How to Be Present With a Pet You're About to Lose

The challenge to 'make every moment count' can turn an already difficult stretch of time into a pressure cooker where you feel like you have to be everything. Here's how to be present with ease.

When you reach that heartbreaking point where it’s clear your pet is dying, the advice starts to pour in:

• Create lasting memories.

• Give them everything they want.

• Cherish each moment.

• Make every day count.

• Be present.

And this advice is well-intentioned. It sounds beautiful. It is right… but to a point.

Because if you take a minute to assess where that lands you, there’s a heck of a lot of pressure behind those words.

As some of my favorite friends would put it, “Life still be life-ing.” Meaning the world and everything you’re supposed to do in it won’t stop because you’re facing impending death.

Some days, you’re too exhausted to be present.

Other days, work or home obligations eclipse all your time.

In between, fear makes you shut down and carry on as usual, as if your world weren’t about to implode.

And there may be days where your pet isn’t doing well, but neither are you, so the day is just a matter of survival. There’s no space for carefully-curated memories to be made.

Then comes the guilt, which adds to the grief, which tops off the exhaustion…

It’s a pesky, rubbishy little cycle, isn’t it?

Here’s how to get out of that loop…

What Real Presence Looks Like

What I’ve come to learn through my own grief research and my personal experience with loss is this:

Real presence with a dying pet looks nothing like a bucket list.

Nor is it a photo shoot, a meaningful outing, or a specially-made meal.

It can be all these things — but they are on the same level and equal to just showing up on a Sunday morning and sitting by your pet. Where you’re both just there, on the couch or the floor or wherever.

There’s no phone in your hand, twitching to take pictures.

There’s no to-do list to check off.

You’re just there. Present. Breathing deeply. Maybe with a hand on your pet as they breathe deeply in turn.

And that’s it. That’s all you need to do.

It feels counterintuitive, absolutely. But it’s these ordinary moments that you’ll miss the most.

Not the posed photos (all 87 of them because you wanted to get the perfect shot🙋🏻‍♀️).

Not the extraordinary adventures (because you always meant to take your pet here or try this new food or buy them that toy and by golly, now you’re making it happen!).

It’s not those things that count most in the end at all. It really is the little things.

Once your pet is gone, you’re not likely to crave the more extraordinary memory-making moments you orchestrated. Instead, you’ll be thinking about

The way your pet used to feel on your lap.

The curve of their back as you laid your hand on their warm skin.

The little noises they made.

The way they followed you from room to room or greeted you at the door or came and found you in the middle of the day for no reason at all other than to snuggle up to you.

So what I’m really saying is…

You don’t have to make every moment count. Every moment already counts.

Easy Things You Can Do Right Now

All that aside, it’s also perfectly normal — healthy, even — to want to do something out-of-the-box in the days leading up to the end. If that’s you, try some of these simple ideas:

• Make a video. Nothing staged or fabricated, just your pet going about their ordinary day. Try to capture their sounds, habits, and the little quirks only you know about. It takes maybe five minutes. But on the other side, you’ll probably watch it a hundred times.

• Write down the very specific things you love about your pet. Not just general things, like “She was so sweet.” Dig for details, like, “She always plopped her ball on my lap when I sat on the couch, even if (especially if) I was sleeping.”

• Start saying goodbye early. Say it more than once. You don’t have to save it for the last day. You can start telling them right now how much they mean to you and how hard it is to let them go, but that you know it’s right for them. You might feel silly at first, but many people later say they wish they’d done this more.

• If you have children at home, let them be part of the goodbyes. Children often handle grief with more grace than adults expect. And they may have their own ideas or ways of wanting to sit with the pet in the final days.

• Let other pets be part of the goodbyes and the videos and the sitting-in-presence time. Your other animals are likely picking up on what’s happening, and every intentional effort you make could help them along in their own process of letting go.

There’s No Place For Perfect Here

Grief therapists who work with anticipatory loss describe something they call “ambivalent presence” — being physically there while emotionally bracing, which leaves people feeling like they failed at being present even when they were right there in the room.

If that sounds familiar, know that it is nearly universal among people navigating this kind of loss. But that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It’s just a very difficult, heart-rending situation. It’s hard to love and be terrified at the same time.

Know that being there imperfectly, tearfully, some days maybe even barely, will always be enough.

That’s what true pet love is. It’s not an Instagram highlight reel of carefully-staged final days. It’s boring and messy and real.

In the end, it’s just about showing up, in whatever shape you’re in, over and over again.

And when there are days you can’t show up — the days where grief is winning, and you feel too depleted to be anything but physically present and emotionally absent — those days don’t cancel out the others.

They don’t define you or your love for your pet.

They were part of a season that asked a lot of you, and sometimes you fell short, and that’s okay because you are human and therefore perfectly imperfect.

So give yourself grace and just be there. That’s really all you can do.

One last thing:

If you never get the chance to do any of this presence-with-goodbyes-stuff, go easy on yourself. My little soul dog, Koda, departed suddenly and traumatically in the night at a very young age. Goodbyes and presence were not on my radar at all.

I’ve made peace with it by saying all my goodbyes in the days and years after and by sitting in presence with his photos and toys and leash and bed.

It’s not the way I would’ve wanted to say goodbye, if I’d had the choice. (But if I’d had the choice, I never would have said goodbye at all.)

And so, when this is what life deals, this is how you move forward.