatever mode of care medically or otherwise we're doing, we don't have control over time. We don't have control over nature taking its own course. We don't observe the fact that nature is the other doctor in the room that is controlling how the being's life is ebbing or flowing. 

We tend to think that's what we're doing, but in actual fact, we're not. We're doing all we can to make it better or different but we're not in control. I think maybe that has an awful lot to do with the difficulty in hospice end-of-life care, is that it's difficult for us to accept that we are not 100% in control of the situation.

Karen Wylie: Absolutely, and that's actually exactly what I wanted us to consider next. That is the role euthanasia plays in our sense of certainty or uncertainty because certainly when euthanasia is recommended, at whatever point in the diagnostic process, the giving the news process, the care over time process. Euthanasia does provide a certain amount of emotional certainty. 

It certainly provides more certainty about finances, which can be astronomical these days in terms of the care provided or if people are still pursuing treatment. But it does also give us an end point of when the stress would be over. It's very much more of a predictable process certainly than hospice care is. I think for many of those reasons it offers relief from the ambiguity that the option of hospice provides.

Gail Pope: Yes and no, because in the world that you and I live in, hospice isn't about the end of life. Hospice is about the comfort during living in the last chapter of life. Then euthanasia, the choice should be at the end of that, which way transition occurs. I think putting the nail on the head here, whether you choose willingly or unwillingly have euthanasia or a natural death at the end - as long as you have made that choice carefully and considerately, and it really feels to you in your heart that it is the right choice - then I'd love to say there's no guilt.

However, we're human and it is hard to be human. Whatever our choice, we can always look back and wonder if we did the right thing. However, I think when we look at end of life as a choice - it's not a choice for humans as yet anyway - but for our animals, it is a choice. So if it's a choice we consider really carefully, then we should not feel guilt afterwards. Tough but you're taking me back down memory lane. I guess I felt guilty after various choices which may not have actually been about euthanasia or a natural death.

I've got to the point where I can almost see which is the obvious choice here. It doesn't become a choice. I think for me if euthanasia is going to be the end, it becomes very clear to me that I have to make that choice. Do I not want to make it? Do I have some negative things about that? Yes but would I regret it? No. And I think, what is the saying? "The path of least regrets." And that's a beautiful sentiment because that's what we all want.

So I think if we follow the life and transition part of our animal's existence and we do that with the path of least regrets following along with us, then it's a beautiful thing, isn't it?

Karen Wylie: Yes and for me, the path of least regrets is always choosing hospice care for whatever length of time is possible given whatever the disease may be.

Gail Pope: There we have another podcast because the word hospice scares an awful lot of people away. "I would never choose that." "I would never choose that." "That's awful."

But yes, you know, that's why I tend to say hospice, end of life care, because it's about living. It's not about looking at dying. I guess I'd probably even be a millionaire as I’ve said that over and over so many times. But it really is finding your own way of being in your own life, because we have to find comfort in ourselves. I guess our animals are, in all honesty, they're our cheerleaders. They're along to help us figure out who we are, where we belong in the world, what our dreams and visions are. They walk beside us through our lives, don't they?

Karen Wylie: They most certainly do.

Gail Pope: No, I'm sorry, I have to laugh.

Karen Wylie: What?

Gail Pope: I've shown you this before. I was going through old photos a few weeks ago. There's this one photo that ended up on my desk, and of course I have my various pads sitting in front of me, and the photos are all underneath it. I picked up my pad to write a note a little while ago, and I don't remember what I was saying but Grace glared at me. Every now and again, I find myself saying something silly and frivolous or something about animals, and I look down and there she is glaring at me like, "So stupid." Sorry, Grace.

Karen Wylie: Oh, God. I certainly think you're right about using the term "hospice" because it's very scary to people. Largely because it feels unknown and that you're giving up on fixing and controlling.

Gail Pope: People tend to think it's going to be expensive, too. But the journey through all of life has various levels of expense. In actual fact, as Mother Nature intended, birthing, living, and dying shouldn't be expensive. We make it expensive or less expensive or more expensive.

Again, hospice, if you look at it, for most people particularly, hospice is a time of least expense. We spend the money on the tests, on the surgeries, on trying to fix stuff. Then hospice is on the horizon. So many people and animals back away from it, but in actual fact, it's the beautiful, comfortable place of letting go, acceptance, and living a good life for as long as there is.

Karen Wylie: It's really about learning to love without any guarantees.

Gail Pope: Yes, that's true. That's lovely.

Karen Wylie: It's also a different place to think about love, a different way to think about it. Because so often, I think maybe I'll just say it for myself, I think of all the different things I do or don't do in caring for my pets because I'm trying to control the length of their life and have them with me forever. Being with them in their last chapters, you're still loving them but you have no guarantee about the timeframe, and you really have to learn to let that part go.

Gail Pope: That takes us back, right back to the beginning of the conversation, doesn't it?

Karen Wylie: Yes, it does.

Gail Pope: It really does. As I look around and realize that the animals have taught me to let go of so much of the worry and fear, and just enjoy life with them because that's what they want to do. Regardless of the long list of different medical diagnoses they may have, it doesn't matter to them as much as it matters to us.

Karen Wylie: No. They still just live. They just live their lives, and they enjoy every moment that they have. Hopefully we can learn how to do that too.

Gail Pope: Yes.

Karen Wylie: Anything else you would like to say on this topic, Ms. Pope?

Gail Pope: I don't think so. I was just sitting here thinking about the word "acceptance" again, and it's very relevant for this conversation. But the way we've worked the conversation around, it's come back to acceptance of our own selves. Hasn’t it?

Karen Wylie: Yes.

Gail Pope: We have to accept who we are, which isn't easy to do sometimes.

Karen Wylie: No, it isn't. But we also know that caregiving changes each of us. Usually for the better.

Gail Pope: Or it could turn us into alcoholics.

Karen Wylie: Fortunately, you and I didn't choose that path. Instead, here we are.

Gail Pope: But there's still time.

Karen Wylie: Okay, maybe that'll be the topic for next week.

Gail Pope: Oh, goodness.

Karen Wylie: On that note, we will say thank you for being with us at Peace of Mind for Pet Parents, and we'll look forward to talking with you and each other again next week.

Gail Pope: Bye-bye. Thank you.