Good grief, p.7
Good Grief, page 7
The fact that you can plan when a euthanasia will happen, too, means that you can take the time to celebrate your animal with others. If you know the end of your pet’s life is coming, you can have a memorial service for him while he’s still alive. You can do all sorts of things to make sure your pet feels loved, secure, and happy in his final moments. A friend of a friend grew up with a dog named Seaweed, and when it came time for Seaweed to go, the friend’s dad took him to the McDonald’s drive-through on the way to the vet. He got the dog three hamburgers and said, “Go to town, Seaweed.”
My friends Tuck and Liz’s friends had a big party for their dog the night before his death, inviting everyone who had also known and loved their pet; they even dressed the dog up in a tuxedo and top hat for the occasion.
When it became clear that the end was near for her dog Harvey, the writer Annie Hartnett invited friends over for an open house to say goodbye to the border collie. Of course, all of Hartnett’s pet-loving friends showed up, but she said it meant the most to her when even a friend who pointedly does not like dogs arrived with cookies and flowers.
My college roommate Lee’s family made their thirteen-and-a-half-year-old German shepherd, Bella, a steak dinner and took her for a drive along the California coast before she was euthanized.
Dr. Dani McVety has built her whole practice around the idea of making the last day a good day. When she was in veterinary school, she discovered that she was particularly skilled at dealing with the end-of-life stuff—she was direct and honest, she didn’t sugarcoat, and she found that people responded well to that. She also realized that she was resilient when it came to compassion fatigue.
When I spoke with her on the phone, McVety told me, “I have never felt compassion fatigue doing what I do now—never. I can euthanize nine patients in a day, and each one feels like the first one that I’ve done.” Which is good, because euthanizing nine patients in a day is a regular day for McVety, who runs her own practice now called Lap of Love Veterinary Hospice, in Tampa, Florida. Lap of Love offers hospice care for elderly and sick animals, medical house calls for pets, at-home euthanasia, and even pet aftercare services. “What I do now is help people say goodbye in the most compassionate way,” McVety told me. “In human medicine we are taught to fight, fight, fight, and one day I thought, What am I fighting against?” It’s not that she doesn’t try to make sick animals well, but because she concentrates on an elderly and dying population, McVety is able to focus on making her patients as comfortable and happy as possible in their final years, months, weeks, days, hours. “I get to treat my patient instead of treating a disease,” she explained. Death is part of the life cycle, and McVety tries to help her clients understand that. “Sickness or death doesn’t happen because medicine fails you,” she said. “It’s just a natural progression of biology. Nature does that. We can’t prevent sickness and death; we are just here to make the quality of life good. And I am here to make the quality of death very good.”
McVety is not the only one drawn to this type of work. Former mortician Ace Tilton Ratcliff and veterinarian Dr. Derek Calhoon started an at-home euthanasia service in Boynton Beach, Florida, called Harper’s Promise, named for their now deceased dog Harper. Both Ratcliff and Calhoon believe euthanasia is a gift we can give to our animal friends; as they have written on the Harper’s Promise website, “As impossible as it may feel, euthanasia can be the last in a long line of kind and loving decisions you’ve already made for your pet.”
