Fospice: not for the faint hearted.
You’re probably asking, What the heck is fospice? Fospice is foster hospice for homeless dogs, cats and others. It is a word I use but did not coin, nor do I know the original author. However, because fostering is thought of as temporary — getting a dog out of the shelter and into a private home while awaiting adoption — “fospice” can be slightly misleading. For me, and the volunteers with whom I work, fospice means providing a forever home throughout a dog’s last breath.
What qualifies a dog for fospice? A homeless dog, abandoned and found wandering or brought to a shelter, is eligible if afflicted with a terminal, life-limiting, untreatable illness, such as cancer, kidney disease or congestive heart failure, to name three of the most common ailments. Most fospice animals are senior, but not all. Many have a slow-growing illness, have significant life still to enjoy and should not be prematurely euthanized. However, because of their medical conditions, these animals are considered unadoptable. And that’s where fospice comes in.
Dogs in our network — we specialize in dogs but occasionally place cats — come to us through rescues and shelters where they have been medically and behaviorally evaluated. If we accepted them directly from private citizens we’d be completely overwhelmed as we are a very small, albeit fierce, group.
Here’s how it all began. After shepherding each of my parents from this life to the next and then suddenly losing a sister, I recognized that part of what healed my grief was my dogs. Spending time with our dogs, stroking their velvet ears, weeping into their warm fur, walking or swimming with them at the dog beach and happily distracted by their enjoyment, was all a significant part of what lifted me up out of deep sorrow.
So, I began to think about why we can’t give back to dogs in the enormous ways in which they give to us during our end-of-life experiences. My research immediately showed that people were indeed offering dog hospice, and some were calling it fospice. I like, “ fospice,” because when you say it, people ask what it is — and it’s in big letters on our t-shirts — and then, of course, you get to explain it and people are invariably grateful to know that such a thing exists.
Yes, we can feed our pets, shelter them, love them unconditionally, reciprocate their playfulness, and etcetera. But what happens when they begin to decline and it’s stressful and sad and confusing for their humans? Many people cannot shoulder the enormous responsibility of deciding upon euthanasia for their pet(s), and so they hand their sick, old dogs over to someone else by, “surrendering,” them to a shelter, or putting them out onto the street. And many people predecease their senior pets, particularly in retirement areas such as where I live in southwest Florida. Family members, friends or County Animal Control will then take these orphaned pets to the local shelter. But in a shelter, many dogs will die alone, afraid, confused and sad.
There are alternatives to abandoning your pet in the eleventh hour. There are networks of compassionate humans who volunteer to take fospice dogs into their loving homes for a beautiful last chapter. When the suffering takes over and the bad days outnumber the good, euthanasia of a fospice dog is ideally performed at home, but in-clinic euthanasia is okay, too, as long as their loving human is with them. Financial support for the dog’s medical comfort is provided, if necessary and if possible, by a foundation or rescue dedicated to this particular mission.
If given the chance, our dogs would stay with us throughout our last breath, and we owe them the same. A veterinarian who chose to remain anonymous wrote that the only thing dogs want to see when they are dying is you. They need to be able to see their human. If possible, their eyes will scan the room, and you had better be there. Unless you’re dead, in which case hopefully you left behind a deeply compassionate end-of-life plan for your dog. If you’re still very much alive and have handed off the task — to someone you know for example — of having your dog euthanized, you may eventually regret it. And regrets can kill us.
“I could never do what you do,” is the common refrain when I tell people about this fospice work. My silent response is always, Neither could I ! Ironically, cursed with hypersensitivity — and hyper-empathy, a word I may indeed have coined — I’m the last sort of person who can do this work painlessly. I cry at the drop of a hat, with the slightest provocation and certainly every time we lose a fospice dog, even if we’re all self-isolating because of a pandemic, and I have never even met the dog. It doesn’t get easier, and there is grief for us each time a dog dies, and sometimes we are haunted by visions of the wretched lives many homeless dogs have had before they finally got to us.
But those of us who are committed to the work of providing dogs with the beautiful last chapter they so richly deserve feel compelled to do so. Someone has to do it! I often say. And I strongly believe this.
Fospice comes with no guarantees time-wise, except that a dog whose life is already too short has now had it further shortened by disease and neglect and we, the Fospice Guardians, will probably not have the dog for very long. The fospice dogs and occasional cats in our network have lived from two years and still going strong to a heartbreaking seven days. Often, a fospice dog gets into a loving, comfortable, peaceful home at last and comes back to life. But there are dogs we recieve only in time to provide them with a loving place to die. And these are perhaps the most painful losses.
As an Interfaith minister, I specialize in Animal Ministry, which mostly means this fospice work, animal blessings and animal memorials. And I think there may be some last-minute redemption for humans who can step in and provide fully for a dog in that last chapter, giving the greatest gift we can give any living creature: love throughout last breath.
I don’t believe we die alone, as long as there is someone — just one other being — with us, shepherding us from this life to whatever reward comes after; one person holding our hand and reassuring us quietly as we transition, or even a dog lying in bed with us, as another sort of divine death doula. In this way, I envision that we are fully and lovingly transported to the next life without a moment of total aloneness; seamlessly guided from the earthly to the eternal.
Dogs can do this for us, and we can do this for dogs, if we can step out of our own egos and accept that fospice is for them. However, Fospice Guardians, as we call our volunteers, are often rewarded with mutual healing and a life-changing experience with their fospice dog. On our website, Fospice Guardians have written eye-opening tributes to their dogs. About her fospice Pit mix, one wrote: “My Cathy girl showed me that with the right love and affection we can heal from even our deepest emotional wounds.”
Still, the work is largely selfless. A favorite dog book of mine is, MY OLD DOG, Rescued Pets with Remarkable Second Acts, by Laura T. Coffee with photos by Lori Fusaro. One of the stories is about a seventeen year-old dog named Fiona, whose rescuer, Rita Earl, had already had ten hospice dogs, one at a time, before she got Fiona. She almost didn’t take Fiona. “It’s terribly hard, Rita said, “and every time I do it I say, ‘That’s it, I’m done. Then I say, ‘Wait. It’s not about me. There’s someone waiting for me who needs a mother for a little bit. And then look what happens: I get to meet dogs like Fiona. How lucky am I?” Fiona turned out to be the dog of her heart and, at the time Rita wrote those words, Fiona was still enjoying life and had amazed every one by living for two years.
I leave you with this: it is said that we choose the work we need to do to heal our own wounded selves, and this is true of fospice. To know that we have given a dog an exquisite final act and a dignified, respectful, gentle, loving ending is indeed a great source of healing. Amen.
