March 25, 2025
Healing the Guilt of Pet Loss: Letting Go Without Regret
Losing a beloved pet is heartbreaking, but for so many of us, grief is tangled up with guilt. Did I do enough? Was it too soon? Too late? Did I fail them? These thoughts can haunt us, making it even harder to heal.
I know this feeling all too well. When I had to make the devastating decision to euthanize our 34-year-old rescue horse, Cherokee, I found myself overwhelmed with guilt—even after decades of experience in animal rescue. If you’ve ever struggled with these emotions, you’re not alone.
In this episode of Muddy Paws and Hairballs, I sit down with grief experts Ken Dolan-DelVecchio and Nancy Saxton-Lopez, hosts of The Pet Loss Companion podcast and co-authors of The Pet Loss Companion: Healing Advice from Family Therapists Who Lead Pet Loss Groups. Together, we’re diving deep into:
🐾 Why guilt is a natural part of grieving—and how we can work through it
🐾 The impossible pressure of “perfect timing” and why it never feels right
🐾 How our deep responsibility for our pets can turn into guilt, even when we make the best choices
🐾 The truth about self-forgiveness and how to stop replaying “what if” scenarios
🐾 Ways to honor and remember our pets in a way that brings peace, not regret
🐾 When to seek extra support if guilt is keeping us stuck in grief
If you’ve ever questioned your decisions after losing a pet, this episode is for you. Grief is proof of love, and learning to forgive ourselves is part of healing. Let’s navigate this journey together.
💜 Listen now and take the first step toward releasing guilt and finding peace.
🔗 Resources & Links:
🎧 Listen to The Pet Loss Companion Podcast
📖 Read The Pet Loss Companion
🌍 Visit muddypawsandhairballs.com for more support
✅ Subscribe to Muddy Paws and Hairballs for real talk and expert advice on pet care.
✅ Share this episode to help more pet parents navigate life with their pets.
💬 We’d Love to Hear from You! Got thoughts on this episode or a topic you want covered? Leave a review or comment—we value your feedback!
🎧 Listen & Follow:
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📩 Contact: Amy@muddypawsandhairballs.com
Thanks for listening to Muddy Paws and Hairballs, your go-to resource for all things pet care. From dog training, behavior, and socialization to cat enrichment, pet adoption, and tackling behavior problems, we provide expert advice and real talk to help you create a happy, healthy life with your pets. Whether you're dealing with dog anxiety, looking for puppy training tips, or exploring enrichment ideas for your cat, we've got you covered. Be sure to check out all our episodes!
Chapters
00:00 - Guilt After Losing a Pet
01:02 - Meeting Ken and Nancy, Pet Loss Experts
04:05 - Why Euthanasia Decisions Are So Difficult
09:33 - The Gray Areas of End-of-Life Decisions
17:07 - Dealing With Guilt and Self-Judgment
33:41 - Finding Support After Pet Loss
43:07 - Meaningful Ways to Memorialize Pets
50:48 - Moving Forward: One Step at a Time
Transcript
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If you've ever lost a pet, whether through euthanasia, sudden illness or something completely unexpected, you know how quickly grief gets tangled up with guilt.
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Did I miss the signs?
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Should I have done more?
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Did I make the right call?
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Even after fostering thousands of animals and experiencing more loss than I care to count, I still found myself drowning in those questions when we had to make the heartbreaking decision to lift up our 34-year-old horse Cherokee.
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No matter how much experience you have, it is still gut-wrenching, because the love, caring and responsibility we feel for our pets makes their loss really messy.
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And, by the way, you might have noticed that our music sounds a little different today.
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I wanted to set a softer tone and be a little bit more reflective for this episode, because it's a heavy conversation, but it's an important one that we need to have.
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Stay tuned.
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Welcome to Muddy Paws and Hairballs, the podcast where we get real about life with pets the joy, the chaos and sometimes the heartbreak.
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I'm your host, amy Castro, and today we're diving into one of the hardest parts of loving our animals healing after the death of a pet, especially when guilt and self-doubt threaten to take over your grieving process.
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To help us unpack all of this, I'm joined by Ken Dolan DelVecchio and Nancy Saxton-Lopez, the compassionate hosts of the Pet Loss Companion podcast and the co-authors of the book by the same title.
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Ken is a licensed therapist, author and grief expert who spent years helping people navigate the unique and often misunderstood loss of a pet.
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Nancy is a licensed clinical social worker who has supported families through both human and animal loss for decades.
