Late Tuesday night/early Wednesday morning, we said goodbye to our foster dog, Howie. He was an old dog with ever increasing health issues, though his actual decline was very sudden, and we weren’t quite prepared for it. The fact that he had only been with us for 14 months, and that he wasn’t “officially” ours did not make the decision any easier. The conversations were tear filled, and I will miss seeing him at the door waiting to be petted when I come home from work today.

This is the hardest part of loving pets. But yes, the 14 months we did have were worth 10 times the number of tears we cried.

I will not lie and say money did not come up in our conversation about what to do, but perhaps not in the way you might think.

While the love and joy I get from our dogs is worth more than everything we’ve ever paid, I would be doing people a disservice if I did not say, pets cost money, and end of life decisions can cost a LOT of money. If you are thinking of getting a pet, make sure you think about how much money you’re willing to spend in one sitting, and what lengths you might go to for end of life care. If you are in a relationship, make sure you are both on the same page about this. Knowing your limits beforehand makes the whole process simpler in the moment.

Because C and I have pretty much always been on the same page about what we were willing to do for our pets, I am lucky to be able to say that money has never played a part in our decisions about what to do for our dogs. In the exact same circumstances, I would make the exact same decisions for each of the three we have lost since November 2009, regardless of the balance of our bank account.

In this case, though, the money we were talking about was not ours. Old Dog Haven has been, throughout these 14 months, a great organization to work with, and we knew that no matter what decision we made, they would pay the bill and not question it.

We could have opted for treatment to make Howie more comfortable that night. We might even have been able to get one or two more good days. But at what price? Tuesday night was bad. Nothing was going to get permanently better. Howie was obviously not comfortable, and you can’t explain what’s going on. Would those one or two more good days have been for him, or for us? When even at best, we would be delaying the inevitable for a few days and put him through an unknown amount of pain and confusion, that was too high a price for us to pay.

Still, we did talk about the cost to the rescue. They are funded mostly by private donations and a few large organizations that donate to small rescues. Money is always a concern. And the money we were “playing” with was theirs, not ours. Could we justify spending money on one or two more days when that same money could then go to help another senior dog, one that had a few years left to live? That did not make much sense to us, either.

At 2am on Wednesday morning, we said goodbye to the Howie monster. It was not an easy decision, but it was the right decision, the decision we would have made, even if money were no object.