When I spoke on the phone with Ratcliff and Calhoon, one of the first things they emphasized was the importance of their work as a team. Calhoon, as the veterinarian, is the one who has the medical expertise, the one who administers the euthanasia drugs, and the one who wields the final needle. Ratcliff’s role is that of a “deathcare adviser.” Ratcliff explained, “I’m a layperson, but I have the experience of being chronically ill with a degenerative disease. Because my disease is rare, I’ve had to do my own medical research and be able to work as a translator.” They are able to turn Calhoon’s veterinary jargon into simple language that clients can understand; Ratcliff is the one who asks questions, clarifies, and explains as Calhoon does the medical procedures. Ratcliff’s work reminded me of Cohen’s position at the Animal Medical Center, providing support to both vets and clients at once, and I thought about how much easier, calmer, and better it would have been if I’d had someone like that by my side during the Chuckie Incident. In addition to his at-home euthanasia work through Harper’s Promise, Calhoon is a veterinarian at an animal hospital, where he must perform euthanasias on his own, and he said that he misses having someone in Ratcliff’s role when dealing in the “traditional, clinical side of euthanasia.” The aspect of support and communication is missing in a lot of animal hospitals, with many clinics full of vets who are overworked and lacking resources. But with an at-home euthanasia practice, both vets and clients have all the time and space they need. No colleague is rushing a vet out to use the exam room next, no family with a new puppy is looking at a crying client with a horrified glance, no receptionist is waiting for a credit card as a devastated person sobs. Calhoon and Ratcliff can set the scene and manage the situation and make it as comfortable and private and safe for both the person and the dying animal as possible. When you can plan, your pet can die at home, where they feel the most comfortable and safe—as Ratcliff put it in an essay for Narratively, it’s “the best way for the worst thing ever to happen.”
“The most important thing you can do is set reasonable expectations,” explained Calhoon. “The gap between what happened and what was expected needs to be as small as possible. It still sucks, but then at least you’re not also dealing with surprise and shock, too.” He said that it wasn’t until he and Ratcliff had to euthanize Harper that he realized how much of his profession was about helping clients up until the moment of death. For many vets, once the client leaves the room and the patient’s body gets sent to the crematorium, that’s the end of the support. But the moment of death is when Ratcliff’s real work begins. While Calhoon wraps up the physical elements of dying, Ratcliff works on the emotional—encouraging clients to take time with the body, take pictures if they want, to sit and cry and reflect, not to rush. “I think most people misunderstand what ‘gaining closure’ about a situation means,” Calhoon said, explaining that most people assume closure is the end of the feelings, the end of the emotional experience. “But closure is the beginning of the process. Closure is a completeness of perspective, a certainty about the reality about the situation. It closes the event, not the experience of the event.”
People need different things in order to access closure, and something that Ratcliff and Calhoon often run up against is members of a family wanting or needing different things for the end—for example, a wife who wants to sit with a dog through the euthanasia and long after the dog is gone but whose husband can’t bear to be in the room. “I had to tell her it was okay for him to leave,” Ratcliff explained. “That he didn’t need to grieve in the same way that she did.” As soon as the couple heard that, Calhoon said, it was a clear “relief for both of them” and suddenly their focus went from each other to their dying dog. But even professionals have a hard time when it comes to their own animals. Ratcliff and Calhoon showed me photos of a shelf that serves as a shrine to all of their dead pets—collars, paw prints, artwork, photographs, ashes, bones. They both got choked up at different times on our call. Ratcliff told me about the death of their fourteen-year-old dog Roland, who had been with Ratcliff since they were nineteen. Roland had been struggling with a number of health problems for a while, and when it was finally his time to go, Calhoon gave him the smallest possible dosage of euthanasia fluid and it sent him on his way. It was a long weekend and the crematorium was closed. “Roland was the type of dog who was with me wherever I was,” Ratcliff explained. So Roland lay in state at home, in a beautiful casket that Calhoon had made, but he didn’t lie in one place; Ratcliff moved his body around the house wherever they went for three days. At one point Ratcliff needed to go to the art store to get materials to make a cast of Roland’s paw and nose, and Calhoon asked Ratcliff if Roland should come with them. Ratcliff felt overwhelming gratitude for Calhoon in that moment, for understanding that this was part of their grieving process and letting them do what they needed to. “It was a big deal to have your partner be completely okay with driving your dead dog around for three days,” Ratcliff said, their words thick with emotion.
Even McVety, who euthanizes animals every day, struggled when her own dog died. She lost the first dog she’d had as an adult when she was three years out of vet school. She’d already started Lap of Love, but still, when it came to the death of her dog, she was hit hard. She felt that she should be handling it better, considering her profession. “I needed me to tell me it was okay,” she explained. “I needed to give myself the gift that I give to everyone else.”
