Peace of Mind for Pet Parents Episode 072: Am I Keeping My Pet Alive for Me or for Them?

RESOURCES MENTIONED & RELATED LISTENING

• Animal Hospice Group (animalhospicegroup.com) — professional certification organization in animal hospice and palliative care
• LIVING Quality of Life Care Assessment Tool — Free download
• BrightHaven Animals YouTube Channel — Search: BrightHaven Animals | @brighthaven_animals
  • Breakfast at BrightHaven: https://youtu.be/V8erOv6B2Oc?si=bgd5wYsDTbh2G7zk

You might also find helpful:

• Episode 056: Someone in Your Corner — What a Veterinary Social Worker Can Do for You and Your Pet
• Episode 069: Preparing for Your Pet's Death — Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Ways to Make Every Moment Count
• Episode 053: From Pet Parent to Caregiver: The Quiet Shift Nobody Warns You About
• Episode 006: When Pet Care Gets Hard: Supporting a Pet with a Difficult-to-Manage Diagnosis

Related reading:

• What Is Animal Hospice Care for Pets?
• Life-Changing Diagnoses in Pets: A Comprehensive Guide
• Emotional Support for Pet Owners Facing a Difficult Diagnosis: Coping with Guilt, Fear, and Grief
• Monitoring Your Pet's Health at Home: A Palliative Care Guide for Chronic and Difficult Conditions

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Episode Transcript: 

Karen Wylie: Hello, and welcome back to Peace of Mind for Pet Parents. I'm Karen Wylie here as always with my friend Gail Pope. Today we're going to sit with a question that almost every pet parent asks themselves at some point, usually late at night when we're alone with our thoughts. That question that we sometimes ask is, "Am I keeping my pet alive for me or for them?"

It's a question that can feel, even when you think it yourself, it can feel like an accusation because if the answer is yes, maybe you're going to start thinking you have failed your pet somehow. But Gail and I really want to spend this episode kind of pulling that question apart because we don't think it's as simple or as damning as it sounds.

So we're going to talk about why this question comes up for us and what it's really asking and how you can use it as a tool to get some clarity instead of feeling guilty about even having that question. 

So Gail, for the two of us, we always aim to support a hospice-supported natural death for our pets. In that context, we're not determining the timeframe for our pets. We're not keeping them alive. They have some input on that decision. Their bodies have their own timeframe and their will to live has their own timeframe. But we also can find ourselves in the situation where there's a crisis along the way. We need our vet and we need an ER, and we have to consider how our pet's continued end of life will proceed.

We make sure we're ready for those detours along the way. But in your years both at BrightHaven, with yourself as a pet owner and thinking about the pet parents you have provided support to, when does this question tend to come up? Is it usually a single moment that it comes up for them, or does it just creep in slowly?

Gail Pope: Well, I'm probably going to give you a fairly boring answer that we've heard and talked about before. For me it comes down to fear of death, lack of education, and I guess the bottom line there, is love. There's a deep love, there's a fear of the unknown. And "I don't know what to do?", "Am I doing it wrong?", and "Is this all my fault?"

When you start sliding down that slippery slope, all you can do is keep on sliding until you're in a state of panic. So I think that plays a big part, don't you?

Karen Wylie: And so when you're speaking with a pet parent who does share that this is a thought they've had, "Sometimes I wonder if I'm keeping my pet alive for me or for them?" You start trying to help them unravel that question and some of the other related questions you were just mentioning. 

How do you go about doing that?

 Are you just talking to them one time because they never think of those questions again? Or?

Gail Pope: There's a huge variety. I think one of the things that I will sometimes talk about is the BrightHaven philosophy that developed over a long time which was what we call "Healing for the Highest Good."

So I'm not looking at trying to fix what I know to be an illness or fix the aging process. There may not be an illness. It may just be an older lady or gentleman who is winding down towards the end of life. And that fear can still come then because obviously the dying process does have its own symptoms, but they don't need treating. So I think if you have the understanding that you're healing for the highest good, then you're not worrying about should I give this drug or that drug or...

