On Care That Doesn’t Heal

Image: quick study for color done by the author.

Please be aware this essay contains the topic of end of life care.

I carry the tray back to the kitchen. Nothing on the plate was eaten. The paper hadn’t even been taken off the straw. Under the plate cover, placed on top to keep the food warm, there were two pancakes with butter, maple syrup, and strawberries. I could smell the warm sweetness as I walked down the quiet hallway.

I had prepared this plate for an elderly man who I knew, from talking to him a few weeks ago, only liked his mother’s pancakes. He could remember sitting in the kitchen, on a red stool, as she stood at the stove flipping them for him and his brother. Saturdays were for pancakes. And, during the summer months, they came topped with the strawberries his mother grew out back. The strawberries needed to be cut so they resembled little hearts on the plate.

Begrudgingly, he had tried the pancakes I brought him the first time I made him breakfast. He’d told me they were “good enough,” which made me smile. From then on I would enter his room and ask him if he wanted “good enough” pancakes, to which he’d reply, “I guess, if that’s all you got back there.”

His tray was heavy as I opened the kitchen door. Not physically, but because I knew what this particular tray represented. A life growing closer to death.

Much of the time, as people near their end, they start requesting their comfort foods. The usuals: macaroni and cheese, oatmeal with brown sugar, soup, mashed potatoes. Then there are times when I have to get creative with the ingredients I have in the hospice kitchen and get as close to what they are describing as possible.

I’ve seen a number of deaths since I’ve been at hospice, and I have learned there are certain stages the majority of people go through as their bodies start to die. Delusions. Restlessness. But before that, appetite disappears. Preferences change. Sometimes three bites constitute a successful meal. Sometimes the tray comes back untouched.

Like today.

I hold preparing food for the dying in the category of a sacred task.

One patient told me I made the best omelet he’d had in fifty years. Another patient couldn’t feed himself, so he was tenderly fed and sung to with each meal I brought. And when no one comes, staff and volunteers step in to fill that space.

It was the same way in animal care. When there was no owner who would stay for euthanasia, I stepped in. Holding the animal closely and pouring all of the love in my heart into its body so it could leave feeling cared for.

When I worked in veterinary medicine and was a part of or performed humane euthanasia, I understood that we were providing a kindness to the suffering animal and to the owners as well. I had a coworker who said, “Sometimes death is the last kindness we can offer.”

I finally understand this.

One does not have to save someone for care to matter.

I learned that in tending to dying animals and, now, in the human capacity. Presence is necessary even when nothing can be fixed. Dignity often comes in small gestures and choices. Appetite, touch, music, humor and preference remain human even near death. Care without hope of recovery is still profoundly worthwhile. Ordinary acts become enormous when time is short.

The empty room after one of our hospice patients passes is heavy. Heavier than I thought it would be. It’s cleaned and prepared for another person to spend their final time in. It feels obscene to be cleaning all the belongings out so quickly for the next patient. One life has recently come to its end and we are moving to the next so quickly.

When someone passes, we truly express how sad it is, but then we have to move on to the next thing that needs to be done for the living. The living, and their families, still need care.

I didn’t arrive at this facility innocent of death. I lived what death does.

I am what death does.

My daughter’s death was a rupture of our lives. There weren’t neat goodbyes and handholding as she passed. It was me standing on a highway a mile from her dead body.

When I began working at hospice I thought: I’ll be okay here. I have had an intimate relationship with death for nearly two decades. I can carry the weight. The sorrow.

And I can.

But what I didn’t expect was that death could teach me to see it differently.

My first couple of weeks working showed me that death, some death, is a natural process and will happen no matter how we rage against it. It may sound odd, but there has been comfort for me in seeing a life lived fully from A to Z, decades of life, coming to its end. Does it make it easier? No. But I see death in a different light now.

In the aftermath of my life being torn apart by my daughter’s passing, I would never have been able to accept someone telling me that death could bring gifts. I am still not certain that is the right way to say it.

Death took my daughter. There is no gift in that.

What I have learned is that beauty can exist beside death.