It’s often easier not to do this. It’s much easier to blame yourself, be mad at yourself, beat yourself up. I think it’s a human thing to focus on the bad, to remember one negative comment in a sea of compliments. It’s a place where we should take guidance from our pets. “Dogs are resilient,” Mani said, and she’s right. Even if a rescue animal has baggage—fears, anxieties, aggression— often they can heal. They can learn to trust and love again.
“We feel so responsible,” said Cohen. “We take their death very hard, and we are always full of guilt and regret—I went to the wrong vet, I had the wrong surgery done, I didn’t do enough.” I nodded as Cohen rattled off so many of the common feelings of pet caretakers in grief. “But I believe in evolution,” she went on. “What is the purpose of this terrible grief? Of being haunted by our last view of anyone we care about? It’s a protective mechanism, descended from ancestors who paid very close attention to how anyone would become dead or sick, to try to keep it from happening again.” It’s a natural feeling, and a hard one to shake off. But Cohen encourages grieving pet caretakers to talk to others, perhaps to join a pet-loss support group like the one she runs. “You sit and listen to the guy across from you in the circle tell his story, and he feels terrible guilt, but you think that he did everything he could do, and so you start to think, Maybe I did everything I could, too. Maybe I don’t need to blame myself either,” Cohen said. “As much as we try, no one has escaped death yet.”
There’s a saying: “Help me be the person my dog thinks I am.” Kind of corny, but I like the sentiment. It’s something to aspire to, for sure. But here’s the thing: you already are the person your dog (or any other pet) thinks you are. You give them food and shelter, you throw a tennis ball around, you take them on walks, you scratch their ears, you rub their back, and you love them as much as you can. Those actions may feel simple to you, or you may feel like you’re falling short—but those simple things are enough.
I don’t think Chuckie is up in hamster heaven, looking down on me, angry that I let him die while Meri was at Disney World. No, I bet that Chuckie was just thrilled that I gave him baby carrots and let him roll around in his blue ball right until the end. Every day, our animals look at us with the love, kindness, and understanding that we need to give to ourselves, especially when it comes to their end-of-life care. So let yourself receive the gift that your pet is giving.
My grandparents’ Yorkshire terrier, Samantha, was born in 1971 and lived until she was seventeen years old—we overlapped for seven months during the first half of 1988. When my grandfather, whom I call Puppy, would tell me how Samantha died, all he would say was that she’d had a stroke, was struggling to breathe, and eventually died in his arms. I mean, the dog was seventeen—it made sense. I didn’t question it. I pictured my grandfather finding the wheezing Samantha, rushing this tiny dog to the vet, trying to do everything to save her, and finally holding her as she got the euthanasia shot.
“Oh, pal, I didn’t take her to the vet,” my grandfather finally told me when I was no longer a child. “Samantha clearly had a stroke, and I picked her up and was holding her in my arms . . .” I pictured my six-foot-something-tall grandfather cradling this four-pound terrier in the crook of his elbow. “Her head was at an angle, and she was gasping and having trouble breathing and . . .” Puppy stopped talking, tears in his eyes. He said he didn’t plan it; he said he never would have thought he could do it—he just knew what he needed to do. He gently pet the dog and placed his hand on her neck to see if she would resist. She didn’t—and he closed his fingers tighter and tighter. “She knew what was going on,” Puppy said, tears streaming. “But she had accepted it. She knew it was the end.” Puppy said he cried the whole time. Once Samantha went limp and her bladder released, he knew the little dog was gone. “Be at peace, Sarah Samantha,” he said, using her full name. “You were so loved.”
More than thirty years later, speaking with me again about Samantha’s death, Puppy repeated and repeated, “It was the hardest thing I ever had to do.” He never told anyone what he had done. He didn’t like to talk about her death at all. He simply said to my grandmother, my mom, and my aunt, and later to me, that Samantha had a stroke and died in his arms. It wasn’t not true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. “I couldn’t tell anyone,” Puppy said. “I felt ashamed.”
