Two weeks ago my partner and I made the decision to euthanize our cat, Agatha. At twelve years old, she had been with us through six moves (one of which was international), five sibling pets, and several medical emergencies, most notably once eating a whole sandal! In those twelve years she also witnessed the entire evolution of our relationship from friends and room mates, to dating and eventually marriage. I have never loved any pet the way I loved her. She was my familiar, a shard of my soul, my shadow at every turn. This was the first pet either of us have had to euthanize and, while incredibly difficult, we found grace and an expansive sense of peace by leaning into the process rather than shrinking away.

The News

After a week of what we thought was one of her occasional episodes of pickiness, Agatha was suddenly eating a concerningly small amount of food. We rotated different treats, tuna, and even people-food trying to lure her into an appetite, but she would only take a small nibble before retreating. Her personality was also distinctly subdued compared to her typical haughty presence, a clear sign of a change of condition. After two days of this behavior we made the vet appointment, steeling ourselves to the possibility that she may be entering her last weeks or months. What we weren’t prepared for was an estimate that she would not live more than a few days without heroic measures. In the six months since her last check up she had developed acute non-viral leukemia, and her body’s cells were slowly asphyxiating without enough oxygen in her blood. They sent us home to think about what we wanted to do.

A small mercy, my partner and I are quite aligned in our values. We cherish quality of life and comfort over pursuing extension of life for its own sake. If these measures were successful, they might prolong her life for a few months or years, but her heart could also possibly give out from the stress and pain of the procedures alone. We could not abide the possibility of her life ending so violently, so we ultimately scheduled euthanasia two days later.

We drove home, eyes bleary with tears, periodically gasping with a fresh wave of grief. We immediately went to the yard and let her out of her carrier. Agatha was historically, and by preference, an outdoor cat who we had forced to acclimate to indoor life as she aged. We had always said that we would let her go outside all she wanted when she was nearing end of life - we just never realized how little time we’d have to give her this gift. She sniffed the air and was kissed by the warm sun, her eyes closed and happy for some time. However her inevitable urge to wander and explore resulted in immediate tachycardia, panting, and yowling in distress. This was too much for her, even the delight of it was too much.... Her remaining time in this world needed to be smaller, stiller, and quieter.

The first thing we did was cry, a lot, and began wrapping our heads around the reality that she would be dead by the end of the week. How many steps needed to happen? Cancelling work, classes, appointments, and social events. Letting loved ones know what was happening. We knew we wanted an in-home euthanasia, and we agreed we wanted time with her body to grieve, and have a home funeral. As a doula, I knew that preparation is half the battle so I immediately started gathering materials from around the house and piling them together, as well as asking friends for support with some errands and supplies, being intermittently crushed by the remembered reality: Agatha was dying.

This is the oscillation of grief. Remembering, forgetting. “Flowers, sheet, scissors, twine, incense…Agatha is dying…cancel the tire rotation…Agatha is dying…Do you need a permit to bury an animal in the wild?...Agatha is dying.”

The next few days put us into kairos time - the simultaneous shortening and elongating of the perception of time in sacred experiences such as birth and death. Life outside, walking my dog felt intensely sharp, brilliant, crisp, my senses on fire in the present moment. The world continued on regardless of Agatha dying. Kids screaming, cars bumping music, picking up dog poop - it all happens at the same time. The sacred and banal, profound and profane. In kairos time I feel an extreme weave of anger and egoless love towards the rest of the world spinning on without knowledge of what lies just under the veil.

The Death

After the appointment we stopped offering her food, and she did not ask for it. Her body knew it was time to start letting go. The morning of her euthanasia we did offer her a ceremonial Cheez-It (her preferred pilfered snack historically), but she only licked the salt off without attempting a bite. We made sure to eat ourselves before starting what we knew would be a day that would rob us of appetite. We disarmed the smoke alarms for incense, opened up the windows, and turned down the heat in preparation for her wake. I left the sliding door open and allowed her to do what she wished, which involved some exploration but ultimately she settled on a chair nearby to enjoy the breeze from inside.

We played records - Satie and Rimsky-Korsokov - and in the last hour I baked rosemary cookies to do something with my hands, and to bring familiar smells into the house. I brewed a pot of “grief tea” a friend had given me, and hoped to offer the tea and cookies to our vet and her tech when they arrived. I imagined us sitting and chatting for a bit, building a sense of intimacy before the act. I felt intent to welcome them in as psychopomps and not executioners. But they were on a tight schedule, and clearly did not look forward to these appointments. They were kind and compassionate, and did not rush us, but also made no signals of staying longer than necessary. There was simply a task they came to do, and there was no time left.

The Wake

We spent two hours after the appointment spending time with Agatha’s body. We cried and stroked her, encouraged our other pets to come see her, cleaned her body and anointed it with lavender and vervain as we said a blessing over each part of her that we loved so much. We held her one last time in our arms, her body disorienting in its warm limpness, and placed her in her little bed.

