Justine Johnson, left, photographs 15-year-old Charleigh recently at East End Beach. Johnson, a photographer from Portland, offers free pet portrait sessions to people with older or dying animals. Motivated by her own experience photographing her brother’s dog, which was diagnosed with terminal lymphoma at a young age, she said she donates her time because she doesn’t want money to keep people from having special photos with their beloved pets. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer
Brodie spent her last day at the beach.
The nearly 19-year-old miniature dachshund could no longer see much and her hearing was gone, but Justin Brooks wanted her to feel sand on her paws.
Brooks adopted Brodie as a 1-pound puppy when he himself was 18. He bottle-fed her when she was too small to eat on her own, and she was there to welcome each of his two children.
Wherever he went, Brodie went, too, in the pocket or hood of his sweatshirt or in a baby carrier strapped to his chest. At night, she curled up with him. She was the most constant thing in his life from age 18 to 36, he said.
Justin Brooks and Brodie, his best friend of almost 19 years, at the beach together for the last time in April 2021. Photo by Lauren Smith Kennedy
But then Brodie’s health began to decline, and Brooks knew it was time. He asked a photographer to come take some pictures of Brodie and him at the beach they often visited together, and a few hours later, a mobile vet service drove up to the house in Gorham. They sat on the warm, sunny deck and said goodbye. It was peaceful and heartbreaking.
Three years later, Brooks still feels Brodie’s absence.
“There are not days I don’t think of her. … Until you have that connection, it’s hard to understand,” Brooks said.
In Maine, a growing microeconomy of businesses and organizations focuses on the profound pain of pet loss – with mobile vet clinics that offer at-home euthanasia and hospice care, end-of-life photographers, grief counselors and support groups. Beloved animals can be memorialized with tattoos and custom urns. One business offers pet aquamation, a water-based alternative to cremation.
Brooks has found the beach photographs captured by Lauren Smith Kennedy cathartic. He received the first few just hours after burying Brodie in the backyard, and he looks at them frequently. Vet at Your Door, one of several Maine mobile veterinary clinics, allowed him to say goodbye to Brodie at his own pace at home, where they’d both be comfortable.
“You never expect a dog to be the most important thing in your life, but that’s what she was for me,” he said.
A GROWING INDUSTRY
Dr. Kelly Hill has noticed a slow shift in attitudes since 2018, when she began offering mobile services through Haven Veterinary Hospice and Senior Care.
In the last few years, she’s seen more hospice veterinarians, mobile clinics and photographers.
“This is something that pet owners have wanted for a very long time,” Hill said.
Mourning a pet has long been considered “disenfranchised grief” – not acknowledged or validated by society. But that’s changing as more people accept pets as family.
Pet ownership exploded during the pandemic – according to the ASPCA, 23 million people, or 1 in 5 families, adopted pets during that time frame. Social media has put pet love and pet grief front and center.
During the pandemic – when veterinary hospitals were overrun, understaffed and didn’t let people come inside – hospice care and home euthanasia became more prevalent, Hill said. But the demand for it remains even after the return of regular in-office visits.
“I can’t tell you how many people said, ‘I didn’t even know that was an option.’ When people realized what a beautiful, peaceful death at home can be, it grew,” she said.
Hill said there are numerous benefits to at-home euthanasia.
She says it’s less stressful for the animal, which might be scared of the vet’s office. It can ground other animals in the home that won’t just see a pet leaving one day and never coming back. And families “can ugly cry,” she said, and choose how the end should be.
Kelly Hill, a longtime veterinarian, stands in the lobby at Tranquil Waters, a center for aquamation, or water-based cremation, for pets, which she said is gentler than flame-based cremation and is better for the environment. An illustration of Hill’s departed dog, Foster, hangs on the right. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer
In hospice care, she guides people through those difficult end-of-life decisions and pain management plans.
She sees her role as helping the animal transition from a body that’s broken and doesn’t serve it anymore.
“What I do is so powerful and so beautiful and so rewarding that it feeds my soul,” Hill said. “But my heart aches for the families.”
Two years ago, she opened Tranquil Waters, a Biddeford pet aquamation service. She said she likes aquamation because it uses less energy and produces fewer carbon emissions than cremation.
Hill said the goal is to make that final step for pet owners less “here’s a box of the ashes” and more personalized.
“Slowly, the word is getting out there that there are kinder, gentler ways to practice,” Hill said. “I think (the pet-grief sector) will grow exponentially in the next decade.”
In April, the University of New England Online College of Professional Studies will launch an End of Life Pet Doula certificate program. The six-week program, according to the course description, is designed to provide students with the skills to deliver practical, compassionate and supportive care to pets and their families as the animals approach the end of life.
“Really what the end-of-life doula is offering is support and knowledge,” said Tracey Walker, who is based in Michigan and will lead the course.
Often, that support can be simple validation.
“The acknowledgment of death and the death of an animal can be profound. A lot of people that I talk to say that their grief is not given the weight it deserves,” she said.
AN IRREPLACEABLE LOSS
Sarah Lehoux’s life came to a standstill the day her 9-year-old Great Dane, Nova, was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a frequently fatal bone cancer common to the breed.
Her life narrowed to taking care of Nova. She paused her work as a travel nurse and stayed home. For 7 ½ months, Lehoux tried to balance chemotherapy, radiation and eventually hospice care with Nova’s quality of life.
Her anticipatory grief and anguish were at times all-consuming, she said. She credits Hill with helping her shift her perspective to enjoying what time she and Nova had left together.
One day in late October, she called Hill and gave Nova the best last meal she could think of: a grass-fed cheeseburger, a lamb trachea and a big piece of chocolate cake with extra frosting.