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Together, they've built a safe space where pet parents can process their grief without judgment, and they're bringing their wisdom and warmth to today's conversation.
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We're going to talk about why guilt after losing a pet is so common, how to recognize that it is a normal part of grief and, most importantly, how to release that guilt so you can truly honor your pet's life and the love that you shared.
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So, ken and Nancy, welcome to the show.
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Yes, thank you very much, amy.
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Nice to be here, Amy.
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So glad to have you here.
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So glad to have you here.
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Before we kind of get too too deep in the questions, I want to share my own little experience and why this episode is so important to me and why I mean, I know we had talked about doing an episode together for a while and it's.
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It's taken me a while to come back around to it, but I've just had a recent experience that I said.
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You know, if I'm feeling this way, after all, I have experienced in rescue than other people are probably suffering through and I'm going to get all choked up again.
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It's crazy.
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So we got this horse named Cherokee when we bought our house in 2018, the people could not find a home for her and they couldn't take her where she was going, and so I get this phone call the night before closing from the cellar crying and asking if I would keep Cherokee, and I thought because she had lived here for 18 years of her life.
00:03:09.306 --> 00:03:14.087
She was 34 when she passed away, and so I was like, sure, we'll keep Cherokee.
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And from there, we ended up acquiring a pony and three donkeys, so she had plenty of companions, but she was suffering with Cushing's, and I have had this experience where I've put I mean, I've put hundreds of animals to sleep, sadly, and I've seen, you know, hundreds pass away in my 14 years of doing animal rescue but this one was just brutal.
00:03:38.456 --> 00:03:54.943
And I think what made it so hard was it wasn't a black and white kind of thing, it was really I had to make a conscious best decision, looking at different factors and saying, yes, let's do this now versus waiting, versus giving her to somebody else.
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Why is that decision?
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Well, even when it is black and white, why is that decision so hard for people?
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Do you think?
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I think it is because we so don't want to kill our friend, and it's very hard to move from killing to ending their suffering, and I think that's just an extremely hard decision for us to make, because it's also it doesn't apply anywhere else in our lived experience.
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Really, it's not something that commonly happens in our experience with other human beings.
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And so I think jumping the hurdle of killing to ending their suffering and then I think, amy, it's what you were talking about which is there's so much gray, it feels like there's so much gray, and we have a very hard time coming to a decision of this magnitude when there's not absolute certainty.
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That's right.
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It's one of those things where you know there's so much going on and you want to make the right decision, but you don't want to make that decision either, right?
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That's what Ken's saying, right?
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So you know, and for your horse, I mean, there was also interesting when you were saying that, amy, I'm thinking there were so many other things going on in your life too at that time, right.
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Your life too at that time, right.
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And when things are going on in our life that are affecting us, then we have a little more uncertainty about what we're really doing or should be doing, because we're kind of jumbled up with a lot of stuff and you know, we certainly don't want our animals to suffer and you know, ken, and I have done this for a long time.
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Most people you know, ken, and I have done this for a long time Most people either think that they made that decision to end a life too soon or too late, right?
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So?
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Because there isn't any exact time where you could say, yes, what this animal did and at this day, and this is what this animal is going through, which means that I need to make that decision and I'm okay with it.
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Most of the time people are not okay with it and even though they may intellectually think okay, I guess because the quality of life isn't there or there are others, I think because of your circumstances, the horse could not go with you.
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I think that was part of the horse could not go with you.
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I think that was part of with the horse, right, right, with Cherokee, okay.
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So then you're thinking, oh well, I could, like you said, I could give her away or I could maybe take her, you know, and so that also complicates that decision right, yes, a hundred percent, yeah, and it's.
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You know, it's interesting that I literally had the vet scheduled to come out like six months ago she had a really bad summer and it's like, okay, it seemed physically that it was really really time and then she kind of rallied and then I canceled it.
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But you're right, you know the circumstance and you know the listeners know that I'm in the process of of a move and I talked extensively with the vet about moving her or and I couldn't take her with me.
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That would be way too much.
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But even a neighbor down the street offered to take her and the vet was pretty adamant that that would probably in her experience, that generally doesn't turn out well.
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The herd doesn't accept them, the animal is too stressed from the change in environment because she's been here so long.
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Is that person willing and able to provide the?
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Because she needed pretty, you know, she needed some medical care that was not cheap and medication that was not cheap, and so I had all of that going in.
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And it's interesting you brought up the timeline is, and both of you mentioned it.
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It's like when it's black and white it's easier and it's like it even came down to the fact that here I am, we're sitting here now.
