14 July 2026

How do I know when it’s time?

It’s the question I’m asked more than any other. Usually late in the evening, usually by someone who has been turning it over for weeks and hasn’t yet said it out loud to anyone.

If you’re asking it, I want to say something first: asking is not disloyalty. People often arrive at this question feeling as though thinking about it at all is a small betrayal - that a good owner would still be fighting. You’re asking because you’re paying attention. That’s the opposite of giving up on them.

There is rarely a moment that announces itself

Most people are waiting for certainty. For a sign. For their animal to look at them in a particular way, or for a morning where it is simply, obviously, unmistakably time.

Sometimes that happens. More often it doesn’t. More often there are good days folded in among the hard ones, right to the end - a wag, a decent meal, twenty minutes in the sun where they seem like themselves again. Those days are real. They’re also what makes this so hard, because every one of them feels like evidence that you were panicking over nothing.

Waiting for certainty usually means waiting for a crisis, because a crisis is the only thing that removes all doubt. Most of the families I sit with would rather not have their last day be an emergency.

Both fears are the same fear

Nearly everyone is frightened of two opposite things at once: doing it too early and stealing time they could have had, and doing it too late and letting them suffer for days you couldn’t bring yourself to face.

Notice that both of those fears come from the same place. Neither is selfishness. They’re both about not wanting your animal to bear something for your sake. Whichever way it eventually goes, that’s the thing to hold onto: you were trying to get it right for them.

What to look at instead

Since a single day tells you very little, look at the pattern instead.

Are there still more good days than hard ones? And - this is the part people miss - which direction is that ratio moving? A hard Tuesday after a big Monday is a hard Tuesday. Four hard days in a row that never quite recover is a direction.

Write down three to five things your animal loves. Not general things. Their things: the specific greeting at the door, the spot on the stairs where they watch the street, rolling in the grass, sitting on your feet while you cook. Then come back to that list in a week or two.

For many families this is the page that answers the question. Not a score, not a threshold - just the plain observation that most of the list has quietly stopped, and hasn’t come back.

Can they still be themselves? Not can they still eat, or still walk to the end of the garden - but is the animal you know still in there, having a life they'd recognise as theirs.

Write it down, because memory is a poor witness

When you’re living inside it, every day feels like evidence. A good afternoon and you think you’ve been catastrophising. A bad night and you think you’ve left it too long. Both feelings are honest and neither is the whole picture.

Two minutes a day for a fortnight - how they were, one line about what was different - gives you something to look at rather than something to carry. It also gives your vet something concrete, which is worth a great deal in a ten-minute appointment where you can barely speak.

People often find they had written the answer down a week before they were ready to read it.

What your vet can tell you - and what they can’t

Your vet can tell you what’s happening in your animal’s body, whether their pain is controlled, and what the next few weeks are likely to look like. That is genuinely their expertise and it matters enormously. Ask them directly: is she in pain that we’re not managing? What should I be watching for? What does this look like in a month?

What they can’t tell you is what your animal’s life feels like from the inside, or what you can live with afterwards. Those aren’t medical questions. That’s the part people get stuck on - waiting for a professional to make a decision only you can make.

When not to wait

Some things mean calling your vet today rather than next week:

• Laboured or open-mouthed breathing, or breathing that doesn’t settle at rest
• Pain their medication isn’t touching
• A seizure, a collapse, or being unable to stand
• Not eating or drinking at all for a day
• Distress you can’t settle

That list isn’t exhaustive, and it isn’t a diagnosis. If something frightens you, that on its own is reason enough to ring them.

You don’t have to work it out alone

The families I work with are rarely looking for someone to tell them what to do. They’re looking for someone to think it through with, who has been in this room many times and won’t flinch at the questions - including the ones that feel unspeakable, like whether relief is an acceptable thing to feel, or how much of this decision is about money, or time, or how much more you have left in you.

Those questions deserve somewhere to go. Asking them out loud, to someone who isn’t inside your grief, is often the thing that makes the way forward visible.

It never gets easier to say goodbye, but I’ve learned we don’t have to say goodbye alone.