A person can be dying and someone can still sing to him. Someone can still laugh. Someone can still care whether the oatmeal has enough brown sugar or whether the strawberries are cut into little hearts.

There is a woman here now, in her eighties, who asked me if I could butter and brown her hamburger bun when I brought her dinner.

“Like my mother used to do.”

So I did, of course.

Her mother must have been gone for many years, and yet here was her daughter, now an old woman herself, remembering the way her mother buttered a bun.

It made me think again of the man and his pancakes. The red stool. Saturdays. Strawberries from the garden cut into little hearts.

Mothers are still caring for their children long after the mothers themselves are gone.

Sometimes another pair of hands gets to carry that care forward.

This woman is not my child, but today I can carry on her mother’s mothering for her. I can keep what is important to her important until she is no longer here.

I have watched people traveling toward the end of lives they cared for and have seen what matters and what falls away.

These are the things I will carry with me into my future: Attention. Food. Touch. Curiosity. Showing up. Saying things. Going places. Love.

Loving people while they’re available to be loved.

I carry the untouched tray with the pancakes and carefully cut strawberries over to the sink and empty them into the trash. This is the last time I will make these pancakes for this man. That saddens me.

But I now know, I continue to mother. 

On Visiting

Little Spectacle Lake, Allegan MI. Photo taken by author.

Two days ago I drove an hour south to pet sit for a veterinarian friend of mine. She has eighteen animals. Seventeen cats and one dog. My friend has a heart that will not allow her to give up on anything living, and so her menagerie consists of animals with varying degrees of disability and need. The dog is just old.

She took two of them on vacation with her: a paralyzed cat who requires around-the-clock care and the elderly dog she refuses to travel without. That left me here with sixteen cats at the end of a cul-de-sac, in a house that does not belong to me, with a small inland lake waiting quietly in the backyard.

Upon arriving and meeting the animals I felt a bit panicked that I would not remember everyone’s names and needs. I even made myself notes with descriptions of each animal. I am visiting someone else’s life and I want to get it right. 

By evening, after everyone was cared for and my duties to them were done, I wrapped a coat around my shoulders and stepped out into the night air. I walked slowly to the edge of the water and settled into a chair.

The sun seemed suspended between the darkening sky and the dense trees lining the opposite shore. It was the very time of day when the sky becomes something more than sky. When color dissolves into feeling. When edges soften. 

I closed my eyes for a few moments, listening as the night gathered around me. Small splashes in the water. Birds singing goodnight to one another. Announcing, perhaps, they had lived another day. Rustling in the tall grass to my right, where I had been told the deer would eventually make their way to the water. 

The sun had disappeared behind the tree line when I opened my eyes. The colors had deepened into something I always wish I could recreate in paint and never quite can. In those colors I felt Becca draw near. She was a part of them somehow. Her laughter alive inside them.

A smile formed on my lips.

There you are, my sweet girl.

Then, somewhere from far behind me, I could hear geese calling into the deepening evening.

I heard them before I could see them. The melancholy calls drawing nearer. I tilted my head back so I could watch them pass overhead. They appeared in a straight line. A few dozen of them suddenly above me, moving across the still water.

Something in my chest ached then. Not the sharp ache of absence, but the longing ache grief leaves behind. The ache of loving someone whose voice you no longer hear.

And yet, my smile grew.

It felt, somehow, as if Becca understood this kind of longing. As if she moved somewhere inside the beauty of the evening and ached gently for me too.

Their calls were lost to my ears before I no longer saw them. Their shape remained a little longer. Then, that too, was gone. 

Night seemed to fall quickly after they disappeared, as though they had pulled the plum-colored sky in behind them.

The birds had finished their songs by then. The lake quieted. Evening grew still as it accepted the night.

I sat there for a few minutes longer, wrapped in the hush of it all. The water darkening. The last color leaving the sky. Somewhere in the grass to my right, something moved softly toward the shoreline.

Then, eventually, I accepted the night too.

I stood and made my way back toward the house where sixteen cats waited for breakfast and medicine and reassurance in the morning.

