Your pain isn’t a problem to solve

I once sent two cats to a sanctuary, thinking I had saved them. I felt so much relief thinking they were finally somewhere safe. 

But they weren’t safe. 

I sent them to what was later called a “slow-kill hellhole” named Tiger Ranch. That “sanctuary” closed in 2008 when the owner was convicted of animal cruelty.

I wrote about my experience in 2012 on my old blog, Notes from a Dog Walker, in the days following the discovery that Spindletop, another sanctuary, had failed and the dogs there were victims of severe neglect. A mass grave was discovered.

This is on my mind because of what happened this summer at Miranda’s Rescue in California, where hundreds of dogs, transferred there from shelters, were reported as adopted but later discovered shot to death.

These dogs and the shelter staff, volunteers, fosters, and community members who cared for them have been terribly betrayed. 

People are grieving animals they believed were safe. They are grieving the loss of trust in organizations they dedicated themselves to. They are grieving the loss of how they understood the world before this happened. 

Megan Devine, author of It’s OK That You’re Not OK, says: “In grief, pain gets supported. Suffering gets adjusted."

We can’t "fix" grief. But we can tend to the pain, as Devine says: 

“True comfort in grief is in acknowledging the pain, not in trying to make it go away. Companionship, not correction, is the way forward.”

We’re not meant to grieve alone. We need others to acknowledge, witness, help us tend to, and feel our pain. 

When it’s a traumatic loss, as this is, we also might need support from trauma specialists who can help us feel our pain safely.

But what does Devine mean when she says “suffering gets adjusted”? Here, the Buddhist parable about two arrows can help us. 

The first arrow is the unavoidable pain we experience as human beings. It arises from causes and conditions we don’t have total control over.

The second arrow is how we react to that pain. It’s the judgment and self-blame we experience in response to the first arrow.

The second arrow sounds like: “I’m an idiot for letting myself get hit by that first arrow. I should have known better. If only I had ducked, this never would have happened.”

Adjusting suffering means we notice, investigate, and remove the second arrow. When it comes to grief, the second arrow often sounds like guilt. 

Grief expert David Kessler often says, “We would rather feel guilty than feel helpless.”

He wrote: "In grief, guilt can feel like control. It gives us something to hold on to... even if it hurts. Feeling helpless is sometimes unbearable. Guilt gives us a script, 'If only I had...'."

Guilt gives our minds something to focus on: our mistakes and what we could have done differently (if only we knew then what we know now).

Those thoughts hurt, but they may not feel as bad as the pain of knowing how much suffering is out of our control. That we can love animals and work tirelessly to help them, and still not be able to protect them all of the time.

Speaking of mistakes, not all guilt is bad. Constructive guilt can help us learn, make changes, ask hard questions, make amends, and do better as a field.

The kind of guilt I’m talking about - the second arrow kind - heaps unnecessary suffering on top of the pain. It sounds like:

“I should have known better than to send those cats to Tiger Ranch.”

“I should have adopted my foster dog; they wouldn’t have died at Spindletop.”

“I should have pushed harder when I had concerns. I could have saved them.”

When we can’t change what’s already done, guilt gives us a concrete action to take: punishing ourselves. We might even think we deserve it. How else will the animals know how sorry we are if we’re not suffering? 

But suffering from unrelenting guilt only isolates, disconnects, hurts, and exhausts us to the point that we can no longer help the animals who are still here and need us. 

It can also distract us from tending to the pain of our grief, which needs companionship and compassionate care. 

If that’s where you are right now, please know that you don’t have to keep shooting yourself with second arrows to punish yourself, make amends, behave differently in the future, or honor their memory. 

In the 18 years since I sent two cats to Tiger Ranch, I have never sent another animal to a sanctuary. 

I carry their memory with me, not to beat myself up for failing them, but because they’re part of who I am now. They keep teaching me, helping me to see clearly, and be brave enough to feel the pain of grief, so I don’t avoid hard choices the animals need us to make for them. 

What I hope for you - for all of us -  is that you find the support you need to grieve, to have your pain compassionately tended to and witnessed by other people, animals, trees, or water.

I am so sorry for all of your losses. The pain you’re in is real. That first arrow hurts like hell. 

But the pain of grief is enough; no additional suffering is required.