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At the end of February I made the decision and I did euthanize her.
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I think it was two weeks ago.
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You know, I could have waited another month.
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I probably could have waited another two months.
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I don't know when my house is going to sell, and so it was like making that decision to just make the decision.
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What guidance do you give people as far as like, how do you navigate through that?
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And I'll tell you what I did in the end was I ended up.
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I actually looked into chat, gpt and said ask me some questions that will help me make the right decision, and it was incredible.
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The questions that I asked.
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But yeah, but because I, you know, as somebody that does rescue, I could do the quality of life thing, and I realized that, you know, there's certain factors that are just a little more black and white for me, but there was still so much gray and so much guilt about making the decision.
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We do use a quality of life skill, but on top of that, that's subjective right.
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How do we know that they're having it Animals?
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But on top of that, that's subjective right.
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How?
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do we know that?
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they're having it.
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Animals can't tell us really, so how do we know they're having a bad day or not, or how?
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I mean?
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We can watch them drinking or their food intake or their mobility, but how do we know when they're in pain?
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Right, yeah, yeah, really.
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I'll say that one of the things that I think is most valuable is consultation with other people.
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So, yeah, so you're not alone in the decision, if at all possible, that there's a veterinarian who, optimally, has some history with the animal and has some knowledge of where they are now relative to where they are the last time, the last visit, the last few months, and that you talk the decision over with people who love and respect you and hopefully also have some familiarity with your animal, because it is a, it's a major decision and it's a really good thing to have support with it.
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so that's what I think.
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I also believe that in a crisis, we are apt to be riddled with anxiety.
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We're at the vet's office we brought this happened to me a number of times.
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I bring my animal companion there.
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I know they're having a hard time, but now I'm told that I have to make a decision, that they're dying, and I feel like we need to give ourselves grace and say okay, we take the information we got from the veterinarian, we look at them, we get a sense of where they are, we sit with it for a very short period of time because we don't want them to be lingering in great distress, and then, if we make the decision to euthanize them, we remind ourselves that we made the best decision that we could with the information at hand at that time.
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We keep reminding ourselves of that, because what will happen is almost always we'll come back and we'll just torture ourselves with questions.
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Shouldn't I have taken them home and waited a little while longer?
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Shouldn't I have gotten another opinion?
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Should I have taken them 50 minutes away to the emergency, where maybe they could be in an oxygen tent?
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Or should I have had the surgery that they said was vaguely possibly going to actually give them more time.
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Ultimately, it comes down to just being very kind to ourselves.
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One of the things that Nancy and I will ask people is if this were a friend of yours who was telling you the story that you're telling us now, how would you support them?
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Would you say, oh my God, did you think of this?
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Did you think of that?
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Why didn't you do this?
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No, probably not.
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Many people, particularly the kind of people who are so conscientious with their animal family members, are so much more empathic toward others than themselves, and so you can ask them what would you tell somebody who you loved and respected who is telling you the story you're telling us now?
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And it can free them a little bit to not be so damning and be so challenging of themselves and try to be kind to themselves.
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It is painful, it is sad, but guilt is really difficult.
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Because any, I would say, the majority of people who, even if the animal goes missing, even if there was an accident, why didn't I let my cat out that day?
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Why did I do that?
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Right.
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It's always there and it's really hard to work through because, like I was saying, we can't take it away from you.
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But hopefully, as you talk about it and as you work through it, that you will eventually be able to forgive yourself and incorporate the loss, because guilt is just.
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It's really a difficult and challenging emotion to go through and most of us have it with our animals.
00:12:49.927 --> 00:12:50.187
Yeah.
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Well and with people too.
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Yeah, yes, with people too.
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It's a similar process that we go through in making some of those decisions.
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I want to hit a couple of things that you mentioned.
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First of all, like Ken, you had mentioned about the veterinarian being able to guide you and I have many fantastic veterinarians because of the rescue for various types of animals that the challenge that I think people might run into and maybe you can address this is that it's fairly rare, unless it's a real black and white, that the veterinarian will say yes, I think you should do this today.
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I literally told the vet when she came out here I'm probably going to euthanize her, but bring her Cushing's medicine, like you know, six months worth.
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Just in case I changed my mind, like I, I was still.
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I was still because I wanted her to look at her that last time.
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But you know she would say things like you know, I support you in this decision.
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I don't think it's a wrong decision.
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And when I start, you know and maybe this is just the communication maniac in me there's a big difference in saying I support you in this decision or it's not a wrong decision and saying it is the right decision.