It's a much more gentle approach. And yes, if you've got your veterinarian, as I always do, at hand if I need to call and say, "What do you think? Do I need to address this?" Then I'm addressing it holistically and I guess part of it also is having someone to accompany you on the journey. When I have a client and they can contact me whenever they reach a, "Ugh, what do you think?" Or, "Is this normal?" They can contact me. I'm sometimes in that same position, so I can talk to somebody to whom I can say, "What do you think?"

That's generally my vet because my vets obviously are experienced in natural passings. They're looking at the same principle as me which is healing for the highest good. We're not necessarily looking at dying. We're putting it all as part of the process of living until the being steps out of his earth house, if you put it that way. It's just making the journey as comfortable as possible.

Karen Wylie: Well, what I love about healing for the highest good is that it completely reframes the way we think about our pet's illness or decline. Instead of the focus on just the medical aspect, the diagnosis and the eventual loss that will happen at some point, healing for the highest good allows you to reinterpret almost everything that you go through in a very different way than how most of us have been taught to think about illness and decline.

So I would think that one question I was going to ask you is what you would say to a pet parent who was feeling ashamed or guilty for asking themselves that question, "Am I keeping my pet alive for me or for them?" But once you would describe healing for the highest good for them, in that context, that would pretty much change their feelings of shame or guilt, wouldn't it?

Gail Pope: Generally, yes. It really helps. When I think back over how many years it probably took me to adopt that understanding, and just actually express that idea to somebody else, unless they already have a wholistic approach to the way they're caring for their animal or themselves. Very often it's more personal than it's about the animal. But unless they get it, it takes a lot more discussion.

"What do you mean, healing for the highest good?" And I say "Offering healing in every single way in daily life for the highest good of your animal in the knowledge that they may be approaching the end of their life, or they may not be."

So it's going with the flow. Trusting that other doctor, Mother Nature as well. It's creating a balance. It's not trying to fix one little thing that isn't really that big a problem. It's looking at the overall constitution of the animal and what's needed today, maybe there's nothing needed. We do have this human fix-it nature. You hear one little symptom and we want to rush to fix it.

I think letting go of that a little bit— obviously, if it's something acute and it's something you can't ignore, then obviously you do need veterinary help. But very often you don't because you have that in that other doctor, that other veterinarian who is on the other side of the wall actually helping to keep things balanced so that the organs are losing function in tandem. There's not something acute happening that you will need to address. Does that make sense?

Karen Wylie: It sure does. Another aspect of what you're saying that I think is important is that in asking that basic question of, "Am I doing this for my pet or for me?" Healing for the highest good is looking at the overall which involves the relationship because there's really no way to separate for my pet or for me. It's really not separate.

Gail Pope: No. That's such a good observation because when I think of it, whatever care we're giving, it's all about love and the love between us. There's the answer that you just gave. It's about you and your animal. It's the relationship which is why looking at that process wholistically, putting that “W” at the beginning, taking the entire relationship: the caregiver, the animal, the family, the, the other animal family too. But looking at everything as a whole makes a huge difference. Letting go of fixing everything. Learning a little more about where you are and what other people have experienced. That can be a great help.

Karen Wylie: Yes. I'm sure there was a point where I was asking this myself, I don't remember those specifically but it's something I would've done as my mind would be asking every possible question, trying to think of doing all the right things. So I'm sure I did ask myself that. But as you're saying, it really is about how we're motivated to think about these things and to ask these kinds of questions because of the love that we have for our pets. It's really an expression of that love that we're wondering about their readiness for what might be coming down the road for them.

But we also need to show a little bit of love for ourselves because we're also exploring our readiness or our lack of readiness for what might be coming down the road. As we've talked about at various times, a lot of us when we are supporting a pet as they're aging or at end of life, we're not very good to ourselves. We're much better about trying to take care of our pet than we are about taking care of ourselves.

Gail Pope: Definitely, definitely. I think it's because we have this inner blame along with the fear. It's like I shouldn't take time for myself because I don't deserve it. I need to be taking care of her or him. It's tricky. Life is tricky. When you compare the life of a human to the life of maybe your cat or your dog, cats particularly, they don't have all this clutter, do they? They take things in their stride. If something's wrong they'll let you know, and then you can work together as a partnership.