We then lit candles all around and prepared for a virtual wake streamed on my laptop. Over the following six hours we received a slew of nearly two dozen visitors from three countries to come and say goodbye, share stories, and offer support. As we retold each wave of guests, we slowly solidified the narrative and cemented our understanding of what had happened the last two days. Circling and hovering around Agatha’s shrine central in the room, we also continued to see her body for hours, absentmindedly staring at her from all angles, adjusting to the reality that the rise and fall of her chest was no longer coming, despite looking as if in a peaceful sleep.

The end of the evening came when we had a virtual room full of guests and my partner stood and delivered a speech detailing the highs and lows of Agatha’s life, funny stories and tender moments, and just how deeply he grieved this tiny animal. We all raised a glass in her memory and ended the wake. Alone again, we brought Agatha down to the floor and allowed our animals more time with her before gently wrapping her in a shroud made of my partner's old holey pajama pants that she inexplicably loved to sleep on anytime they were left out of the laundry. When we felt ready, we carried her to a space made in our freezer for safekeeping until the next day’s disposition.

The Burial

We decided to bury Agatha out of town, so that it would feel special and ritualized when we chose to go visit. We made a quick detour to drop off some of her remains with a pet memorialist to be processed as a keepsake. Guided by my friend’s tip, and armed with her shovel, we went to an informal pet cemetery in a forest beside a lake that has been used since the sixties. It is a beautiful place with playful and loving energy, easy to imagine the silver whispers of sweet past friends running about like kodama protecting the land.

We asked Agatha to guide us towards her new resting place. It was a cloudy, windy day, and sunbeams broke through in patches, dappling the mossy forest floor, moving almost as fast as we could catch up to them. Agatha’s favorite spot like most cats was laying in the sun, the red undertones of her black hair coming through in the light. We accepted the sign as Agatha’s consent.

We took turns digging and burning incense of thyme, sage, and rosemary. We primed the soil with a trail mix we created with catnip, Greenies, and Cheez-Its, and tucked her favorite toy and a bouquet of flowers given to us by Daisy Deathcare and Island Scavenger Skulls into her shroud, as well as paper effigies we’d drawn of ourselves and our other animals - her family - to take with her. Getting down on our bellies in order to reach the bottom of the grave, we slowly delivered the small, sweet parcel to the earth. We both cried as we did so, and I felt solace seeing our tears leave wet marks on her shroud.

After some time, we grabbed some handfuls and began the refilling process. After we had packed the soil tight enough, we marked it with a wreathe of dried cedar, holly, wisteria, and fern. Inside the wreath we made a cairn of the stones, and four sticks to square off the plot. We stood, brushed ourselves off and sang “Sea of Love”. I felt good then that we had honored her body with all elements - fire in the incense, water in our tears, earth in the soil, and air in our song. Every step of the way, we moved slowly, making sure it felt like the right time to move onto the next step, constantly checking in with each other. When it was finally time, we also both said the word “goodbye” out loud before leaving, which was much harder than I expected.

We ended the night quite hungry, our appetite returning for the first time in several days. We decided on sushi, a comfort food for me and often referred to as “catscraps” in our home. There we ordered warm sake and toasted to the life of our cat, and the beauty we had brought to her death the last few days.

The Sweep

The following day, we started with more “catscraps” for breakfast - a herring omelette with onions and capers, which we shared with our other cat as a treat. Our very intuitive dog needed some extra love after the last few days, so we took him on a long walk in a riparian trail despite heavy rain that morning. Despite the weather, it was a beautiful walk - nearly empty and just the sounds of birdsong, rain pattering, and the gentle flow of the river alongside. We spotted horses grazing in their pastures, and hundreds of young fawn lilies and trilliums, glowing stark in the contrast like ghostly lanterns, reminding me of the kodama running through Agatha’s resting grounds.

After returning the borrowed shovel and having a cup of tea with friends we returned home to put our space back together. It felt important to circulate and vent the energy after such an intense experience, as well as tighten back up the structure and integrity of the space that holds us. I thought of the “Closing of the Bones” postpartum ritual, like we needed to put the bones of our home back together. We put on more music and silently cleaned for a long while, doing an especially thorough job sweeping - a chore both my partner and I find meditative and grounding.

When we finished, we relit her wake candle and some incense. We sang “Sea of Love” again and scattered the petals of her wake flowers in all her favorite places - the windowsills, our office chairs, her cat tree, and a barstool she especially loved in her last days. We agreed to leave them there as long as possible, allowing them to naturally be cast about the home. We wanted to have an echo of her presence for a bit longer, perhaps even finding a few petals months later under the couch as a welcome hello. We worked from back to front, ending the ritual by laying the petals in a straight line across the doorway, letting her memory cross the threshold out into the liminal space of whatever is next for her.