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You should absolutely do this today.
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So that makes it a little bit hard, do this today, and it makes so that makes it a little bit hard, and I can understand why they wouldn't want to do that because they don't want to add to that guilt and that feeling that you feel, because it's like, oh, I could have waited till the weekend when my daughter came home from college or something like that, and could have said goodbye to the pet or you know things like that.
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It's really it's really difficult for veterinarians because many years ago years ago they would say right.
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I think that they were more apt to say, no, I think you need to do this, but they got so much push back right and people would get really angry and they wanted to know.
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But they didn't want to know, right.
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So what they do is really what your veterinarian is doing.
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Well, you know it's not a wrong thing.
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And they're thinking well, you're not saying you should do it, you know.
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So there's a lot of question around that, but they are taught now not to really say too much.
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Now, that said, some people will say well, what would you do to the veterinarian?
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What would you do if it was your animal?
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That's my question to them.
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I was just thinking the same thing.
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I always ask that question, yeah.
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What my veterinarian has said and this has happened on three occasions, I guess, in the last several years.
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What she'll say is well, clinically there is no path to health here, but you love her, so you have to decide.
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She'll always make that decision.
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She'll say, clinically, this is the way it looks and she's not going to get better, but you have to make the decision.
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And then she'll kind of look at me like do the right thing, ken.
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Wink, wink, nod, nod.
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Yeah, I find that.
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I'll say what would you do if she were yours?
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And she'll be pretty clear about it.
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I mean pretty definite, like I would.
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I would let her go, I would ease her out, yeah, and I always feel like they won't tell you what to do because they fear liability, they fear a lawsuit right as yeah.
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As we are an incredibly litigious society, people sometimes get outrageously emotionally overwrought in their recriminations and they'll say well, you told me, and so I can understand that.
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I also think it's important for people to realize the position that the veterinarians are in and to not see them as a God figure or somebody who has the ultimate responsibility, because we do have the responsibility, and that's why I think that the guilt is so profound and I think the guilt is so profound because we've had responsibility for every aspect of this animal's care and life, what they eat, what they do during the day, the environment in which they live, food we give them the medication we give them the company they keep.
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We are in control of all of that and we're responsible for all of that.
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And so many people feel, I believe, that we should be responsible for preventing their death, and I think that this also ties into the fact that mainstream culture is incredibly phobic about the reality of death.
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And we need to get more comfortable with the reality that every living thing dies.
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Every one of our animal companions is going to die, we're going to die, our friends are going to die, our children are going to die.
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We're all going to die and that is not a catastrophe.
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That is simply the law of nature and we do not have control over it.
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And I feel like people just beat themselves up because their animal died and you know.
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Really, the question is you didn't expect this to happen.
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Most, of our animal companions have much abbreviated lifespans compared to us, and so, when we adopt them into our family, we know that we're likely to lose them and it's very important to just keep that in mind and, as the time approaches, to realize that we cannot prevent this from happening.
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We can make decisions about how to help it happen in the most comfortable fashion and we can take the best care of them through illness and infirmity, but we cannot prevent them from dying.
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And really the last gift the way I see the last gift that we give them, is as painless as possible, a transition when there is no path forward.
00:18:35.215 --> 00:18:59.046
I remember making this decision with my mother when she was at the very end of her life and was having a conversation with my brother who wanted to do everything possible, including coding her again, you know, the defibrillator which had really traumatized her and I remember saying to him very pointedly I said our task now is to help her die as comfortably as possible.
00:18:59.046 --> 00:19:01.587
There is no path back to health.
00:19:01.587 --> 00:19:03.366
That is not possible.
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That's why we're in hospice.
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We don't want to just create more trauma for her.
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She is transitioning out of this life and that's what happens.
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Our animals, if we're lucky, if they're lucky enough not to be killed in an accident or an emergent medical crisis.
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That's where we're going to end up with them.
00:19:22.980 --> 00:19:25.501
Right right medical crisis.
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That's where we're going to end up with them, right, right, sometimes.
00:19:27.603 --> 00:19:38.851
I mean, you know, ken, there was one of our people that came on the podcast and he's still struggling, and you know it's complicated because I think Amy, with Cherokee it was a little complicated, right.
00:19:39.290 --> 00:19:45.855
So his animal was elderly, had dementia and had mobility issues.