Generally, it's not something awfully bad or terminal instantly. It's creating a balance for daily life for you as well as your pet. I think one of the things that people don't take into account often enough is the fact that our animals, I always say - and this is a kind of a funny little way of saying it, but cat speaks dog, cat speaks human. Dog, the same. And yet humans, for the most part, unless we're an accomplished and wonderful animal communicator, we only speak our own language. We don't speak theirs. We understand certain loving gazes that they have, but we're not tuned into the deeper understanding as well as our animals are.

So I think part of being a caregiver is understanding that your animal knows that you're frantic, knows that you're worried, knows you're upset, knows you haven't been eating properly, knows you're not sleeping properly. Those things affect them. So getting a grip on yourself and reaching a point where you can, "Phew, it's okay. Let me enjoy today because I don't need to think about tomorrow at the moment. Let's enjoy this relationship."

Again, we're entering a period here where it's also twofold because while we're worrying about what may happen, without realizing it we're experiencing anticipatory grief. So that's mingled up and hurting our hearts, whereas we should be sharing that. Sharing and caring with our animal before our relationship changes when they step out of their body. So yes, it's complex. Again, it comes down to how hard it is to be human.

Karen Wylie: Yes, and how hard it can be to love our pets so completely. Gail, how do you help someone see that wanting more time with their pet doesn't automatically make them selfish?

Gail Pope: It's part of the whole conversation, isn't it? I think once you start to realize that dying is a process and that comes during living. Living and dying together are all part of the process. You're living first. There's not really a dying going on or even entering the conversation. But then it is. But every day is still about living. It's creeping towards the end of that life.

I guess I come back to it again, and that's where our relationships become so much more difficult because we're feeling the fear of the ending of this, the ending of the love. It's like this brick wall is ahead of us.

And so I think when I'm talking to people who have a spiritual understanding of end of life, the conversation can, *exhale,* it can help them just, "Oh my God, I hadn't really thought of it that way," and it changes everything. 

For some people, they don't have that. Again, I talk about my mother who didn't have that. To her, death was that brick wall that we all hit and that's the end of everything. I remember back to years, long, long time ago, where that's how I was brought up. I didn't have a spiritual understanding. It took a lot of animals to actually make my eyes open wide and realize, "Wow, this is different."

Then the comfort comes in because it's not all about this. It expands and then it expands more. "Oh, wow!" And then the process of birthing becomes as important as the process of dying. Then we start to look at the circle of life as a circle. "Whoa! Something's changing in this relationship now."

So I think helping people work through death again, comes down to knowledge. Whatever their spiritual belief is or not, that understanding the process. It really comes down to what hurts. What is suffering? What is pain? That's a much bigger conversation, I realize, but it does come down to that because that's where the fear is grounded. So again, I come back to what I'm probably well-known for on this podcast of saying - read books!

Read books about death and dying in the human field. There are so many wonderful stories, so many practitioners who have shared their lives and experiences of how people die. Barbara Karnes is someone that we talk about often, and she took me into sharing this field as she shares it with humans, and has done for decades. It was her book, "Gone from My Sight", that awoke the passion in me to share and care and help other people to reach this understanding.

Karen Wylie: You're absolutely right, of course. It's education in so many different forms. We hope that our conversations each week provide some new information, some new ideas to think about. 

I really like you framing it as "Healing for the Highest Good." Because when we're able to do that, then asking the question of whether we're letting our pets go too early or letting our pets go too late become less important. The healing for the highest good is for all concerned. The pet is obviously our focus at that moment, but the decisions we make and the learning we'll have from our decisions, is in our highest good as well.

Gail Pope: Certainly is. Gosh, there's so much flowing through my mind that spins away and around in this kind of conversation. I do think that reading other people's stories can really help to understand. Our animals are generally four-legged and we're two-legged. However, the resemblance of death and dying, it's the same. It's the same process. There are more and more people in the human world who are really coming out and talking about what happens in death and dying, what does it look like? Is it like it's in the movies? No, it's not.

Karen Wylie: No and the caregiving journey for us is very different in terms of how it really is versus how it may look in movies. Sometimes when we start asking these questions of balance and "Is my pet ready or am I ready? What am I doing here?"

We can start asking these questions because the caregiving process itself is becoming unbearable, becoming more than we can deal with. 