And I thought about my daughter.

For years, I imagined her reaching for beauty. Chasing it somehow.

I no longer imagine her reaching for beauty.

She is made of it.

On What Can Still Be Tended

Image was not taken by author.

The past six days I spent at one of my son’s homes. The time together was priceless and I wasn’t ready to leave. I’m never ready to leave either of my sons. Even when times are good. 

As I was packing to leave, my son had already left for work and my ability to hug him one more time had passed. I picked up a stuffed animal that had belonged to him as a child. A striped orange cat with camouflage shorts. The rest of his outfit was lost years ago. I held the cat to my face and inhaled deeply, as if I could smell my son as a child again through the animal. I tucked him under my arm and carried him down the stairs with my pillow. I just couldn’t put him back down. I needed him. A connection that spanned who my son was then and who he is today. 

A link from when he lived with me as a small child to stretch across the miles between us now. 

The drive from his house to mine is roughly two and a half hours and I generally cry at least part of the way. I can’t stop the tears. It is hard to say goodbye when I know that I have already lived through a “last one” and we aren’t guaranteed another with any of our children. 

When I got home I was exhausted. Emotionally. Physically. Mentally. My face was puffy and my nose was stuffed. I cried longer than usual.  I wanted to take a nap right away. I tried. My mind wouldn’t stop circling. I tried to paint. I couldn’t get anything to look the way I wanted. I finally turned on the tv for background noise and cleaned up. Did laundry. Trying to stay busy until bedtime. The house was quiet in a way that wasn’t peaceful, but empty. 

Bedtime finally arrived and my mind was able to slow down and allow me to sleep. I slept deeply and for a long time. I would like to say I awoke rested but in truth I didn’t. I woke up less physically tired, though. 

The sun was bright as I sat down on the couch with a cup of coffee in my favorite mug. The animals arranged themselves around me as they usually do. I felt a bit lost and wasn’t sure how to fill the day. Next to me, on the table, was a little notebook I was using to plan a new garden. I picked it up and let my eyes wander over the plans I’d been making the week before. A list of plants I wanted to add to the area. Another list of plants and seeds I already had – given to me by friends. A third page held the names of people who offered me flowers and small trees if I wanted to come dig them up. Then, I remembered it was Saturday and the farmer’s market was open.

My friend and I decided to go down to the market. What a perfect place to wander for a while. The entire side yard is a blank canvas so there is a large area to fill. There are a number of songbirds who come to the feeder so I knew I wanted to build the garden around the wildlife that visits daily, and nightly. Birds, rabbits, turkeys, possums, a skunk, and last year we had two adolescent raccoons who stopped by at dusk for nearly a week. I don’t have a preference about who eats at the feeder. Any hungry animal is welcome to partake. 

There are also a handful of domestic animals, stray cats in particular, who seem to come to our house in order to feed. There is one big old scruffy gray tom cat who I see once in a while. His left ear is tipped so I know he has been fixed. I love catching a glimpse of him now and then even though I can tell he wants nothing to do with me. That’s ok. I just want him fed. 

Part of the garden, the area in the back protected on three sides, is going to be a semi-permanent area for the strays in the neighborhood. A handful of insulated houses. Fresh food and water. Safety. 

There was a booth at the market that had little plants for sale. One of the plants had the most beautiful green leaves. Their shape pleased me immediately. I asked about them and learned they are nasturtiums. The woman at the booth said she had two kinds. Orange and red, and just red. The flowers are edible. I bought four. Two of each color. Then I saw catnip. I had planned on getting a few plants to put in the cat shelter area so I got one plant for them and one for the two cats who live in our house, Walter and Avi. In a box next to the catnip were bulbs. A sign on the front of the box said “Tulip bulbs – fill a bag for $1”. We filled two bags and brought home roughly forty bulbs. I have no idea what colors they are but I am looking forward to finding out when they bloom next year. 

