For people who are closer to the end of life than the beginning, taking on the responsibility of adopting a new pet is a complicated and emotional personal decision. They secretly and internally calculate the math of “how much time do I have left?” with “how much time does my new pet have left?” This is a difficult subject to discuss, but an important one because life at any age is precious and no one should deny themselves or pets love simply because death is looming closer than it used to.
Pet Owners and the Math of Death
Death takes us all at some point. But death is also wildly unpredictable. Death shows up unexpectedly, swiftly, and sometimes violently in tragic situations, but it can also arrive as predicted or even much later than anyone anticipated. So planning your life around death may seem like a futile exercise, but it’s not.
Confronting the reality of one’s own death is a compassionate and loving act because it puts the lives and well-being of others before our own need for connection and love. Doing the math on your remaining years before promising to care for, protect, entertain, and love a pet is a courageous and heartfelt act.
Being able to provide for a pet depends not on one’s age, but on one’s health – mental, physical, and financial – and the type of pet they are committing to nurture. For many older people who have trouble with mobility or struggle with being mindful of their responsibilities, adopting a pet that requires exercise and constant attention is probably not a good idea. However, for older people who have relatively good health and psychologies, adopting a pet is an excellent idea. And, of course, there is a vast dynamic of possibilities between those situations.
But there is always the math of life and death. And sometimes, for many people, that math includes how long that pet is expected to live and which type of pet they adopt. For some older pet owners, adopting a senior dog or senior cat or other pet is a simple matter of matching life expectancies. This may be sad, but it is also true, and it is also beautiful. The math of death often brings together human beings who need unconditional love with animals that need affection and connection in their later years, too.
[Check out the Top Five Pet Loss Books for Children]
Aging People and Senior Pets Belong Together
Middle-aged people and couples who are empty nesters often wrestle with the idea of adopting a new dog, cat, or other pet to fill the void left by their adult children who have moved on to their own pathways in life. They have a house full of love and memories filled with the sounds, smells, and images of growing children and perhaps even pets that are now elderly or who have passed on. That nostalgic void can soon feel very lonely and empty.
Companionship is an essential human need, and every dog and cat owner will tell you that companionship is something every animal needs, too. This doesn’t change with age, for humans or animals, and perhaps even becomes a more essential need as we grow older. No soul – human or animal – wants to feel alone, especially towards the end of life.
[More pet loss advice, insights, and resources: Life After Loss: 5 Signs It’s Time for a New Pet and How to Write a Pet Eulogy]
Sometimes the circle of life simultaneously closes with those around us. For older people, that closing circle sadly means they are pushed – together, as a generation – toward the fringes of society. Our bodies deteriorate. Our brains change. We ultimately get phased out of our jobs and even our families and can end up in facilities for the elderly, where everyone is gray-haired, hunched over, and remembers a time when life – when their family, neighborhood, and the planet – was different. Pets are generational, too.
Unfortunately, society pushes aging souls aside as the younger generations become the parents and consumers highly valued by everyone from capitalistic marketers to opportunistic politicians. People get old and less relevant to the world around them. We don’t like to admit this, but it’s true. And if human beings can feel this powerless, this overlooked, this disconnected as they get older, it’s hard to imagine what an abandoned pet feels toward the end of life. Aging people and aging pets belong together because for their time on earth, they belonged to the same world.
The Final Exodus from an Overwhelming World
Nothing is worse than feeling completely vulnerable to the cruel and indifferent forces of the universe. For unloved animals, this sense of helplessness must feel overwhelming as crushing hunger, physical pain from malnutrition, violence, and injuries, a lack of shelter in the elements, and feeling alone, isolated, and exposed become an ongoing and everyday struggle.
Of course, many human beings face these horrible realities on a daily basis, too, and we must acknowledge their desperation and hardships. Sometimes it feels that helping the human race overcome its own heartbreaking tragedies is so staggering that we are paralyzed into indifference. Maybe caring for a pet is our own small way of feeling some control over such a massively agonizing human reality.
And maybe we need the love of a pet to survive that sense of powerlessness. Since ancient times mankind has sought the companionship of animals and connected with them in ways we simply cannot with other human beings. This connection with animals only grows stronger as we feel our fates are connected through the advance of time and the growing specter of death.
For centuries human beings have buried their loved ones with images and representations of their dogs, cats, and other pets for companionship in the afterlife. People and pets belong together, regardless of their ages. But for those of us who are older, and for those pets that are older, it just makes sense that we take that last part of our journeys together.
Adopt an older pet today.