00:19:45.855 --> 00:20:01.102
Okay, and this was his sole dog, right, he loved this dog, but he was the only one taking care of the dog and there were issues in the family and they're like, oh, the dog's up all night because he's sundowning and all this and he had a bad bat.
00:20:01.102 --> 00:20:02.403
It was really difficult.
00:20:02.403 --> 00:20:03.385
There were so many things.
00:20:03.385 --> 00:20:09.755
When he had decided maybe we should euthanize him, the vet came love this vet, know her great vet.
00:20:09.755 --> 00:20:11.624
But what happened is?
00:20:11.624 --> 00:20:13.830
He asked, is this the right thing?
00:20:13.830 --> 00:20:18.151
And she said well, look, the dementia is going to be a problem.
00:20:18.151 --> 00:20:39.073
Maybe he has another few weeks around his mobility, right, he chose to euthanize him and then, boom, it was like he could have had a few more weeks.
00:20:39.113 --> 00:20:39.474
Why did I do this?
00:20:39.474 --> 00:20:39.978
Why did I do this?
00:20:39.978 --> 00:20:40.440
She said that, you know.
00:20:40.440 --> 00:20:51.570
And so I had to work really long time with him, you know, to kind of go through that guilt, because after, obviously, the death, he was not doing all that physical work.
00:20:51.570 --> 00:20:57.105
He felt better, and the more he felt better, the more he believed that he did the wrong thing.
00:20:57.105 --> 00:21:07.299
And this is what guilt does to us and, like Ken said, it's really hard and we have to slowly work through it and not be so hard on ourselves.
00:21:07.519 --> 00:21:22.911
And I think that's an important point, Nancy that with the death of a loved one, there are also some changes that we experience as relief, as opportunity, and that doesn't mean that we don't grieve for them.
00:21:22.911 --> 00:21:30.707
It doesn't mean that the loss is not very important to us, and it doesn't mean that we're betraying them.
00:21:30.787 --> 00:21:39.373
It's just the way life changes and this is something again that people feel like did I do this to free myself from this burden?
00:21:39.373 --> 00:21:47.674
And they have to go back and say, no, I did it because it was the appropriate thing to do to end their suffering.
00:21:47.674 --> 00:21:51.229
I mean, to me, the phrase that keeps coming back is end their suffering.
00:21:51.229 --> 00:22:03.813
That's what you do and, as you said, one of the things that you notice over time is how many people think they did it too soon and how many people think they did it too late.
00:22:03.813 --> 00:22:08.145
There are some people who are absolutely okay with the timing.
00:22:09.008 --> 00:22:19.766
We do hear that with some regularity but it's much more likely that there's like this whole swirl of recriminations, of woulda, shoulda, couldas, and I've said this many times.
00:22:19.766 --> 00:22:35.630
One of the things when I get any of those kinds of feelings, things when I, when I get any of those kinds of feelings, I look at the boxes that have their ashes, I mean it's real, it's a little morbid maybe, but it immediately orients me to the fact that they're not here anymore.
00:22:35.630 --> 00:22:54.377
And this is not helpful, because there's there's nothing, there's nothing good that will come from this, this chewing on this emotionally more and more and more, and so the reality is you did the best time that you could at the time, and their life is over.
00:22:54.377 --> 00:23:00.046
We don't know what that means ultimately for any of us, but you're not going to change that.
00:23:00.046 --> 00:23:01.209
There's no way to change it.
00:23:01.911 --> 00:23:04.537
Right, but you're also never going to forget them, right.
00:23:04.585 --> 00:23:06.009
You're never going to forget them.
00:23:06.088 --> 00:23:06.450
We talk a lot.
00:23:06.450 --> 00:23:09.846
These animals are so important to us, right?
00:23:09.846 --> 00:23:17.807
They give us such gifts and such love and you can't have a relationship with a human like you can with an animal.
00:23:17.807 --> 00:23:25.156
So it doesn't mean that they may be gone and that's devastating and there is guilt around it trying to work through the guilt.
00:23:25.156 --> 00:23:38.707
But they're always with us, you know, and we have to remember that because you know they gave us that wonderful life with them for so many years.
00:23:38.707 --> 00:23:40.420
And sometimes and sometimes I mean people get really angry when it's so soon.
00:23:40.420 --> 00:23:51.648
You know when something happens when they're young, but if they're older and have gone through a lot of life, you know it's a little bit different, but they still have given us so much right.
00:23:53.532 --> 00:23:54.374
Definitely yeah.
00:23:54.374 --> 00:23:55.817
And do you think so?