Later in the day we went to a garden center and my friend purchased six fruit trees. We hadn’t planned to but I am so happy we did. Two apple, two pear, and two peach. Years are going to pass before we get fruit, I imagine, but that’s alright. They felt perfect for the pollinator section of the garden. It is easy to imagine them bursting with blooms. By next year, I hope, the branches may be able to hold the weight of a nest. In five years, fruit will fall to the ground and feed an animal. In ten years there will be shade enough to cool the yard. 

A few hours after getting home from the garden center I remembered I hadn’t finished the laundry yesterday. I got off the couch, looked out the window at the fruit trees lining the fence across from the bird feeders, then went down to the basement. 

Moving clothes from the washer to the dryer, I suddenly heard a loud buzzing very near my head. I looked up at the small window and saw movement. I realized there was a bumblebee that was trying desperately to get outside. She (they are all shes to me) kept hitting the glass. Her body was dirty with cobwebs. I couldn’t figure out how she had gotten down there but I knew I had to get her outside. 

I ran upstairs and grabbed a cup and a piece of paper and was able to catch her easily. She was right where I’d left her. She wasn’t going to leave that window with the sunshine falling through.

She was on the wrong side of outside. 

I got her outside, removed the paper from the mouth of the cup, and gently shook her onto a flowering bush. She didn’t land, though. She dropped a bit then took flight. I watched her fuzzy bottom zig-zagging across the front yard. 

As I watched her disappear, I understood something familiar in her earlier desperation: my grief did not remove me from the world entirely. It placed me beside it. Life remained visible. I just could not always reach it. 

Bereaved parents live life adjacent.

I walked toward the new trees again imagining future blossoms, feeling the cool shade to come. There was a small chickadee perched on the delicate branch of one of the apple trees as it gently swayed in the breeze.

I picked up the gardening notebook when I went inside. I wanted to add the plants that came home with us today. The inventory of what we have is growing longer. This isn’t just a list of what we physically have. If I read between the lines it is also a list of what remains. What is possible. What is alive. What can still be tended. 

What brings me back into life.

On Care That Doesn’t Save

Reader note: This essay addresses animal injury and end-of-life care.

Photograph by the author.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing—a tiny animal moving near the curb. I swore out loud, because I already knew it wouldn’t end well.

I believe that when you see an animal in need, it becomes your responsibility to respond. You don’t get to turn away. Maybe that’s why dying things find me. Or maybe they’re placed in my path.

Late last summer, during an unbearable heatwave, I was driving home from a long day at the clinic. Sick animals, a euthanasia, broken air conditioning—everything had frayed me thin. I just wanted to go home. I didn’t have the emotional energy to deal with another animal in need. Instead of passing by and doing nothing, I rounded the block and came back.

Before I even reached the street, I saw the remains of a rabbit nest dragged across a freshly mowed strip of lawn between the sidewalk and the road. I was immediately angry. Someone had to have seen it—if not before, then after—and still left its inhabitants scattered and helpless.

Before I could do anything, a crow swooped down, picked up a squirming baby bunny in its beak, and flew into a nearby tree. It settled on a branch beside another crow. I turned away before I had to witness what would happen next. I yelled. I started to cry.

Frantic, I searched the grass and didn’t see any other babies. Then I peered over the edge of the curb into the street, where I’d first noticed movement. One tiny rabbit was still alive, trying to right itself. Afraid the second crow would spot it, I scooped it up and wrapped it in the hem of my scrub top. It was covered in ants. Blood trickled from its nose. Both eyes were missing. I knew it wasn’t going to live.

I could have left it there, or I could take it with me—to the clinic—and help it pass quickly and completely.

I called the vet and told her what had happened. She wasn’t there anymore, but she told me to meet her back at the clinic. The fact that she came back speaks volumes about her integrity.

During the drive, I wailed. I told the baby I was sorry it would never get to live its life. I cried for the one carried away by the crow. I cried for the others I knew must have been in the nest, too.

When I arrived, my coworker had turned on the surgery table so it was warm—maybe comforting. We laid the baby down. The vet examined him. Breathing was labored and uneven. We all knew. She prepared the euthanasia solution and injected it. The three of us stood quietly around the table, hands resting on or near him. Tears fell. We waited. We listened for a heartbeat. He was gone.

