Last Licks: End-of-life Care for Pets and Their Humans

The day the dog of my childhood died, there was no chance to say goodbye. Mom was crying when she called. She had found Ginger cold and stiff in her dog bed that morning. Not knowing what else to do, she drove the body and bed to the vet’s office, and left them there. I understood, but it felt wrong. I always expected I’d have a chance to see Ginger again.

I thought about Ginger this week when reading a front-page story in the New York Times about advances in end-of-life care for pets. Now there is animal palliative care, mobile hospice, lots of time to say goodbye. A lot of it is more for the humans than the pets, and having vet come to your house to administer euthanasia costs more than going to the clinic.

When it’s time, the vet performs it in the living room, bedroom or wherever the family feels comfortable.

That’s a big part of the job, the vets say, relieving pet owner guilt, giving them an emotional bridge to a pet’s death, and letting them grieve at home—rather than in a clinic or animal shelter.

That was what prompted Kathryn D. Marocchino, a California professor of death and dying, and her husband to found a hospice for pets. As the group’s website explains, the pet hospice started “in response to the emotional trauma they suffered when their tabby, Nikki, had to be euthanized during the final stages of acute feline kidney failure.”

In parallel with palliative and hospice care for humans, even as end-of-life care for pets becomes more mainstream, myths abound. Some common misconceptions are the same for pets and humans. As our psychologytoday.com colleague Jessica Pierce points out, here is “Misconception #1: Animal hospice is a place you take your animal for care.”

As with hospice for humans, animal hospice is a philosophy, not a place. It also may involve drugs to help with pain and anxiety. But for pets, hospice often ends with euthanasia, performed by a vet at the pet’s home or another place chosen by the family. For us, 20 years after my first experience with a pet just suddenly disappearing, it would be in the car.

Joby, a sort-of cockapoo I had adopted in graduate school, had been through a lot of changes with me. We started living together in a large house with four other grad students, moved to a tiny house by ourselves, then two slightly larger houses with my husband, and finally a four-bedroom house with two small children.

The kids loved Joby, but at 13 she was arthritic, increasingly cranky, and she spent most of the day under our bed. Then she lost interest in eating. Our wonderful vet kindly counseled us to think about her “quality of life.” It was the first time I’d really thought about that concept at all. This was before “dying well” had become a topic of conversation for humans or animals.

We talked it over with our son, who was 4. We explained that Joby was in pain and we were lucky that the vet could relieve that pain in a peaceful way. He wanted to come with us, to be with Joby when she died—in the car at the vet’s—and when we buried her in the back yard. For all of us it was our first experience with a “good death.” As I held Joby in my arms for the euthanasia, she was calm and simply passed away. We took her home, said a few nice things, and buried her under the fig tree. I took my son to school and wept for hours. It felt right.

—Posted by Sheila Himmel