I admit, I was shocked the first time I heard this story—a teenager or perhaps a college student, stunned to learn that my grandfather had killed his own dog. But as I got older, I started to see things differently. My mom pointed out that even though Puppy grew up in the city of Somerville, outside of Boston, he’d had goats and chickens and canaries—a rural kind of lifestyle that perhaps made Puppy more comfortable with hands-on euthanasia. And when you think about it, how is giving your dying Yorkie a final squeeze any different from bringing her to the vet for an injection shot? When I was on the phone with Farris, the equine vet, Samantha came up; I shared how I had struggled to understand how my grandfather had been able to do such a thing.
“Oh,” Farris said gently. “That was a kindness.” She noted how stressful it would be for a little seventeen-year-old Yorkie to get rushed to an animal hospital—all of those loud noises, the other pets, the chaos. Instead, Samantha died right in my grandfather’s arms, the place she loved to be the most. To again paraphrase Milan Kundera, death came for her in the guise of her loved one.
And that is really doing the best we can do.
4
Turtles & Taxidermy
THE FIRST TIME I saw a dead turtle was in 1999, the summer before I started sixth grade. I was walking along one of the sidewalk-less roads on Fishers Island, the same island where, a few years earlier, I’d thrown Kiki his first birthday party. Fishers has no traffic lights, no hotels, no restaurants, and one bar, and many of the roads are not even paved. It’s the sort of place that reminds you how quickly nature can reclaim a space if left to its own devices—sidewalks crack and buckle from tree roots beneath, wisteria and vines quickly cover abandoned structures. And for such a small island, it has a lot of wildlife—bunnies, deer, coyotes, ospreys, feral kittens, one notorious fisher cat, and turtles all the way down.
That fateful day, I was walking on the road next to a shallow body of water nicknamed Scum Pond by my family, for the thick green algae that coats it every summer. I absentmindedly kicked rocks out of the road and onto the bordering grass. As my foot wound up to kick a particularly flat and odd-shaped rock, I paused for a closer look. Was it a chunk of asphalt? Part of a tire? My breath caught in my throat. It was a baby turtle. A dead baby turtle. It was the size of a Sacagawea dollar, and unnaturally flat—there were tire tracks imprinted on the shell, just like in a cartoon. I went to touch the turtle, to feel the grooves embossed into the carapace, but the body was hot from baking on the July asphalt. I stared in horror: while I had plenty of experience with dead fish, dead birds, and dead hamsters, I’d never seen a dead turtle before. My pet turtles always disappeared on me before they had a chance to die.
Flower Speedy Andersen Bartels was my first. Dad and my brother, Chad, found the eastern painted turtle in the middle of the road on Fishers, the summer I was five years old. Chad, busy with important teenage business, quickly lost interest in the turtle, but I was enamored. Flower spent the summer swimming in a plastic kiddie pool in the driveway, and I gleefully threw her handfuls of raw hamburger meat every morning. It was a glorious time. For me, at least. I’m sure the turtle was miserable.
At the end of the summer, Dad gently tried to explain to me the concept of “temporary pets.” He told me that some animals are just visitors, dropping into our lives for a little bit, adding some enjoyment before returning to their real homes in the wild—but I wasn’t having it. I convinced my parents to bring Flower back to our house in Lexington and build her a small pond in our yard. But Flower had other ideas. Not even an hour after Dad dug a giant hole in the lawn, submerged a large plastic tub from Home Depot, and surrounded the man-made pond with chicken wire, somehow Flower managed to escape. I was, of course, devastated, just as I’d been about all my other pets. But this time there was no body to bury. Flower wasn’t dead; she was just back on her own, somewhere else, without me, which was a confusing kind of grief. While at first this was upsetting, the idea of Flower off having adventures eventually began to bring me some comfort. At least she wasn’t dead. At least, if she was dead, I didn’t know.