My coworker prepared his body for cremation. I didn’t know she’d requested the ashes be returned. When they came back, the label read: Steve — baby bunny. She had cared enough to give him a name. I brought him home.

The bag inside the tin held the smallest amount of ashes I have ever seen. They fit easily into the palm of my hand. They’re still on my dresser, next to my daughter’s ashes. I had planned to scatter the bunny’s ashes under some flowers, but part of me felt I was rushing his life into and out of mine too quickly.

I needed him to exist a little longer.

I had planned to scatter my daughter’s ashes, too. That was always the intention. It’s been nearly twenty years, and I still can’t. I know she isn’t in the urn. I know the rabbit isn’t in the tin. But I can’t. Not yet.

This spring, I plan to buy a flowering bush and plant it over the bunny’s ashes, placing a small stone rabbit nearby. No one else will know he’s there. But I will.

The earth held his body once before, in the nest. It will hold him again. There is something right about that—about returning him to the ground that tried, briefly, to keep him alive.

On My Journey

Original watercolor study by the author for a larger painting.

As I enter the nineteenth year of living without my daughter, I took a moment to look back at the landscape behind me. From where I stood, I could see the distance I’ve traveled since this journey began. I could see other things, too. 

On the horizon, the skyline of my former world still rises. Not as it once was, but as it remains. The skeletal dome of a grand building. The bases of structures that once held entire lives. The outline of something magnificent, now hollowed. The smoke has long since cleared. The dust has settled. What’s left are ruins—quiet, stable, undeniable.

Closer in, the destruction is more intimate. A section of wall without a room attached to it. A doorway twisted slightly out of true, opening into nothing. These are the remnants I once moved among, back when looking up was still impossible. They no longer threaten collapse. They simply exist. Like a ghost, the old world remains—visible if I turn my head, no longer pulling me toward it.

Laid out below me are the paths I have traveled. Seen from this distance, they no longer resemble lines on a map, but something more like a tapestry—its pattern only visible now that enough thread has been laid down.

Closest to the ruins, the weave is rough and uneven. These are the rocky paths that lead out of the detonation zone, their direction dictated by damage rather than intention. Some of these paths end abruptly, blocked by debris I could never move. Entire directions closed off to me from the beginning. Not because I lacked will, but because the passage simply no longer existed.

Other paths continue for a while before thinning. The vegetation has begun to reclaim them—not thick enough yet to erase their shape, but the growth signals they are no longer meant to be walked. They carried me only so far. I can still trace their outline, still recognize where I once stepped, even as they quietly return to the land.

Then there are the paths that appeared without warning. The ones that don’t follow logic or planning, but necessity. Like the shortcuts pedestrians make across grass when the designed walkways fail them. These routes sprang up where no road had been intended. Awkward at first. Barely visible. Born of urgency, not choice.

Farther out, I can see walkways that were once wild and unknown to me. Terrain I never imagined entering. Over time, my walking has worn them down. What was once unfamiliar now holds the imprint of repetition. These paths are becoming permanent, their lines darkening, their direction clarifying. They are no longer accidents. They are part of the pattern.

From here, I can see how the tapestry has changed as I have changed. The early weave is survival. The later weave shows skill—not mastery, but familiarity. An understanding of tension. Of which threads must hold, and which can loosen without the whole thing coming undone.

I am still walking.
The ruins remain.
My pattern continues to form.

On Where Grief Lives

Lake Michigan – December 2025. Photo by author.

The pain of ordinary days is where grief actually lives. Anniversaries get language. Holidays get permission. Birthdays have witnesses. Ordinary days are the long haul. They’re the place where love proves it isn’t dependent on ceremony.

The long work is showing up on those ordinary days that hurt in unremarkable ways. It’s discovering that grief doesn’t just live in certain days – it lives in grocery aisles, in empty hours, in moments where nothing is wrong and everything still is.

