I Hope They Knew

I read something on Threads today and suddenly found myself ugly crying.

It was a post about pets who had been euthanized and the things they had supposedly communicated afterward to an animal communicator. I don't know what I believe about communicating telepathically with animals who have passed. That's probably a conversation for another day. But the messages themselves got to me.

They were about forgiveness. About animals knowing that the decision came from love. About them not being angry with the humans who made it. About how being there with them at the end mattered. And about how maybe, just maybe, the people left behind could stop punishing themselves for a decision they made because they thought it was the kindest thing they could do.

And immediately, I thought of Chase.

It has been about a year since I sat at the vet and made the decision to have him put to sleep. Chase was our French Bulldog, and unlike the other animals I've lost, his death came with a decision I had to make. I hated that decision.

There is something terribly unfair about loving an animal for years and then, at the end, being asked to decide when enough is enough. They can't tell you, Mommy, I'm tired. They can't tell you they're ready. They can't reassure you that you're doing the right thing. You look at them, listen to the vet, look at everything they're going through, and make a choice you never wanted the responsibility of making.

Then you live with it.

So when I read words saying, essentially, There is nothing to forgive. You were trying to help me, I cried.

I want to believe Chase knew that.

I want to believe he knew I wasn't giving up on him. That I wasn't choosing to lose him. That if there had been another reasonable choice that could have made him better, I would have taken it. I want to believe that when I made that decision, whatever he understood in those final moments included the one thing I needed him to know most: I loved him.

But then Chase wasn't the only one who came rushing back.

Tiny. Grinny. Poopy. Tteoki.

I didn't make that decision for them. There was no scheduled goodbye, no moment when someone asked me whether it was time. And you'd think that would mean there was less guilt.

It doesn't. The questions are just different.

When you choose euthanasia, you can torture yourself wondering whether you acted too soon. When you don't, you can torture yourself wondering whether you waited too long, missed something, failed to notice something, should have done something differently, or could somehow have changed the ending if you'd known more.

With Grinny, everything happened so fast. One moment he was my night-shift companion, my chest-sleeper, the cat whose purr had been part of my nights for years, and then I was holding him while he died.

Poopy followed not long after. Tteoki, too. And every loss leaves behind its own version of what if?

That's the part the Threads post unexpectedly opened today. I started reading something meant to comfort people who had chosen euthanasia, and instead found myself thinking about every animal I've lost and every question I still carry about their last days.

I don't know whether I feel comforted by what I read or worse. Maybe both.

Part of me wants someone to tell me exactly what that post was saying: that they knew. That none of them blamed me. That the years before those final hours mattered more than whatever I did or didn't do at the end. That animals don't keep score the way grieving humans apparently do.

Because we do keep score, don't we? We remember the medicine we gave and the one dose we might have given late. We remember the symptom we noticed and wonder about the one we didn't. We replay the vet visits, the decisions, the last meals, the last sounds, the last time they looked at us. We take years of loving them and somehow put ourselves on trial over their final days.

Maybe that's what I needed to hear today, whether or not I believe an animal actually said it. Their lives with us were bigger than their deaths.

Chase was more than the decision I made at the vet. Grinny was more than the terrible minutes I spent holding him at the end. Poopy, Tiny, and Tteoki were more than whatever questions I still have about whether I could have done something differently.

They had whole lives before those moments. There were meals and naps and ridiculous sleeping positions. There were scratches and purrs and barking and fur everywhere. There were ordinary days when nobody was sick and I wasn't thinking about losing anyone. There were thousands of little moments when they were simply ours and we were theirs.

Maybe grief makes the ending so loud that sometimes we forget how much came before it.

I still don't know whether that Threads post consoled me. I'm still crying as I write this, so the jury is very much out on that one. But there is one part I want to keep.

I hope they knew. Not whether every decision was right. Not whether I could have found one more treatment, noticed one more symptom, bought one more day, or somehow rewritten an ending I still wish had been different.

Just that I loved them.

I hope they knew that much.

In memory of Chase, Tiny, Grinny, Poopy, and Tteoki.