When Love Begins to Prepare: The Quiet Moments Before Goodbye (pet grief)

There’s a moment in every caregiver’s journey when love quietly shifts shape.

It moves from hoping they’ll live to preparing for them to leave.

It’s not a choice — it’s an instinct. The heart somehow knows what the mind refuses to say out loud.

When Gollum fell sick, I did everything I could to help him heal. I stayed awake for nights, cleaned his vomit, checked his breathing, and prayed for his strength to return. But in between those desperate acts of love, another thought began to whisper at the edges of my mind — What if he doesn’t make it?

It was a thought I didn’t want to think, yet couldn’t push away.

So, one of those nights, I searched for pet cremation services. My hands trembled as I typed, my eyes blurry from sleeplessness and tears. It felt like betrayal — as if even thinking of his death would bring it closer.

But deep down, I wasn’t planning for his end. I was preparing to honour him.

Preparing for a pet’s death doesn’t mean you’ve lost hope.

It means your love has matured into something vast enough to hold both possibilities — recovery and release.

That night, while I read about cremation rituals, I imagined what it would mean to say goodbye — not in panic or haste, but with gentleness.

If he had to go, I wanted it to be peaceful. I wanted his body treated with the same love with which I’d held him for 13 and a half years.

When Gollum passed away later, I realized that moment of searching hadn’t been morbid. It had been sacred. It was my soul trying to make space for the inevitable, to soften the shock of loss with readiness.

Death, I’ve learned, begins long before the heart stops beating.

It begins in small realizations — when you see their legs tremble, when they stop eating the food they once loved, when you start whispering “please stay” even as a part of you says “it’s okay if you go.”

Preparing doesn’t mean you love them any less.

It means you love them completely — even through their leaving.