And I am doing it. Not heroically. Not neatly. But faithfully. That counts. There’s a wisdom that only comes from these stretches: where I stop asking “why does this still hurt so much” and start remembering “oh… this is the terrain now”. Not as surrender. As knowledge. As familiarity with the path.

The holidays hurt loudly. They announce themselves. I brace. I armor up. But the ordinary days? They’re sneaky. They slip past the guard I didn’t realize I’d lowered once the calendar stopped shouting. There’s no ritual for them, no advanced notice that says today will hurt. And yet – there it is. A steady beat on my chest in rhythm with the waves breaking on the shore. Melancholy with stamina.

This is when I’m drawn to the lake. The stark beauty settles into my bones, mirrors something stripped and honest inside me. There’s also something cruelly honest about this stretch. The decorations are down. The world has moved on. And I’m left with the truth: this is what it’s like to carry her on a random Monday. No witnesses. No scripts. Just me and the ache.

The “winter shore me” is allowed to move slowly. To stare at nothing. To feel the ache without explaining it or fixing it. Even the lake rests under ice for a while. That isn’t giving up. This is how I remain.

On The Gift Of Darkness

Photo taken by author.

Some people chase the sun. I chase the hour when the light finally leaves. I know I am not alone in this. I crave the quiet darkness with an intensity. There is a peace in it, a settling of the world and the self.

When the last of the daylight slips off the fields and the trees stand black against the sky, something in me unclenches. Winter is my season. The air turns clean and sharp, carrying the colorless scent of nothing blooming. Branches rise like ink strokes against the bruised-blue dusk. The world becomes a sketch of itself, lines, contours, bones. It’s the only time of year when the world stops pretending . . . honest in a way no other season dares to be.

In winter, nothing pretends. Not the world, and not me. The darkness comes early and invites me inward, away from the harsh glare of daylight, away from the pull to be bright and open and decipherable. In sunlight I become a shape others can interpret, but in the long blue dusk I return to myself. Maybe that’s why I trust winter more than any other season – it has never lied to me. Summer is all insistence and cheer. Spring makes promises it can’t keep. Autumn lingers in its nostalgia. But winter just is. Its honesty settles on my skin the same way the cold does – direct, unsoftened.

Even the bird calls turn truer then: cardinals cutting the quiet with clean, sharp notes, crows speaking in raw syllables. Night arrives like a soft blanket laid across the land, and my mind settles beneath it. In the early dark, I am not performing a life. I am simply living it.

The early darkness and the longer stretch of those hours give me the gift of inwardness. I’m able to draw my energy back to myself and away from the world around me. I feel a quiet strength return, one I lose in brighter seasons. I can rest without apology. Winter offers me solitude that is not loneliness, clean and uncluttered hours that don’t insist on being filled. My soul can stretch its tired limbs. My thoughts are given back to me. Winter hands me my own depths and says: here, these are yours. And in the stillness, I remember who I am when no one is asking anything of me.

Winter, and the darkness it brings, allows things in me that would shrink from the harsh light of other seasons to surface. In the long hours of early night, the quieter truths have room to breathe. What is buried can be mined. What is fragile can be unearthed without fear of exposure. The dark coaxes forward what the bright months chase back into hiding: old questions, softened griefs, memories that still hum at the edges of my mind. Darkness makes space for all of it, giving me the privacy and stillness to understand what rises. In the dark, nothing is rushed. Nothing is forced. What comes forward comes because it’s ready.

Restoration lives at the heart of winter for me. I am restored because I am more fully myself. Just as the landscape is stripped down to its bare bones in the dark winter night, so is my soul. The excess falls away. The noise quiets. What remains is honest and essential. In these long hours of darkness, there is more time in the day for me to soften – for the tight places in me to loosen, for the rigid, survival-shaped parts to warm in their own slow way. Long winter nights give me room to breathe into my own depth, to rest inside the truest shape of who I am.