“I still find myself looking for her, and it’s been four months,” she said in a recent interview. “It’s an irreplaceable, catastrophic loss in my life.”
The house has been too quiet, too clean without Nova, whose personality was as big as she was. She was sweet and gentle, putting up with Lehoux dressing her up in elaborate costumes each year on her birthday. She was also goofy and too smart – she figured out how to use the ice maker and steal toast from the toaster.
A few weeks ago, Lehoux started her first work assignment in almost a year. She and her boyfriend and their other dog, Ellie, drove from Biddeford to Wisconsin. It was her first road trip in almost a decade without Nova’s big slobbery head resting on her shoulder.
“She was extraordinary,” Lehoux said. “I feel like there’s judgment sometimes in animal relationships … but I’ve learned that my relationship with Nova isn’t something that I have to prove to anybody else.”
Justine Johnson, right, photographs Gray and Rhett Mercury with their 15-year-old dog, Charleigh, recently at East End Beach in Portland. Johnson offers free pet portrait sessions to people with older or dying animals. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer
Patricia Lee Rode, a Rockland pet bereavement counselor, changed careers in 2016 because she saw a need. There wasn’t help available, like she offers now, after the death of her German shepherd Sonny.
“The importance of animals is becoming more accepted,” she said. “They are family.”
Ultimately, she sees her role with her clients as “somebody to help them learn how to grieve fully so they can live fully.”
People find different ways to remember their pets, she said. One took some strings his cat used to play with and turned them into a bracelet. Rode wore Sonny’s tag on a ribbon around her neck. Lehoux sent some of Nova’s ashes to a company that will turn them into a diamond. Kennedy, the photographer, has a tattoo of her cat Tilly’s face on her arm.
“Grief is shaped by the bond you have,” Rode said. “I think there’s an immense sense that you’re the steward of animals, you’re taking care of them, you’re responsible for them.”
Erin Schlicher, a veterinary social worker at Maine Veterinary Medical Center in Scarborough, said animal bereavement can be especially difficult because pets are so woven into a person’s daily life. Pet owners know their lifespans are short, that they’ll have to say goodbye.
Still, “I don’t think we’re ever fully prepared for that,” she said.
Through MVMC, Schlicher offers support to pet owners and veterinarians. She holds sessions for people coping with the loss of their pets and for veterinarians with compassion fatigue. She recently launched a monthly pet bereavement support group for clients.
“The group is about having a safe space to fully express how painful or intense that grief is without someone saying, ‘Oh, it was just a dog,'” she said.
EMBRACING THE END
Lauren Smith Kennedy, the pet photographer who documented Brodie’s last day at the beach, said she channeled her own grief over the sudden loss of her cat Tilly into a way to help others. She created the Tilly Project, an online directory of around 1,800 photographers around the world who offer end-of-life pet sessions, often for free. The website also serves as a clearinghouse for resources on pet bereavement and preparing for impending loss.
Kennedy said Tilly was her shadow and her soulmate – sweet, sassy, goofy and talkative.
“I thought, what a beautiful way to be able to honor the one cat who taught me about unconditional love,” she said.
Justine Johnson offers free pet portrait sessions to people with older or dying animals. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer
She still grieves the loss of Tilly after almost six years. Even with two new cats – Percy, a Velcro-like cuddler and Newt, whom she called a daily lesson in patience – she still feels it.
“The minute you think that you know everything about grief is the moment you know nothing about grief,” she said. She hopes The Tilly Project can shed some light on the depth of the human-animal bond.
She’s intentional about using the term “end of life,” but she lets her clients pick a name, whether it’s celebration of life, forget-me-not or something else.
Kennedy is particularly moved by the lengths to which people will go to make their pets more comfortable at the end, whether it’s a pillow and blanket-laden wagon for a dog whose legs no longer work or the simple act of lifting up the water bowl for a cat struggling to drink.
“When we get puppies and kittens, we celebrate them in such a big way … but it’s so beautiful when we put that same energy and … devotion at the other end, too,” she said.
When Rhett and Gray Mercury adopted Charleigh – the dog the shelter said was the least likely to get adopted – she was 7 and they were told she probably didn’t have long.
That was eight years ago, and Charleigh isn’t showing many signs of slowing down.
She’s still crazy for her ball and eats anything she can get to with gusto. But she’s sleeping more, and sometimes doesn’t get up right away for her breakfast.
“She’s past her life expectancy by a year and a half,” Gray Mercury said.
Her hips and legs give her trouble sometimes, but that’s from an old injury. She’s had several trips to the emergency vet in recent years, but it’s her zeal for anything resembling food that has landed her there. Once, she was licking peanut butter off a spatula and swallowed the rubber top whole.
Charleigh seems like she’ll live forever, but the couple know she won’t.
So on a warm February day, the couple met up with Justine Johnson, a Portland photographer who, like Kennedy, offers free celebration-of-life pet sessions for older or dying animals. They settled on East End Beach, where Charleigh saw the ocean for the first time when they moved to Maine about six months ago.
Johnson has offered the sessions for nearly 10 years and said she doesn’t want a person’s finances to be a factor.
It can be difficult to say goodbye – and there are often tears on both sides of the camera lens – but she said she often hears from people later that the photos have been a comfort.
“As a culture, we have a lot of taboo and denial around death, and it can be easier to pretend it’s not happening or it’s not coming,” she said. “But I would encourage people to just go for it. … You’re never going to regret having the photos taken. You’re always going to be happy you did it.”
March 10, 2024 at 04:00PM
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Demand grows for services to guide pet owners through hard goodbyes - Press Herald
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