We ended the day cooking a chicken, vegetable, and dumpling stew inspired by her favorite “chicken & pea” food blend, and watched “Harold and Maude”, my favorite comfort movie for grief. We snuggled up under blankets and sniffled away together as Maude said her last words to Harold, “Go and love some more!”

The Privilege

An important thing to note is the sheer amount of privilege required to make the choices we were able to in this situation. We pay for pet insurance which is considered a luxury for many people, and this is what allowed Agatha to have as long of a life as she did with her senior diagnosis, six month labs, and medications. The comfort of experiencing a euthanasia in the home is nearly double the price as in the clinic. We had enough money in savings that I did not even ask how much the procedure was before booking it. Agatha had just enough time for us to slow down, go home, grieve, process together to make a decision, rather than being pressured into an immediate euthanasia at the appointment.

We also had the social and financial flexibility to immediately clear our schedule for the next few days, including cancelling work. I have the prior experience and education of being a grief counsellor and end of life doula with home funeral training - something that allowed me to jump into regulating action for the next few days. We have a loving and supportive community who were able to make the time to show up for this little kitty, and for us. We also both have relatively stable mental health and emotional literacy that allowed us to engage with such a huge hurt without being completely broken by it. Without all these, none of these decisions would have been as easy or obvious for us, and we have immense gratitude and compassion for the fact that this simply is not the reality for many pet guardians.

The Ritual

As many ritualists have talked about extensively: ritual is simply a sacred pause, a noticing and observation of a great change with the intention of lingering, remembrance, and honor. It can exist in the most simple or complex of gestures. At the end of the weekend, we had immersed ourselves in countless rituals around this experience:

Identifying and facilitating her favorite activities in her last days
Recording her purring, taking photos together as a family
Creating a shrine for her body with objects meaningful to her
Drinking gifted “grief tea” (motherwort, holy basil, rose, lavender, oat tops)
Baking cookies to express gratitude for our helpers (delivered the following Monday)
Burning candles and incense all weekend in her honor, starting Friday morning when she died until end of our Energy Sweep afternoon on Sunday
Cleaning and anointing her body
Singing over her body
Hosting a wake, retelling the story of her sudden decline and death to our loved ones
Drinking from mead horns which we use only on special occasions
Asking for and receiving stories about her from our community
Giving a tributary speech about her life
Shrouding her body after the wake
Using a special piece of cloth for the shroud
Choosing music intentionally that evoke and summon feelings of grief
Selecting her plot allowing natural cues in the environment to take on meaning
Digging the grave ourselves
Burying her with meaningful items
Incorporating the elements into her burial
Scattering handfuls of dirt and pausing in silence before the full burial
Building a cairn and grave marker
Taking photos of the experience
Saying goodbye explicitly for the first time
Sweeping the energy of our home
Scattering petals on her favorite spots in the home
Attaching her favorite toys to our keyring
Taking a bath using the same oils we used to anoint her body
Cooking a meal for ourselves inspired by her favorite “chicken & pea” blend of wet food
Watching “Harold & Maude”, a favorite film for grieving
Returning to her grave and upgrading to a more permanent marker at a 6 month mark
Moving the shrine slowly from her deathbed, to a small table in the living room, to full incorporation with her remains into our larger altar in the back room, allows titrating steps into integrating her loss into our lives more fully, each step its own observed graduation.
Writing this blog!

Grief craves repetition. Our cognition under grief’s rule is so inundated with the exhausting task of adjusting to our new reality without our beloved, that it needs redundancy to fully process - retelling the story, rehashing the feelings, and remembering again and again that they are gone. The sheer number of rituals we observed in Agatha’s death helped us to continuously re-experience the new truth of our loss. It allowed us to create a coherent timeline, to create a sense of order and meaning out of what would otherwise feel like chaos.

We know that her loss as a cat is ultimately only a fraction of human loss, but grief hardly ever isolates itself to siloed hurts. In her death, we felt the deaths of many before her. Perhaps because of her cat-ness, it allowed us to have enough emotional space to practice what a “good death” might look like, when so many we’ve known have not had that privilege. It felt in many ways corrective to other experiences, and good practice for future ones. Grief is, after all, a muscle that needs tending each and every day, for little and big losses alike.

Two weeks out, I am still crying daily when her memory comes over me suddenly like a wave - but I feel a spaciousness that allows it to swell, crash, and ultimately pass. There is faith in the rhythm of the feeling, the oscillation of sacred and banal, an appreciated glimpse into kairos time. This is the secret of letting death and grief into your heart through ritual - that in that expansive place you will also find praise - an ode, a hymn, a monument to life and love.

Additional photos of Agatha’s death journey. All images courtesy of Ash Marrow.

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