Winter, and its darkness, have always felt familiar to me. Maybe because it is the season my daughter was born into – a time when the world itself is stripped down and new beginnings arrive quietly. Or maybe it is because winter is also the season in which she died, and something in me has been living in that blue-lit landscape ever since. The cold months know both sides of her story: her first breath and her last. And in that strange, sacred symmetry, I find a kind of belonging. Winter holds her, and it holds me. It is the season that makes room for both our truths.

Winter is the only season that speaks in a voice I trust. And the darkness . . . it’s the place that listens.

On When Life Aligns With Death

Not my photo.

Change rarely arrives on schedule. When it comes, it often carries both grief and relief in its hands. My years at the clinic shaped me in ways I’ll always be thankful for—the lessons in compassion, patience, and the deep privilege of being trusted at life’s end. But seasons shift, and I found myself standing at a crossroad. It was time to step away, not out of anger, but out of honesty.

Leaving was both an ending and a beginning—a release that opened space for something I didn’t yet have words for.

Sometimes life lines things up in a way that feels almost choreographed. That Friday—the day of my final meeting—was also the day my foster dog had an appointment to meet a potential adoptive family.

Olive had come to me nearly a month earlier. She’d been rescued from a commercial breeding situation, her past mostly a mystery. Cream-colored, tiny, and unsure of the world, she’s likely some mix of miniature poodle and Maltese. One of the smallest dogs I’ve ever fostered—barely a third the size of my cat, Walter. We already had three dogs at home: Carl, a pittie-hound mix with a heart as big as his head; Pepi, a Jack Russell–Chihuahua with a Napoleon complex; and Louis, my anxious little whippet-Chihuahua mix. Olive was so small and gentle that I figured fostering her would be easy until the right family came along.

And since it feels unfair to leave him out—there’s also Avocado, our other cat, who insists on being acknowledged whenever the rest of the household is mentioned. We are, in every sense, a full house.

I knew the day when both of those things would happen was going to be difficult. I had been dreading it. I’d waited a full week for my meeting, and in that week, I had fallen in love with Olive. Small and quiet, she just wanted to be near me. She would bury her face into the blankets as she lay on my lap, sleeping for hours each day. I could see her healing—her body and mind trying to catch up to all the changes that had come so quickly.

I understood this. I had spent many of those same days sleeping, too. Sleep can be an escape from daily stress, but it can also be a place where soul-deep healing happens. I sometimes wonder if, while I slept, my own soul was quietly aligning itself—preparing me for what that meeting would bring.

Friday came. I was to bring Olive to the shelter at noon so she could be ready for her appointments. I talked to her the whole drive there, telling her she was brave and loved, that she would soon have a home all her own. When I mentioned how many changes she’d endured and that they were almost over, she looked up at me as if she understood. Mostly, I thanked her for letting me be the safe space between then and what’s next. She curled her face into my chest and stayed there.

I carried her bag over my arm—food, diapers, her little jackets, a harness, leash, and bowl—and held her close as we walked inside. One of the adoption coordinators met me, and I started to give him the details I thought might help: “She’s sweet but shy. It takes her a bit to warm up, but once she does, she’s a cuddler. She wears a diaper for now, loves walks, but she’s a runner if she gets loose.” I handed over her food and told him she sometimes hides it until someone sits with her and talks her through the meal.

I was crying the entire time. He gently asked if I wanted to stay to meet the families, but I declined. They didn’t need a tearful foster sitting in the corner as they tried to imagine a new beginning. So I kissed her, whispered I love you, and left. I told myself I’d done what I promised—to get her ready for her next chapter—and that had to be enough.

On the drive home, I tried to shift my focus to the meeting ahead. My friend had said, “The writing’s on the wall,” and I knew she was right. A few hours later, just before the meeting, the phone rang. It was the shelter director. Both families had passed on Olive. “If you’d like to adopt her,” she said, “she’s yours.” I started crying again, thanked her, and drove back to the shelter to bring my girl home.

I knew, after the gift of Olive’s return, that whatever happened, it would all be okay.

For the better part of a year, I’ve been contemplating a life that would bring my personal experience into harmony with my work. Caring for animals has been a place of immense healing for me, but lately I’ve felt called toward more—something that speaks to both the living and the dying. I don’t remember exactly when I first came across the term death doula, but the words stopped me. They made perfect sense.