00:23:55.817 --> 00:24:03.790
Because, ken, you had mentioned, you know, when people question themselves and they say, did I do this for me or did I do this for them?
00:24:03.790 --> 00:24:13.739
I and maybe I'm wrong on I don't think I am, but I I feel like I did it when I did it for both of us, I think it was time.
00:24:13.920 --> 00:24:14.460
Could she have?
00:24:15.020 --> 00:24:22.924
could she have gone on longer time?
00:24:22.924 --> 00:24:23.586
Could she have gone on longer?
00:24:23.586 --> 00:24:33.426
But we did an episode with the founder of Lap of Love a while back, the home hospice in euthanasia, and she said and I'm not going to quote her exactly and I don't know if this is her saying or from somewhere else, but better a week too early than a day too late.
00:24:33.426 --> 00:24:40.666
And Ken, you kind of alluded to that as well, and so part of my thinking was kind of going back to the questions that I asked myself.
00:24:40.666 --> 00:24:45.951
You know, like quality of life for her, because they're obviously it's different for dogs and I think it is important.
00:24:45.951 --> 00:24:48.253
And Nancy youT was, you know, for a horse.
00:24:48.253 --> 00:24:59.969
Remind me, what are those, what are those elements?
00:24:59.969 --> 00:25:01.913
And you know horses are herd animals.
00:25:01.913 --> 00:25:04.992
Her entire herd had been systematically kind of removed.
00:25:04.992 --> 00:25:11.893
The pony got adopted, the donkey got adopted, the other donkeys got adopted because we knew she wasn't going to be going anywhere.
00:25:11.893 --> 00:25:17.612
And you know as much as I would look out the window every morning and hope, oh, she's laying down, maybe she.
00:25:17.612 --> 00:25:20.198
You know, like I hoped I wouldn't have to make that decision.
00:25:20.198 --> 00:25:28.118
You know it ultimately came down to the fact of, yes, it was like Ken said, her health was not going to get better.
00:25:28.118 --> 00:25:32.146
The vet had mentioned the summer was coming and it was going to be brutal because of the.
00:25:32.146 --> 00:25:33.607
You know, the heat is just a lot for a Cushing's animal to handle.
00:25:33.607 --> 00:25:35.909
The heat is just a lot for a Cushing's animal to handle.
00:25:36.750 --> 00:25:44.334
But there was a little bit of self-serving in there as well, because, although she was not hard to take care of, here I'm trying to sell my house.
00:25:44.334 --> 00:25:46.714
I've got this old kind of sickly-looking horse.
00:25:46.714 --> 00:25:50.577
I didn't want people to come and think, oh, you're not taking care of that horse.
00:25:50.577 --> 00:26:08.339
And, as morbid as this sounds, I thought about the fact of if I wait till the very, very end, you know, if I'd waited another month, let's say, now I have this big burial mound in my pasture and everybody's going to say what's that?
00:26:08.339 --> 00:26:09.607
And now I've got to tell them there's a dead horse in their backyard, kind of thing.
00:26:09.607 --> 00:26:12.798
And you know I didn't want to have those conversations or I didn't want people to feel uncomfortable.
00:26:12.897 --> 00:26:22.131
But one of the things that I kind of console myself with is what would have been gained for her to keep her around for another month or two months or whatever.
00:26:22.131 --> 00:26:30.608
She's out there by herself, you know, I don't know exactly how she was feeling, but I can't imagine at 34 with Cushing's and you know not being not having many teeth left.
00:26:30.608 --> 00:26:32.654
You know she probably wasn't feeling awesome.
00:26:32.654 --> 00:26:36.289
You know she probably felt when she was six or seven years old.
00:26:36.289 --> 00:26:41.480
And so what would I have gained by allowing her to stick around a little bit longer?
00:26:41.480 --> 00:26:43.171
Maybe I'd felt a little less guilty.
00:26:43.171 --> 00:26:43.653
I don't know.
00:26:43.653 --> 00:26:55.678
I mean, I guess part of that is how do you talk yourself through that guilt, like I have these little conversations where I play my own devil's advocate to try to make myself feel better.
00:26:55.678 --> 00:26:59.234
What else can people do to navigate that guilt?
00:26:59.704 --> 00:27:29.471
Well, I think one of the things you can do is you can remind yourself of the care that you gave all of those years and how deliberate the decision was, and all of the consultation you had, and that point which the person from Lap of Love and I think that's a brilliant way to put it better a week too early than a day too late and also think of the fact that, indeed, your needs should figure in to the formula.
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