The Rollercoaster of Emotions with End-of-Life Decisions

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we all just died peacefully in our sleep?
Wouldn’t it ease our pain if we didn’t have to make life and death decisions?
Life is not like that, and neither is death.
 
In an earlier blog I introduced you to our dog Kuba who was nearing end of life.
Lately he has been struggling more and more. His legs are weaker, he can’t go up the stairs and he was making weird choking noises last week. We thought, “OK this is it. It’s time.”
Then he got a little better again. And we thought, “oh, maybe it’s not time.”

This stuff is hard on the heart and soul. I would feel sad then panic that we were thinking of putting him down for our convenience, that we were being selfish. It wasn’t his time.
Then Geordie would calmly reassure me, “We’ll be doing it for him.”
 
But Kuba is still with us… for now. We are giving him all the love we can, extra, fun treats, telling him how much he means to us. We even made this crazy ramp to see if it would help him up the stairs.
The kids enjoyed playing on it, but Kuba wanted nothing to do with it.
We tried. And that is all we can do. That is all any of us can do…
try our very best in life and at the end of life.
And that is good enough.

Have you ever loved a pet till the end, then had to let him go?
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