Author's Note: One of the hardest life decisions is when a pet owner has to end a pet's life for humane reasons.
But unlike a human being, we have no way of knowing if we are truly providing comfort to our beloved pet in those last moments.
I wrote this piece many years ago for a dog mom who had to make this sad decision.
It was meant to assure her, and maybe you, if you experienced something like this, that your love and comfort was felt and appreciated from the moment you adopted your pet until the very last.
He had no idea that what he was looking at, and what was trying to comfort him so passionately, was a female human.
But he did know what love meant and had felt love from the first moment that he had been held by this tall slender creature with hair on top of her head. That creature had become his mother.
He was color blind, as most dogs are, except whenever he heard her voice, or felt her loving caresses; it was vivid colors and emotions that he would feel.
He was lying on an examination table in a veterinarians’ office, his tiny heart was racing and he was sweating.
He was hurt badly and he knew it.
He felt his mother’s hands stroking him and he could hear her beautiful voice talking so calmly and lovingly. It was making him feel so much better.
He loved his mother so very very much and he was so sorry that he was making her so upset by being hurt. He could feel the sadness and pain coming through his mother’s hands.
He wanted to speak to her, and tell her how wonderful each day had been with her. He wanted to tell her that, really, he had given her seven times the love, at least in dog emotion.
She was the best friend and mother he could have hoped for.
As his eyelids closed for the last time, his dreams were of playing, being held, cuddling on the couch, and sleeping in on rainy days together. His mother’s smile was the last thing he would ever see.
He was at complete peace in his last moments, simply because his mother’s two hands were lovingly caressing him, and she was talking to him all the while.