Birth is revered—a ritual, a gathering of hands and hearts to welcome new life. But if I’ve learned anything in the nearly two decades since my daughter’s death, it’s this: death is a kind of birth, too. We’re simply on the other side of it—the side that bears witness as a soul departs. And that, too, is monumental.

There are many reasons I feel called to this path. To help others, yes—to bring my understanding of death to a place that offers comfort, to help reclaim the rituals of farewell that the modern world has forgotten. But also, selfishly, to deepen my own understanding of my daughter’s death. I walk with death daily, and to know it intimately feels less like darkness and more like reverence—a way of staying close to what is sacred, to what remains.

I don’t have all the answers. I don’t think anyone does. But I believe that by walking beside others as they face loss, I may continue to learn what it means to live—and to love—even in the presence of death.

On Making Space

Sometimes love begins with the simple act of lifting what cannot yet climb.

When Olive first came home, she stood just inside the doorway, unsure if she was meant to stay. Olive is a foster, though she doesn’t know that word. All she knows is the soft bed, the food that appears without fight, the hands that don’t harm. I tell myself not to fall in love, but love is part of the work.

I set down a small bowl of food, and she approached it in slow, cautious circles, pausing after each bite as if waiting for it to be taken away. Her thinness told the story before I ever heard it— fifty plus dogs in one home, one life among many, no reason to believe kindness could last.

Later, I bathed her. The water ran brown at first, then clear. She shivered, but didn’t pull away. When I wrapped her in a towel, she pressed her face into my palm, a quiet surrender that felt like trust beginning.

That evening, I opened the door for our walk. Olive watched the others step outside, her head tilted as if studying a new language. The stairs puzzled her—three small steps that might as well have been mountains. She tried, then stopped, trembling at the edge of what she didn’t yet know how to do. So I lifted her. She rested against my chest, heart beating fast beneath her ribs, and I thought about all the times we’re asked to do the same—to carry what is too fragile to climb, to be the strength that love requires. Sometimes, that’s how healing begins: one being steady enough for another to trust the ground again.

The evening air folded around us like a quiet promise. Five pounds of newness among veterans of rescue, she trotted forward, trying to keep pace. The others moved ahead in their practiced rhythm—tails swaying, paws landing in patterns learned from trust—but she was learning the rhythm, too. The gentle give and take of belonging.

That night, I wasn’t sure how sleep would go for her. My dogs share the bed with me, and I always let a foster do the same. Because she is so small, I worried I might roll over her in my sleep. But each time I woke to check—four times, maybe more—she was in the same place, curled into a tight circle against my side. My dogs slept in their usual spots, unbothered, as if they already knew she belonged.

Her breath was rhythmic, deep, threaded with a few soft whimpers. I lay there listening, wondering what kind of sleep this was. The last five days of her life had been chaos—separating dogs, confusion, fear. Was her body simply too tired to stay awake? Or had she, even for a moment, sensed the calm? Maybe sleep itself was her first act of trust.

Each walk, each meal, each quiet hour on my lap teaches her that safety can hum steady in the background of a life. My dogs already know this song by heart. They do not question the newcomer, do not guard their space. They shift without words, making room for the small, trembling presence who is learning what love feels like when it expects nothing in return.

And maybe that is what we all must learn again after loss—how to live inside a world that once felt familiar but now feels foreign. How to feed ourselves, to move, to rest, when the very air has changed its meaning. Grief, like Olive, must be coaxed forward one hesitant step at a time.

Olive came home as a foster, one more soul in need of rest. She doesn’t yet understand the stairs. She stands at the bottom and looks up, measuring the distance, unsure of her strength. But she will learn. One day she’ll move between levels with ease, forgetting there was ever a time she hesitated.

And maybe we will too—learning the steps of this changed life, trusting our footing a little more each day. The climb will never be easy, but it will carry us forward.

This is the rhythm of our home. We make room—for the broken, the frightened, and for the parts of ourselves still learning to rise.