So it just depends on so many different factors: the pet, ourselves, the specific illness. One of the things I guess that comes to my mind here is that, I often bring it up, but it's our "Living Quality of Life Assessment Tool." So that if someone really does think that they're keeping their pet alive and they're doing that and their pet is actually ready to go, then maybe it's time to do your own "Quality of Life Care Assessment". To see how your pet's doing this week.

It's not where we're saying, "Do a quality of life assessment to determine if they're ready to be euthanized." That's a different kind of quality of life assessment. 

But with our living assessment, we're looking at love and connection, to really look at how the pet is still responding to us and the relationship we have. Are they mobile and still showing some levels of independence or not? Those are the kinds of things that we ask and encourage pet owners to look at. 

With the "LIVING Quality of Life Care Assessment" PDF that we have on the BrightPathForPets.com  website. We'll make sure to put that link in the show notes.

But that can also be one way to try to give yourself a semi-objective— I mean granted, you're the one filling out the tool. If you're really thinking that, you're the determining factor and you want to get a sense of where your pet perhaps is, then completing the quality of life tool from your pet's perspective can help you a little bit more.

Gail Pope: I think that makes me realize that, although we have the Quality of Life for Living Tool, we need another one. We need a partner for it now, don't we? We need one that sits beside it determining the Quality of Life on a Daily Basis for Dying. That needs to be done because it's a parallel. It's very simple. We're looking at appetite in daily life for living. In daily life for dying, we really are looking at an appetite that dwindles. Then we reach a place that I encounter very often where someone will say, "Oh, he hasn't been eating for two or three days. He hasn't eaten anything." I think, "It's time."

Let's look at the bigger picture here and then we can answer, is it time? Maybe time for dinner or a treat. It may be time to consider euthanasia. However, if it's the appetite alone, we know that is normal in dying. The appetite declines. It declines and then it stops, and we hear of people and animals that stop eating completely for much more than just a few days.

Karen Wylie: Like our friend Alice told us last week about her Lorelei not eating for 20 days before she died. She was still active. She was still interacting with the family. But she was not needing food and drink.

Gail Pope: Exactly.

Karen Wylie: Yes, very different. Gail, I guess this is bringing this conversation to a close. I guess what I would like to say is that if someone is staying awake at night and thinking about these kinds of questions, we do want you to hear very clearly that the fact that you're asking these questions means you're paying attention. That you love your pet enough to want to get this part of their life right and this part of your relationship. 

That's definitely not selfishness.

That's devotion and love. 

So I don't think there's a clean answer to "Am I doing this for me or am I doing it for them?" Because it's a "We". It's the relationship. What would you like to say to close this conversation, Gail?

Gail Pope: There's still so much. I guess, I would say it's about being kind to yourself because you're in this beautiful, loving relationship, but when you slide into this state of worry and panic and fear then you're not able to balance the love in that relationship as you're used to, as the animal is used to. So being kind to yourself and spending more time just being with them. If you're going to cry, cry with them. Let them see, let them feel. They know you're crying hidden away in another room.

So it really is about being kind to yourself, so that your relationship continues in an open and loving fashion. That you can begin the grieving process together and understand quite what that means. Because we know deep down that grief is only love. So that's really where we end this conversation. It really is all about love

Karen Wylie: I believe somebody has said that it begins and ends with love. That Love Sandwich idea..

Gail Pope: Really? I wonder who?

Karen Wylie: I wonder who that could be. 🙂

It also sounds like we should include a link to the "BrightHaven Menu for Self-care" given this conversation. I did take note, I've put it on the wish list of additional things, assessments, you think would be helpful to develop.

Gail Pope: I think so. I think so. More and more people are stepping into this murky area. I think we just need to open it up a little bit more so that it becomes something that people don't talk about behind closed doors because it's embarrassing and difficult and all of those things. We need open conversation about the subject. Let's embrace our humans and our animals all in the same conversation really.

Karen Wylie: Yes, because we love them both, and many times we love them in the same ways.

Gail Pope: Exactly.

Karen Wylie: All right. With that, we will close out this conversation of Peace of Mind for Pet Parents. As always, we thank you for being with us. We hope you'll be with us next week as well. Bye-bye.

Gail Pope: Goodbye.